A new green revolution or not?

The world's population will reach seven billion this year and may peak at nine billion by mid-century. There are plenty of things wrong with the world's food system. But the amount of food it produces isn't one of them. We already grow enough food to nourish nine billion people, probably fifteen billion people, in fact, for we eat only about one third of those crops.

Much of the global harvest feeds livestock - an inefficient route for delivering our nutrition, since it takes eight calories of grain to produce one calorie of meat. Plenty more is diverted to make biofuels. An African could live for a year on the corn needed to fill one gas-guzzling SUV fuel tank with ethanol. That's not all. In the developing world, an estimated 30 per cent of the harvest is eaten by rats and insects, or rots in grain silos. The First World throw about 25 per cent of food away, uneaten.

The truth is that the world's farmers could probably double the amount of food they grow - using GM crops and other technologies - and still people would go hungry. This is ultimately not about production or about human numbers, it is about poverty. Every time there is a famine, it turns out later that someone, usually just down the road, was hoarding food for sale. The problem is that the hungry families didn't have the cash to buy it.

Does this mis-diagnosis matter? Even if we grow enough food, surely growing more can't hurt. It does matter. Because the proposed planned remedies stands a good chance of making the poor poorer. It could mean we have both more food and more famines. This is because most of the methods suggested to increase food production are about big farms and big investment. Government chief scientist Sir John Beddington wants to plough up vast tracts of African cattle pastures and amalgamate the smallholdings of millions of peasant farmers to create giant, high-tech farms. Beddington sees the spread of Western farming methods and giant food and seed companies as the solution to the food problem. His blueprint will take land away from the rural poor. Beddington's report says: 'We need to make agriculture more efficient.' But more efficient for whom? For agribusiness and its bottom line? Or for farmers and consumers? In an age where the smart investment banks are putting their cash into biofuels rather than bread, and where large corporations are buying farms across the developing world to grow cotton for cash rather than food for people, the two are not the same thing.

In Mali the government there has recruited foreign experts to help it invest in agriculture. Western aid agencies are building irrigation projects to boost production of rice. Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, Mali's biggest sugar daddy, has just dug a 25-mile canal to irrigate an area of dry scrub three times the size of the Isle of Wight. The trouble is that these projects will take water out of the River Niger. They will empty fertile wet pastures just downstream, where one million of Mali's poorest people currently live by catching fish and grazing their cattle. They fear the plans will create desert. Most of the rice from the new fields will go to feed Libyans. Meanwhile, the poor of the Niger wetlands are likely to join the Al Qaeda groups.

In contrast to the Beddington approach, Professor Robert Watson, currently chief scientist at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs who three years ago chaired an international report on the future of the world's farming, reached rather different conclusions. He said African smallholder farmers should be backed, not stripped of their land; that local knowledge of crops would often work better than high-tech methods; and that fighting poverty was the key to feeding the world.
Watson explained : "It's not a technical challenge; it's a rural development challenge. Small farmers will remain the predominant producers. The question is how to help them"

Fred Pearce, author of Peoplequake , writing in the Daily Mail