GEOG 2400 GEOGRAPHY OF WORLD DEVELOPMENT

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GEOG 2400 - GEOGRAPHY OF WORLD DEVELOPMENT

• Food and Nutrition Feeding the Masses

Spring 2002
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Food and Nutrition- Recap

• The reason why malnutrition exists and people go
  hungry is not one of food production but one of
  distribution and opportunity.
• Humans generally need between 2,200 and 2,500
  calories a day and about 1g of protein per kg of
  body weight to maintain themselves at a healthy
  and fully productive level.
• Humans also need important essential
  micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that come
  from eating a balanced diet.
• There is great inequality in nutritional access,
  both between countries and within countries, in
  large part a function of relative income levels.
• Currently, enough food is produced on the planet
  to provide a per capita diet of around 2,750 kcal
  per day (WRI 2000).

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Food Security

• World food production has managed to keep ahead
  of world population growth, contrary to the fears
  of neo-Malthusians.
• Famines have been infrequent and local, usually a
  function of the effects of warfare and not
  population rising to be in excess of production
  capabilities (however, there are locations where
  drought and desertification do play a role e.g.
  Sahara region).
• World food aid has become very important some
  5.3 million metric tonnes were sent to the low
  income countries in 1998 according to HFR 2000.
• With conservative estimates predicting a
  population increase of 3 billion by 2050, over
  90 in the Third World, fears are resurfacing
  over long-term potential to meet global food
  needs and eliminate existing inequality.

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How do we get our food?

• In industrialized nations like the US, we rely on
  monoculture farming that uses intensive energy,
  water, pesticide and fertilizer input.
• Much of these inputs are subsidized or their use
  creates environmental externalities.
• Excess US farm production is exported and feeds
  about 1/3 of the rest of the world.
• We also import our food from developing nations
  where the best land is used for similarly
  intensive plantation agriculture for export
  (although cheap labor is often substituted for
  machinery), often through multinationals (e.g.
  Dole).
• Quality farmland is being paved over at an
  increasing rate (13 of US farmland by 2050).

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Farming in less developed nations

• More than 2.7 billion people get their food from
  small family farms using animal traction, hand
  labor and green manure (animal waste and nitrogen
  fixing legumes ploughed back in).
• In much of S. America, Africa, and S.E. Asia,
  slash and burn is still practiced by small
  farmers, where possible on a shifting agriculture
  basis (i.e. up to and over 10X the total land
  area needed for permanent cultivation is cleared
  and farmed).
• With the best land used for export crops, farmers
  move on to steeper slopes better suited to
  forests and soil erosion is becoming a major
  problem.
• Tropical soils cannot support agriculture for
  long - they have very few nutrients which were
  all cycled within the the trees that were
  cut-down, removed or burned.
• Increasingly small farms cannot support the large
  families that result from high fertility, pushing
  migration toward cities.

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IMAGES OF TRADITIONAL FARMING
MEXICO
JORDAN
SENEGAL
INDIA
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Progress in Agriculture

• Through history, two interrelated aspects allowed
  humans to continuously expand farm output
• the ability to convert more land - prairie and
  forest - for cropping.
• the increase in crop yields per acre planted due
  to improvements in crop varieties and farming
  technology.

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The green revolution

• Although there is a significant degree of
  undernurishment worldwide, Malthusian predictions
  of food shortages and famine have not accompanied
  exponential population growth this century.
• Research efforts by organizations like the
  Consultative Group on International Agricultural
  Research (CGIAR), agronomists like Norman
  Borlaug, and others led to hybrid crop yield
  increases of 300-500 for wheat, corn, potatoes,
  rice beans.
• Many of the hybrids require irrigation and
  chemical fertilizers (which have been in supply
  and cheap so far even for many peasant farmers
  in the poorer countries).

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Crop yields have increased because of improved
crops (Prentice-Hall geotutor)
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Did the revolution succeed?

