Guest Editorial by Malcolm F. Cairns
The writer, a Canadian-born PhD candidate at the Australian National University, has edited Voices From the Forest, Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Sustainable Upland Farming (2007, RFF Press, Washington, 880 pages). He lives in Thailand.
As the world’s population grows, can agricultural techniques adapt and keep pace? Will humans continue to succeed in feeding themselves?
One dislikes sounding too Malthusian, but the United Nations climate reports highlight some real challenges to food security. So far, humans have proven adept at harvesting nature’s bounty to stay fed while enjoying higher standards of living.
But the costs exceed what the environment can sustain. Like a rogue species with voracious appetites, we’ve consumed too much. Forests are decimated. Fisheries have collapsed. We’ve fouled the planet’s air and water. Species extinctions will continue and even accelerate. Worse, people show worrying capacities to shrug off environmental carnage rather than to correct it.
While food production has tended to keep pace with population growth, that never fills everyone’s bellies. Huge disparities affect the consumption of food and all resources. Absurdly, the privileged people in wealthy countries suffer from gluttony and inactivity while those elsewhere starve. This is the world we’ve come to know and hardly even question anymore.
But a new unknown looms – the impacts of global warming. Not only must we feed rising populations, but the conditions for producing food may change in ways that we hardly fathom.
Consider the densely populated Asia-Pacific region. Judging by scientists’ warnings, we may lose some of the most productive lowlands under seawater. Entire South Pacific island nations may vanish. Already, saline encroachment damages the Mekong Delta and other river deltas producing much of the region’s rice. Weather patterns look more erratic. Much of Assam and Bangladesh often recede under floodwaters.
Paradoxically, water shortages may loom upstream. If the Himalayan glaciers feeding the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yangtze and other great Asian rivers disappear as predicted within the next 40 years, their dwindling flows may no longer irrigate the rice crops that feed a third of humanity. Moreover, new research suggests that as global warming continues, rising carbon-dioxide levels will depress rice yields.
These trends alone could send the region, and the world, into a food deficit and lead to unprecedented migration that strains resources even more.
Mankind faces many challenges. The sooner we can push governments to deal with them, the better.
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Huge disparities affect food consumption.
Wasteful ways, worrying trends threaten 'basics'.
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