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Davos and the Return to Food First
In the mid-1970s, a serious drought coupled with soaring energy prices led to the Sahelian famine, which propelled food security issues to the top of the news. In 1979, Francis Moore Lappe (author of Diet for a Small Planet, written in 1971 and sold 3 million copies) and Joseph Collins (a refugee from the Institute of Policy Studies) wrote Food First, which argued three things: (1) there was no food scarcity in the world just serious maldistribution caused by agribusiness; (2) luxury food crops grown in the third world and exported to the rich nation elites used too much of the good agricultural land; and (3) meat eating had to go as it placed a huge strain on the land, used far too much grain and was bad for your health anyway.
Even today, the Food First themes receive great acclaim and now have been accepted by the luminaries of Davos particularly with respect to ending the consumption of meat and eliminating food fuel based farming such as nitrogen-based fertilizer (which, when tried, crashed food production in Sri Lanka).
The only critical review I could find of the book was a two-part, 30,000-word essay published in AG World. The review made some very interesting points.
While the total grain production in the world divided by the world’s population did equal a relatively modest diet of 2,000 calories a day, to get there, one would have had to have nearly perfect distribution and no loss after harvesting and transportation and processing. And, given most food production worldwide is locally used, moving huge amounts of food, especially grain, in a massive redistribution scheme is untenable.
But the real story went beyond this issue. Grazing land is almost entirely not suitable for annual plowing — the grazing land is often with shallow soil, and little rainfall. Plowing such land would eventually erode a lot of the soil and food production would plummet. In addition, grazing animals are also one of the key sources of horsepower in the southern hemisphere — for farming and local transportation — without which farm production would also crash. Yes, the cows produce methane gas. But the land on which they graze is also a huge carbon sink. The loss of agricultural land from erosion and urban use is already serious. Accelerating that does not get you to food security.
Most interesting, however is that the exported luxury crops—as defined by Food First—such as tobacco, cocoa, strawberries, sugar cane, peanuts, tea—take up some 29 million hectares of land as of 1980 when the Ag World Review was written. Some land was used for these same crops but used locally and not exported to what Food First defined as rich countries. By comparison, the land devoted to grains and cereals at that time in the third world came to almost 900 million hectares of land, or 27-fold greater.
But then the clincher was the Food First chapter on those countries that had eliminated food scarcity and hunger and had “got it right.” The countries were listed: Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Ethiopia. You are not misreading this. Those were the countries listed by Food First. The word communism or communistic was not mentioned in the chapter on the virtues of these nation’s agricultural policies.
The kicker, however, was that of the 29 million hectares of exported luxury food from the third world, Cuba (sugar cane) and China (tobacco) accounted for 23 million of the 29 million hectares of land—land devoted to exactly the industrial agricultural trade practices Food First condemned.
Finally, it was also explained in the review that coffee and other such crops are grown on what is known as permanent crop land where trees, bushes, and vines perpetually grow, which act to keep the hillside and mountain soil in place. If removed, the soil would erode from wind and water, leaving more of the southern hemisphere impoverished and hungry.
Published in General
To the Main Feed!
You hear that, little Kim? You are living in the Land of Plenty!
And, for easy sharing:
Transporting large quantities of grain is easier now than it was forty years ago.
I don’t know about other parts of the world, but land in west Texas and eastern New Mexico for cattle grazing is quite inappropriate for most crops.
United States farmers feed a lot of the world. But by government edict we burn a lot of food (ethanol) in the gasoline engines of our cars. So is food really in short supply?
I am reminded of the 1970s when erosion was a major concern. It was said that the topsoil of our farmland was washing into the Mississippi delta at an unsustainable rate.
My father earned a subsidy by contour plowing our dry hilly pasture land in the high desert of southern Colorado.
I guess, with the extent and degree of ignorance about the world, you can say and get away with almost anything. The question is, who puts this stuff out there, who promotes it and why? Besides China of course.
But an MBA from Columbia talking to a group of politicians in a valley in Switzerland knows how to use land better than the people who have been living and working it for generations.
They were right about one thing:
“(1) there was no food scarcity in the world just serious maldistribution caused by agribusiness;” except they were wrong about the cause. It’s not agribusiness, but bad and corrupt governments that are the cause of (deliberate, punitive) food scarcity. Recall, it was an attempt to rectify that problem that got us into the disaster in Somalia back during the Clinton administration. (In fairness to Clinton, the original mission was started in the waning days of the GHW Bush administration.)