• World food output increased from 14 million tons
  in 1950 to144 million tons in 1990. It increased
  20 from 1984-94.
• Between 1960 and 1990 food production outpaced
  population growth by 20 and regional famines
  dropped more than 90 since the early 1960's.
• However, things have been slowing down more
  recently - in many regions (esp. Africa, C.
  America), food production increases have been
  smaller than population increases resulting in a
  fall in the food production index to 1998.
• Increases in chemical fertilizer usage are
  tapering off and unlikely to yield much
  additional productivity.
• Some scientists believe that genetically modified
  crops will provide greater yields, especially if
  varieties can be developed that are suited to the
  Third World and eliminate the needs for
  pesticides and fertilizers (others are scared of
  the consequences).

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The new revolution - good or bad?

• The old green revolution was characterized by
  careful in-field crop selection and
  cross-breeding combined with the use of
  agrochemicals.
• The new revolution being fomented in the
  laboratory and petri dish, is characterized by
  hormone therapies and genetic engineering - DNA
  splicing, cloning, etc.
• Companies like Monsanto are genetically modifying
  crops to include genes from other species that
  allow them to fight off insect pests - e.g. the
  BT potato and corn with DNA from the
  insect-killing Bacillus thuringiensis.
• Where is all this taking us - toward greater food
  security or into a science fiction nightmare?
• HDR 2001 assesses the biotechnolgy debate from
  the perspective of the developing nations in
  Chapter 3 - Managing the risks of technological
  change (Please read)

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Frankenfoods

• In Europe, activists rip up field trials of GM
  crops and supermarkets label foods to tell you
  whether GMOs have been used.
• Protesters demonstrate outside agribusiness HQs
  protesting so-called frankenfoods and forecasting
  ecological catastrophes from genes run amuck.
• Americans, oblivious to the debate plant and eat
  massive amounts of GM corn, soybean, potatoes
  with little thought either way.
• Meanwhile, as opined by the Nigerian Minister of
  Agriculture Agricultural biotechnology, whereby
  seeds are enhanced to instill herbicide tolerance
  or provide resistance to insects and disease,
  holds great promise for Africa.We dont want to
  be denied this technology because of a misguided
  notion that we dont understand the dangers of
  the future consequences.

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Some of the Pros of Transgenic or GM crops

• Traditional cross-breeding takes a long time,
  typically 812 years - biotechnology speeds the
  process of producing crops with altered traits by
  using a specific genetic trait from any plant and
  moving it into the genetic code of any other
  plant.
• The modification of plants is no longer
  restricted by the characteristics of that species
  e.g. cacti genes responsible for tolerating
  drought can be used to help food crops survive
  drought.
• Genomics can drive the development of new crop
  varieties with greater drought and disease
  resistance, less environmental stress and more
  nutritional value.
• Transgenic crops increased from 2 million
  hectares planted in 1996 to 44 million hectares
  in 2000, but 98 is in just three
  countriesArgentina, Canada and the United States.

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The Future of Farming

• The world needs continued improvements in
  farming productivity (per acre yields) because of
  increased numbers of people, changing diets and
  shrinking farmland acreage.
• But existing high levels of production need to be
  sustained also, which will be difficult if soils
  are not conserved, pesticides are not used
  wisely, etc.
• Improved farming efficiency is still possible the
  old fashioned way - from multiple cropping,
  intercropping and irrigation efficiency.
• Also gains can be sustained by improved soil
  fertility management - wider access to chemical
  fertilizers (short-term) and the greater use of
  green manure, composting, and soil erosion
  control (longer term).

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Progress stumbling?

• Rowntree et al (1999) state that each minute, 170
  new people are born needing food but at the same
  time, 10 acres of farmland are lost because of
  environmental problems.
• Broad food security concerns include harvest and
  storage losses, erosion and soil fertility loss,
  soil salinization and the impacts of changes such
  as intensified droughts and floods that may
  accompany global warming (WRI, 1998).
• Industrial-style agriculture, responsible for the
  majority of world food production, is dependent
  on oil, using some 10 of world supplies at
  present.

