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Not going to talk about xmas or new year... neither fish... (rather strange coming from me)... In any case it has been a while since the last posting, I have been mostly based on Roma, working from the office on some policy and forecasting issues from the fisheries point of view but in perspective to food availability in general, this is an expansion of my usual work and has been quite revealing..
A bit more than a year at the UN, has given me a good inside view on this massive organization and exposed me to the "really big picture". I guess the main impact of this job on my life is to really see things of a “trully” global perspective... I’m have to deal with technical issues at community, regional and at maximum country level... but here the job is the world...
And while I can remember there always been “apocalyptic” type challenges that never totally eventuate (tribute to our environment resilience?), I see trough my work here some real challenges...
Without trying to provide a complete account of them, some of the most key challenges in the discussion table are:
The key (for me) is that world population is projected to grow from 6.5 billion in 2005 to nearly 9.2 billion by 2050... to feed a population of more than 9 billion free from hunger, global food production must nearly double by 2050... today’s figure of people living below 2 USD/day is 58% of the world population...
The entire population growth will take place in developing countries and it will occur wholly in urban areas, which will swell by 3.2 billion people as rural populations contract. That means that a shrinking rural work force will have to be much more productive and deliver more output from fewer resources.
Higher productivity requires more investment in agriculture, more machinery, more implements, tractors, water pumps, combine harvesters, etc., as well as more skilled and better-trained farmers and better functioning supply chains.
This means that fewer farmers will have to feed a more populous world with fewer resources and minimal access to credit under the present crisis.
One way would be for world agriculture to expand its land basis and use some of the nearly 4.2 billion hectares potentially available for rain-fed crop production (only 1.5 billion ha are currently in use). But that would not be possible without further environmental damage and increased greenhouse gas emission.
Another avenue would be to tap into yet-unused yield-enhancing resources, which could double productivity for many crops in many countries. However, such potential can only be realized if farmers have improved access to inputs, apply better fertilizers in more abundance, make use of better seeds, improve their farming and management skills and expand land under irrigation. These as well are measures that have serious socio-economical and environmental consequences.
In addition to rising resource scarcity, global agriculture will have to cope with the burden of climate change.
The IPCC has documented the likely impact of climate change on agriculture in great detail. If temperatures rise by more than 2C, global food production potential is expected to contract severely and yields of major crops may fall globally. The declines will be particularly pronounced in lower-latitude regions. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, for instance, yields could decline by 20-40%.
In addition, severe weather occurrences such as droughts and floods are likely to intensify and cause greater crop and livestock losses.
Rapidly rising energy prices have created an added challenge for global food supplies. Rising fossil energy prices mean that agriculture will become increasingly important as a supplier to the energy market.
Important here is to understand that the potential demand from the energy market is so large that it has the potential to change the world’s traditional agricultural market systems completely.
However, for me in the short term, even more critical is likely to be the impact of the financial crisis on the availability of credit, which is widely recognized as one of the major constraints to agriculture development in the developing countries, the rationing of which is likely to be more serious than any interest rate effects.
The combination of falling agricultural prices and reduced access to credit may have a knock off impact on agricultural production, with very serious implications for the global food security.
For instance, a cutback in grain plantings against the background of continuing low grain stocks, which have not been rebuilt since the high food price episode, would increase the risk of global food crisis if harvests turn out to be poor, especially if countries cannot access credit for food imports.
As a father, and perhaps just as basically a human... the future kind of scares me... these are not “predictions” of scare far fetched “greenes”... this are people I respect (albeit at different levels).
I guess this basically means that “we all” have a lot of issues to be dealt with ahead of us... but my usual optimism is quite dented... (all the hard data, figures and expansion on this issues can be found here
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Perhaps related but not... I decided leave the UN in March 2009, basically for quality of life reasons... We haven’t gel with Italy... So no point to stay.... Luxury for me is not to be a UN diplomat and getting paid good money and live in a trendy roman suburb surrounded by 5 million people... Luxury for me is that Felix and Kika can walk to school and get to an empty beach at their will... Not even if I’m the secretary general of the UN I could do that here... in any case the common agreement i got with my bosses is that the working relation is not going to change, just the logistics of it (from employee to consultant, basically)
