More food may not mean less hunger

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49050

Achieving ambitious Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) production targets to meet growing world demands will not suffice to feed the world, and focusing too much on churning out crops may even be damaging, experts warn.

The Rome-based United Nations agency said earlier this month that world food production must increase 70 percent by 2050 to nourish a human population likely to reach 9.1 billion. It said this can happen if developing countries, expected to generate most of the extra 2.3 billion people, increase agricultural investment by around 83 billion dollars per year.

But FAO's estimate that over one billion people, almost one-sixth of humanity, are suffering hunger in a world that today generates more than enough to feed everyone suggests that meeting this target is only part of the equation.

"We ask how we can feed the world by 2050, but what we should also ask is how we can overcome poverty by 2050," Hasan Sahin, programme officer of the Tehran-based Economic Cooperation Organisation tells IPS.

Marco Contiero, the genetic engineering and sustainable agriculture specialist at Greenpeace's European Unit, also thinks there is a danger of taking too narrow an approach. "The dogma that we just need to produce more is wrong," Contiero tells IPS.

"Of course we must increase production where it is at low levels. But we already produce lots of food and yet we still have one billion people going hungry, while 1.6 billion are overweight and 500 million are obese. This shows there is much more to the problem."

Some analysts fear the drive to meet quantity targets could lead to an increased use of large-scale industrial farming of a restricted number of crops - methods that have kept the First World well-fed but which might not be appropriate for developing countries.

One of the main reasons these methods may be inappropriate is that they risk further damaging the plight of poor people in rural areas worst affected by hunger, where a Catch 22 situation frequently materialises.

"When the prices are too low the farmers have no cash. If the gate price does not even pay for the calories they spend in their muscles on ploughing, that's nonsensical. But when prices are high, poor people become very vulnerable," Roberto Ridolfi, head of the European Commission's Europe Aid F3 Unit, tells IPS. "It's bad news for poor people no matter what."

Helping developing countries' small farmers to break out of poverty, on the other hand, could create a virtuous circle in which they stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution.

"We are not the ones who feed the world, the farmers are. What we need to do is motivate farmers to increase productivity - farmers need to be a major concern for us," Benyamin Lakitan, secretary of Indonesia's State Ministry for Research and Development tells IPS.

"The problem in developing countries is that farmers' prosperity has really not increased for decades. We need to put more effort into increasing farmer prosperity; that way farmers will help us to increase food production. Financial incentives for farmers is the key issue."