Ending Hunger Takes on New Complexity

The last time the world faced a crisis in food supplies, science came to the rescue with the “green revolution” in agriculture--the use of hybrid varieties of grain in combination with massive doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides--to greatly increase crop yields.

The result was a modern miracle. In the 22 years since the 1974 World Food Conference was convened to mobilize countries against what many feared was imminent famine, the global per capita intake of calories increased and the number of undernourished people declined despite an overall growth in population of 1.5 billion.

Faced with 2.5 billion more mouths to feed in the first quarter of the next century, delegates to the World Food Summit that concluded here Sunday once again appealed to science--this time in biotechnology and food-preservation techniques--to save the planet.

“Today the world’s population is increasing by the equivalent of a New York City every month, a Mexico every year and a China every decade,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman told the conference last week. “Without biotechnology, we will be forced to exploit highly erodible farm and forest land. This may meet our short-term needs, but in the end our legacy to future generations will be a barren Earth.”

Unlike the green revolution, which sparked little public opposition, the development of biotechnology and the use of genetic modification in developing new strains of insect-resistant and herbicide-resistant plants are already very controversial.

During Glickman’s news conference at the summit, three women protesters stripped off their clothing to reveal bodies painted with slogans condemning genetically modified soybean seeds. “Ban the Gene Beans!” was written on the bare back of one protester.

And last week, in Destrehan, La., 17 demonstrators from the environmental group Greenpeace chained themselves to a gate and inside several soybean transport barges owned by Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., a food export conglomerate. They were protesting the development and transport of genetically altered soybeans produced by another American food giant, Monsanto Corp. of St. Louis.

Members of the American delegation to the Rome food summit said they were surprised by the degree of opposition to biotechnology, particularly among Europeans. The message seems clear: Science may once again save the planet, but not without a struggle from environmental groups who oppose tampering with nature.

As in previous U.N.-sponsored international conferences, including last year’s World Conference on Women in Beijing, the delegates tiptoed gingerly around the sensitive issue of family planning and birth control as a way to limit the demand for food supplies.

“Demographic factors are not enough by themselves to explain deficiencies in the distribution of food resources,” Pope John Paul II said in his address to the summit. “We must reject the sophism that to be many in number is to be condemned to poverty. By his actions, man can change the situation and answer the rising needs.”

Instead, the delegates and assembled agricultural economists concentrated on increasing the supply of food and confronting inequities created by the worldwide trends of market liberalization and globalization of production.

“By the mid-1990s,” said political scientist Raymond F. Hopkins, a specialist on public policy food issues at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, “economic interdependence and the globalization of production had altered the human condition. Problems of high food prices and famine were not major factors in public concerns.”

International food and hunger relief agencies, Hopkins said, were concentrating on the estimated 800 million people estimated to be undernourished by the Food and Agriculture Organization based here in Rome.

The bulk of this underfed population--defined as receiving fewer than 2,100 calories a day in sustenance--is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, Afghanistan and parts of Central and South America.

When then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger called for an emergency meeting on food in 1974, the world was slowly recovering from the oil crisis and many feared that the planet was headed for a “food shock” crisis of similar or greater magnitude.

Despite the gloomy prospects, Kissinger boldly pledged that “no child will go to bed hungry by the year 1985.” After the 1974 scare, the world avoided a major famine. The number of hungry people was cut from 900 million to the estimated 800 million. But Kissinger’s goal fell sadly short.

In 1996, it is estimated that 200 million children go to bed hungry every day.

Under the leadership of FAO Director General Jaques Diouf, U.N. economists have set a more modest goal: to halve the number of hungry people by 2015.

Ironically, the only delegate to this conference who echoed Kissinger’s 1974 call for the complete elimination of hunger over a short time span was Cuban President Fidel Castro.

“What kind of cosmetic solutions are we going to provide so that in 20 years from now there would be 400 million instead of 800 million starving people?” Castro railed rhetorically, pausing to scan the audience of well-fed dignitaries. “The very modesty of these goals is shameful.”

If Castro set the moral high tone of the conference, American agricultural economist Lester Brown of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute dominated the debate.

In a book titled “Who Will Feed China?” Brown predicted that the changing eating habits of China and conversion of farmland to other uses will ultimately force the world’s most populous country to import massive amounts of wheat and other grains, causing prices to increase dramatically.

As many of the conferees pointed out, the question posed by such a scenario is not “Who will feed China?” but rather “Who will feed sub-Saharan Africa?”--and other areas too poor to buy grain at the inflated prices.

Rising to challenge Brown’s scenario, FAO economist Nikos Alexandratos angrily denounced what he called the economist’s “scare story about China.”

Finally, Chinese Premier Li Peng, one of the handful of heads of government attending the conference, was compelled to reassure the world that China is not about to become an international basket case.

“People can rest assured that in coming years,” said Li, who studied engineering in Moscow, “not only will the Chinese people retain food sufficiency self-reliantly, they will also make new contributions to greater food security in the world.”