When grain harvests fell short, stocks declined, and prices rose during the last half of the twentieth century, there was a standard response. At the official level, the U.S. government would return to production part or all of the cropland idled under its commodity set-aside programs. At the same time, higher prices would encourage farmers worldwide to use more fertilizer, drill more irrigation wells, and invest in other yield-enhancing measures. Production would jump and shortages would disappear.

Now the possible responses to shortages are more demanding. First, the U.S. cropland set-aside program was dismantled in 1996, depriving the world of this longstanding backup reserve for world grain stocks. As of 2004, only the European Union is holding cropland out of use to limit production, but it is a small area, perhaps 3 million hectares. The United States does have some 14 million hectares (35 million acres) of cropland, much of it highly erodible, in the Conservation Reserve Program under 10-year contracts with farmers, nearly all planted in grass. In an emergency, part of it could be plowed and planted in grain, but it is mostly low-rainfall, low-yielding land in the Great Plains that would expand the U.S. harvest only marginally.

The world today faces a situation far different from that of half a century ago. Diminishing returns are setting in on several fronts, including the quality of new land that can be brought under the plow, the production response to additional fertilizer applications, the opportunity for drilling new irrigation wells, and the potential of research investments to produce technologies that will boost production dramatically. . . .

The world has changed in other ways. As world population and the global economy expanded dramatically over the last half-century, the world quietly moved into a new era, one in which the economy began pressing against the earth’s natural limits. In this new situation, activities in one economic sector can affect another. Historically, for example, what happened in the transport sector had little effect on agriculture. But in a world with 6.3 billion people, most of whom would like to own a car, auto-centered transport systems will consume a vast area of cropland.

In the societies that first turned to cars as the principal means of transportation, there was no need for the transportation minister to consult with the agriculture minister. During the earlier development of the United States, for example, there was more than enough land for crops and cars. Indeed, throughout much of this era farmers were paid to hold land out of production. Now that has changed. Food security is directly affected by transportation policy today.

If densely populated countries like China and India turn to cars as the primary means of transportation, they will pit affluent automobile owners against low-income food consumers in the competition for land. These nations simply do not have enough land to support hundreds of millions of cars and to feed their people.

The competition between cars and people for resources does not stop here. Some key food-producing countries, including the United States, are producing ethanol from grain for automotive fuel. In 2004, the United States used some 30 million tons of its 278-million-ton corn harvest to manufacture ethanol for cars. This tonnage, requiring nearly 4 million hectares (10 million acres) to produce, would be enough to feed 100 million people at average world consumption levels. Other countries building grain-fed ethanol plants include Canada and China. The competition between affluent motorists and low-income food consumers is thus not only for the land used to produce food, but also for the food itself.

The other side of this coin is that if grain prices rise sharply, ethanol plants are likely to close, as they did in 1996 when grain prices went up temporarily. This would free up grain for food or feed, thus providing an additional buffer when world grain supplies tighten.

The loss of momentum on the food front in recent years argues for reassessing the global population trajectory. Indeed, population policymakers may hold the key to achieving a humane balance between population and food. We can no longer take population projections as a given. The world cannot afford for any women to be without family planning advice and contraceptives. Today, however, an estimated 137 million women want to limit the size of their families but lack access to the family planning services needed to do so. Eradicating hunger depends on filling the family planning gap and creating the social conditions that will accelerate the shift to smaller families.

Food security is affected not only by the food-population equation, but also by the water-population equation and the efforts of water resource ministries to raise water productivity. Indeed, since 70 percent of world water use is for irrigation, eradicating hunger may now depend on a global full-court press to raise water productivity. . . .

Ensuring future food security therefore can no longer be left to ministries of agriculture alone. Food security is now directly dependent on policy decisions in the ministries of health and family planning, water resources, transportation, and energy. This dependence of food security on an integrated effort by several departments of government is new. And because it has emerged so quickly, governments are lagging far behind in their efforts to coordinate these departments and their agendas.

One of the essentials for success in this new situation is strong national political leaders. In the absence of competent leaders who understand the complex interaction of these issues, the cooperation needed to ensure a country’s future food security may simply not be forthcoming. In the absence of such leadership, a deterioration in the food situation may be unavoidable.

Source: Lester Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 187–92.