Sustainable Agriculture for a Food Secure Third World

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Ismail Serageldin

The centrality of the rural is often forgotten, particularly by policy makers in industrialized countries, where most people live in urban centers. Their developing country counterparts frequently follow this lead, exhibiting an urban bias in their approach to development. And yet, to ignore or play down the importance of the rural sector as a component in development is a tragic mistake, because most of the world's poor live off the land. I intend, therefore, to explore some crucial aspects of the rural: the need to rethink resource uses, the role of research, and the future contribution of the rural sector to sustainable agriculture as the basis of food security. Let's look at the current context--which is forbidding.

The world population increases at an average rate of three persons per second, every second of the day.(1) This amounts to an increase of 90 million people a year--an enormous expansion in many parts of the world in which population density is already severe. Over the next 30 years, the population of Indian cities will be increased by an amount that is more than twice the total population of France, Germany, and the UK combined.(2) Comprehending and preparing for such rates of growth globally is the first part of the challenge. The second part of the challenge is to ensure that this population has access to food in adequate quantifies at adequate prices, everywhere, at all times, and to produce this food in a way that does not destroy the environment on which we all depend. This is the triple challenge we face, and my emphasis here is on the last two facets that combine to form the challenge of sustainable food security.

We cannot meet this challenge by producing less to keep the environment unaffected by agriculture. People must be fed, no less than the environment must be nurtured. This means that we have to produce differently, not less, while rethinking resource use. It is a given that we will have three billion more people on the planet before the population of the world stabilizes, and therefore it is a major challenge for us to figure out how food supplies to meet their needs are going to be provided. The problem is not going to be resolved by producing more in the industrialized countries and shipping it to where it is needed, because poverty inhibits trade. It will not be resolved unless we successfully transform agriculture at the smallholder level in the developing countries.

This is a formidable and complex task that involves policy, research, tools, and social and economic reality. And the realities are stunning. Today, 840 million people are going hungry, two billion people are malnourished in terms of iron deficiencies, and as many as 30% of the world's population are at risk of iodine deficiency (FAO, 1996). Such an incidence of malnutrition has profound effects on children as they grow up. It is unconscionable that we have a situation where enormous production and food surplus exists in different parts of the world and, at the same time, there are people who suffer the indignities of hunger.

In the last century, there were people who looked at the condition of slavery and said that it was unconscionable and unacceptable and that it must be abolished. They were known as the abolitionists. They did not argue from a position of economic self-interest or incentives; they argued from a sense of moral outrage. I believe that all of us privileged with abundance should look at the condition of world hunger and say that in this day and age, as we enter into the new millennium, it is unconscionable and unacceptable--indeed, obscene that millions should continue to be hungry. We must therefore all become the new abolitionists. It is not enough to accept halving the number of hungry people in the world as a target, and to consider ourselves successful if 420 million people in the human family are denied the most basic of basic rights, which is food. That is just not acceptable.

So how do we go about it? The abolition of hunger is a much more complex task than the abolition of slavery. Food security requires change along a number of different axes. We must consider not just production but access. That is not to say that production is not important--shortages in production lead to increased prices and decreased access. We must consider not just output but the production process, which is where sustainability comes in. If we erode the soil, parch the land and, in the process of producing, destroy the forests, we cannot sustain production.

Then, again, the right technology while useful, has to be set in an effective policy framework. We must consider land reform, access to resources, access to water, and other issues that must be balanced not just globally but also within countries, by national policies, and not even just nationally but from community to community and household to household. Remember that in the United States, champion food producer of the world, there are still households and individuals suffering from hunger. We must also consider the rising phenomenon of urbanization and the urban poor, and finally the nutritional content of the food. As Nevin Scrimshaw reminded us, the quality of the food consumed is as important a factor in human development as the amount of food available (Scrimshaw, 1989).