Food Security, Population, and Environment

Human needs are increasingly in jeopardy due to food production. The expansion of food production has cost permanent loss of top soil (24 billion tons/year). In spite of hugh gains made in food production the number of hungry people has increased. Social political and economic constraints determine the extent to which food resources reach those in need. Underlying the constraints are inequities in land ownership frequent choice of low nutrition and perishable foods unequal access to inputs and farm credit limited availability of jobs inequalities in the food market and continuing political neglect. The following issues are discussed: 1) nutritional security maldistribution and absolute shortages; 2) the loss of productivity from the sea; 3) constraints on food production; 4) the need for more suitable farmland; 5) soil depletion; 6) the loss of biodiversity; 7) the loss of genetic diversity; 8) the need reordering of priorities on use of fertilizers irrigation and pesticides; 9) the prospects for expanding food production through genetic engineering reducing postharvest losses and diverting feed to food; and 10) the environmental constraints on increasing food production (air pollution global warming and the population-environment-food interaction). Understanding of agricultural systems and ecology is given as the reason that the American agricultural community and political leaders remain so detached. University training of agronomists has been deficient in providing adequate contact with ecological science in contrast to "pure" biology. Revelle did not include the possibility that global change may reduce productivity. Optimism is based on blind assumptions that present market systems will effectively respond to environmental deterioration. Nathan Keyfitz has rightly isolated a key "empirically backed point of knowledge: that "bad politics are widespread and persistent". In order to achieve a theoretically biophysical limit of food production natural capital will irreversibly be depleted and a high standard of living will be compromised. Slowly evolving trends are difficult to see. Social changes are needed to control population invest in agricultural sectors of developing countries reorganize the world trade system for food reduce maldistribution of food and alleviate poverty. 10 billion people much less 5 billion people cannot be nourished even temporarily without these changes.