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Some Obstacles to Future Improvements

• Cropland and production expansion is hampered in
  many regions of the world by soil erosion, lack
  of water, air pollution and urbanization of prime
  farmland.
• For example, in China, more than 1 million acres
  of farmland has been paved in the last 30 years.
  Chinas air pollution is estimated to cause crop
  and forest losses worth 5billion/year.
• Increased demand for meat in developing countries
  in relation to cultural changes and economic
  prosperity could reduce total calories produced
  from farming by a large .
• Bioengineering could result in unforeseen
  biological catastrophes.

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Sustainable Agriculture

• Broadly defined, sustainable agriculture is where
  farmers can profitably maintain the production of
  high-quality food while conserving resources in
  an environmentally and socially beneficial way.
• A combination of seven basic goals need to be
  implemented to sustaintably meet growing global
  food needs worldwide.
• Protect existing productive soils from erosion
  and urbanization.
• Increase plant productivity per unit of land
  planted.
• Reduce harvest losses from pest damage.
• Improve food storage and provide adequate
  (re)distribution.
• Develop new farmed food sources that exploit
  underutilized resources.
• Expand the total land area being farmed.
• Reduce fossil-fuel based inputs and the use of
  harmful chemicals.

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Malnutrition

• The UN declared in 1966 the universal "right to
  adequate food".
• The most widely recognized obstacles to food
  security are
• the lack of money to buy adequate quantities of
  food (city or town dwellers) note that this
  clearly is both a demand and supply issue because
  together these determine local prices
• the lack of land resources and/or technology and
  know-how to produce sufficient food to meet the
  nutritional and income-generating needs of their
  growing families (rural farmers).

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Measuring malnutrition

• Measure intake indicators which focus on the
  adequacy of nutrients and energy needed for
  health, survival and a normal working life.
• Measure outcome indicators such as body weight
  and size and/or the prevalence of classically
  diet-deficiency illnesses such as anaemia and
  avitaminosis A.
• Undernutrition is a quantitative notion that is
  measured in calorific terms i.e. whether people
  get this level of kcals and protein to stay
  healthy.
• Malnutrition is a qualitative notion that
  assesses whether essential micronutrients
  (vitamins and minerals) that come from eating a
  balanced diet are present or missing from dietary
  intake.

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Global conditions

• As indicated in WRI (1998), some 841 million
  people around the world did not have access to
  enough food for healthy living (1990-92 data).
• According to one estimate, malnutrition
  contributed to 12 of all deaths in 1990 (WHO,
  1996) and about 1/3 of all the children in the
  Third World are malnourished (compared to
  reference e.g. 80 of median weight).
• UNDP data (1990-97) indicate 18 of babies born
  in the Third World are of low-birth weight (less
  than 2,500 grams) and they usually occur to
  mothers who are themselves malnourished.
• Percentages of infants with low-birth weights can
  be over 50 in the poorest developing countries
  (e.g. Bangladesh) and are frequently between
  15-30, in contrast to the 4-7 more common in
  the richer nations.

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Some statistics on food

• Average daily per capita supply of calories
  (aggregated, intake measure) in 1997 was 3,371
  high HDI, 2,743 medium HDI, and 2,166 low HDI
  (HDR 2000).
• These numbers do not count for distribution
  inequities.
• Similar differences can be observed for protein
  and fat supply per capita.
• In the least developed countries and Africa as a
  whole, per capita calorie supply fell slightly
  while the per capita supply for all developing
  countries as a whole rose 24 from 1970 to 1997.
• Protein supply per capita fell in sub-Saharan
  Africa and remained static in the low human
  development nations. nations.
• The more developed regions saw 300-800 calorie
  per capita rises over the same period.

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Wheres the beef?

• Historically, the vast majority of the worlds
  population have subsisted on a largely vegetarian
  diet.
• Meat has been a luxury item in many cultures due
  to the loss of equivalent energy that goes into
  producing animals for slaughter.
• Changing cultural mores, increased urbanization
  and increased prosperity in the middle and elite
  classes of the Third World are rapidly
  accelerating the level of meat consumption.
• Daily per capita supply of fat has risen 200 in
  East Asia, and 80 in all developing countries
  from 1970-97.
• Increased meat production generally requires both
  diversion of grains to feed (gt101 reduction in
  equivalent food supply) and more rapid tropical
  deforestation for grazing land.