Global Food Shortage Looms, Experts Say

Unless more attention--and money--are focused on agricultural research and conservation, the tragic famine in Somalia will seem “infinitesimal” compared with the massive food shortage the world will face by the end of the decade, leading agricultural researchers warned Friday at a symposium in Washington on food, poverty and the environment.

Even as a United Nations-led network of research centers begins work with relief agencies on the difficult process of restoring Somalia’s devastated agricultural system, other scientists in the network are focusing on farming techniques and crops designed to safeguard and enhance the world’s vulnerable food supplies.

At the symposium, which drew agriculture experts from around the world, announcements of progress in farming techniques and crop breeding were the hopeful spots amid dire predictions that by the year 2000, the annual shortfall in food needed to feed the world’s hungry could climb to 90 million tons--eight times the shortage that exists in sub-Saharan Africa today.

“In eight years, sub-Saharan Africa will have a shortfall of 50 million tons, and there’s no way they can afford to import that much food,” said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, which sponsored the symposium.

Dramatic improvements in crop yields will be needed in the next 20 years to stave off disastrous starvation, Pinstrup-Andersen said. A 40% increase in production per acre is possible, he said, but not if the worldwide network of agricultural research centers continues to be starved for funds.

Annual international assistance to developing countries for agricultural programs fell to $10 billion from $12 billion during the 1980s, and individual governments’ support for their own research and conservation programs has fallen even more sharply.

Key advances in production of rice, the staple food for 1.5 billion people in developing countries, were announced by Gustavo Nores, director general of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia.

Nores said the center has developed a “rice-pasture” farming technique for use on savannas that could ease encroachment into Amazon rain forests. The system uses a new rice that can be grown on grassland used for cattle grazing.

In addition, a team of scientists from the Colombian center and Purdue University has made what could be a significant breakthrough in conquering rice blast, a disease that has long frustrated researchers, Nores said.

Such advances often rely on stores of seeds and plant materials in “seed banks” throughout the world. Many of those stores are increasingly endangered, the symposium was told.

The situation is grave at the Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, the grandfather of all seed banks and once the most important collection of plant materials in the world. Seed collections throughout Eastern Europe are also in dire straits, said Geoffrey Hawtin, director general of the International Board of Plant Genetic Resources.

“These governments are so strapped for cash, they’re talking about staff cuts of 20% to 70%,” Hawtin said.