Sustainable farm income key to food security
THE Cambridge dictionary describes moonshot as a bold plan to do something impossible. So, when more than 150 Nobel laureates and World Food Prize winners sign an open letter calling for “planet-friendly moonshot efforts leading to substantial, not just incremental, leaps in food production” — which at the present pace appears almost impossible to meet the enormous challenge of feeding the world by 2050 — the loud and clear warning comes as a timely wake-up call.
“We are not on track to meet the future food needs. Not even close,” the letter has warned.
It has been signed by some of the greatest figures of our times — Nobel laureates such as the 14th Dalai Lama, Joseph Stiglitz, Kailash Satyarthi, Robert Huber, Daron Acemoglu and Sir John E Walker, and World Food Prize recipients like Dr Gurdev S Khush, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Rattan Lal and Hans R Herren.
“As leaders of science and innovation, we ask you to join us in sounding the alarm, raising collective ambitions, and advocating for research moonshots to ensure the world’s food and nutrition security,” the letter concludes.
At a time when the world already produces enough food to meet the requirement of 9.8 billion people by 2050, it only shows that food deficiencies — there are close to 800 million people living in hunger — are not because of any shortfall in production. The food deficiencies are an outcome of faulty policies.
The letter entitled 'Hunger's Tipping Point' makes no mention of the global thrust on feeding cattle and diverting food for automobiles but does talk of "increasingly common extreme weather events associated with climate change", the food and nutrition crisis is only going to worsen by the middle of this century. As the letter rightly adds, additional factors such as soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages and conflicts will drag the productivity down.
This is certainly a cause for worry. Although the letter does make a mention of maize, a staple food for Africa, which is under threat from future predictions of decreasing yield, meeting the global challenges of food and nutrition security cannot be addressed till the world realises the urgent need to join hands and collaborate.
In the US, for instance, 44 per cent of the domestic maize production is diverted for ethanol production, even as Africa faces shortages. Similarly, a report in the New Scientist journal (March 14, 2022) shows that 90 million tonnes of foodgrains was diverted for ethanol, and the European Union utilises 12 million tonnes, including wheat and maize, for feeding automobiles. The EU also diverted 3.5 million tonnes of palm oil to diesel production.
All this was happening when the global supplies of staple food were hit by the Russia-Ukraine war. If only 50 per cent of the biofuel production was reduced in the US and EU, the grain saved could have met the entire food shortages created by the war.
Among the transformation efforts required, the letter calls for enhancement of photosynthesis in crops like wheat and rice, biological nitrogen fixation of major cereals, transformation of annual crops to perennial ones, diversification of the cropping systems and the creation of nutrient-rich foods from microorganisms and fungi.
What has to be acknowledged is that “the benefit of enabling healthy, productive and secure lives for billions of people has returns that flow broadly through the global economy,” says the letter.
While there is enough evidence to show that investment in agricultural research has multiple returns, the report calls for “society sponsored research to be the foundation of the innovation that drives a successful food system of the future”.
What remains unclear is whether the emphasis is essentially on state-sponsored research or dominance of private research.
The letter speaks of multiple market failures when it comes to providing people with healthy, cost-effective and sustainable diets. It does point to "market failures" within appropriate regulatory and "pricing" frameworks, but makes a mention of only carbon and water prices and remains conspicuously silent on the biggest scourge — the failure of markets to enhance farm incomes everywhere in the world.
In my understanding, unless strenuous efforts are made to ensure sustainable farm livelihoods, it may be difficult to meet the challenges of future food and nutrition security.
For example, while the US Farm Bill — which provides for budgetary provisions to farmers and farming for the next five years, with the last one ending in September 2024 — has made a provision of $1.8 trillion, the US is expecting one in five farmers to quit agriculture this year.
And this is despite the immediate promise of $10 billion to offset the loss farmers suffered from low commodity prices and higher cost of production. The new Farm Bill 2024 is awaiting clearance.
In the EU, after the farmers' protest in 24 countries in the first four months of last year, an assured farm income has emerged as a common thread. Only a fortnight back, the small farmers’ federation in France, the Confederation Pysanne, called for agriculture income to not being left as adjustment variable of the agricultural food supply chain. It denounced the excess margins downstream to the detriment of farmers. This means that while all other stakeholders in the food chain walk away with hefty profits, the farmer is left to survive at the margins.
In India, in the midst of the farmers’ protest 2.0 that has been going on for over 11 months at the Punjab- Haryana border, a recent news report said the market prices for seven of the 14 kharif crops are hovering at 12 to 26 per cent below the minimum support price (MSP). Over the years, farm incomes have been stagnating or sliding.
The challenge to feed 1.5 billion additional mouths in 2050 is surely possible. But the action plan should work on a moonshot approach that should first turn farming into a viable and profitable enterprise.