http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=560009&p=2Feed The World: Warnings of a global food shortage are cropping up in the news. This should not be happening in 2011. But while our technologies have advanced, our politics are still prehistoric.
Our world should be a land of plenty. But we're being told that global food prices are rising as supplies become increasingly tight. Analysts cite a combination of growing demand and poor weather.
Food riots in Tunisia are getting the most media attention now, but that's not the only country being affected. Argentina's soybean harvest has been diminished by hot, dry weather, while flooding in Australia has severely hurt the wheat crop Down Under.
In the U.S., inventories of corn have fallen because of weather problems, and soybean reserves, according to the Agriculture Department, are at a three-decade low. Heavy rain in Canada and Pakistan was not offset, but instead was exacerbated, by drought in Russia.
Man cannot control the weather. But famine today is as much man-made as it is a force of nature.
Zimbabwe, for instance, was once considered the breadbasket of Africa. It exported wheat, corn and sugar cane across the continent and beyond. But the country's agriculture industry has been destroyed by a Marxist government that has seized privately owned farms in the name of "land reform."
Under the regime of Robert Mugabe, the annual corn harvest shriveled from more than 1.5 million tons in 2000 to 500,000 tons in 2003. By 2010, production was still around 600,000 tons. Wheat production also collapsed, from 309,000 tons in 2000 to 27,000 tons in 2003. Last year it was roughly 18,000 tons.
Over a short period, Zimbabwe went from being a net exporter of food to a country dependent on international handouts. The once-fertile nation is in a perpetual man-made famine, where more than 2 million go hungry in a population of 11.4 million.
Less known is the story of Malawi. Earlier this decade, kleptocrats within the government sold off the nation's grain and kept the profits for themselves.
Governments promote famine in more passive ways as well. Another African nation, Zambia, declined food aid, mostly corn, from the U.S. in 2002, even though it was facing a famine that would affect nearly one-third of its people.
Why? Because America was offering genetically modified food, and it was the country's policy — based on Europe's unfounded fear of such products — to reject it.
Four years later, Friends of the Earth publicly asked governments in the hungry African countries of Ghana and Sierra Leone to recall U.S. food aid that contained genetically modified rice. Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa set the wrong tone in 2002 when he called the food offered to his famished nation "poison" and "intrinsically dangerous."
Such foolish statements could be passed off as ignorance, but what do we say about wags in the developed world who have named genetically modified crops "frankenfood"? They are spreading a fear and superstition about genetically modified foods that doom humans to suffering and even death.
Through genetically altered organisms, which pose no health problems to humans, farmers are able to plant seeds that grow into crops which are resistant to drought, cold weather, insect damage, herbicides and disease. Nutrition can even be improved through genetic modification.
Genetically modified crops have another significant advantage: They can produce more per acre than is possible with conventional crops. Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who launched the Green Revolution through his decades of biotech work, believed that genetically modified food crops would stop world hunger. He was eventually able to coax sixfold yields from some crops.
When he died in 2009, Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, put Borlaug's work in context: He had "saved more lives than any man in human history."
Some say Borlaug actually saved as many as a billion lives. Yet genetically modified foods are looked on with skepticism and are still banned by governments.
Given that we have the technology to grow larger crops on smaller parcels and fly fresh food around the world to where it's needed in a matter of hours, the obstructionism is inexcusable. We need policymakers who are as advanced as today's technology.
Topic: Editorial: The Only Way To Go Green (Read 564 times)