Course Readings

Chapters 2 "Facing the Prospect of Food Scarcity" & 3 "Preserving Global Cropland" in State
Safina (1995)
Gabriel (1995) 
Matson et al. (1997)
Botsford et al. (1997)
Baker (1995)

SUSTAINABILITY OF TERRESTRIAL FOOD PRODUCTION

The Coming Food Scarcity

    Expansion of agriculture is over. Agriculture has plowed nearly all the lands that can be plowed worldwide, reaching all of the most accessible areas of the planet. Food stress and poverty in some nations have even moved agriculture out of the flatlands and into remote areas now deforested and terraced. In many areas of Africa and Southeast Asia, farmers literally farm the mountains, terracing crops right up the slopes to the top.

    Agriculture uses most of the world's water (estimated at 87% of the world's fresh water withdrawn). With population growth, agriculture is now competing with urban areas for water (witness MWD in Los Angeles and San Diego fighting like children over water from the Imperial Valley they want to divert from agriculture to urban southern California).

    Agriculture and urban water users now take so much water from some rivers that all of the water is allocated. These rivers run dry before the reach the Sea: the Colorado, USA-Mexico; the Yellow, China; and the Amu Dar'ya/Aral Sea, Russia.

    But the world's irrigated areas are not expanding even through humanity is taking more of the world's runoff (rivers). Irrigated areas have been declining due to depletion of underground aquifers (for example, the Ogallala Aquifer in central USA) and the diversion of waters to cities. 66% of the irrigation water in Texas and 38% in California is pumped from ground water (Pimental et al. 1997). The USDA estimates that 21% of irrigated cropland is being watered from unsustainable underground aquifers (Brown 1997).

    Most of the world's increased food output is no longer due to expansion in the area extent of agriculture, but due to intensification of production on the existing areas. Agricultural areas are actually declining due to massive urbanization and the infrastructure devoted to the automobile.

    The global food system is so intimately tied together. Loss of farmlands to population growth and urbanization threaten the very basis of US agricultural exports. US exports have fueled the massive increase in grain consumption in Asia. Over 1 million acres of land is lost to urbanization annually, of which half are from the USA's 470 million acres under cultivation. Another 2 million acres is lost to erosion. The US population is growing a 3 million persons per year, doubling every 60 years. If these trends continue, food prices could rise 300-500% early in the next century.

    Existing agricultural areas are becoming exhausted due to overuse of fertilizers and poor farming practices. Runoff from agriculture to surface and groundwaters is the leading cause of nonpoint pollution in the USA (EPA 1994).

    As a result, grain yield per hectare have been slowing since 1990, rising only 3% from 1990-96, or 0.5% per year. This rise does not keep pace with population growth at 1.6% per year (Brown 1997).

    Add to these concerns the growing and unprecedented rise in affluence in Asia. States Brown (1997), "There is no historical precedent for so many people moving up the food chain so fast." Producing 1 kg of animal protein requires about 100 times more water than producing 1 kg of vegetable protein (Pimental et al. 1997). In China, grain consumption by animals has skyrocketed. From 1990-95 China's grain consumption increased by 40 million tons; 33 million tons were consumed as animal feeds (Brown 1997). Similar but less dramatic trends are occurring in Indonesia, India, and other Asian nations. Most of this grain is imported from the USA.

HOPKINS REPORT WARNS OF FOOD SHORTAGES AS WORLD POPULATION GROWS
Winning the Food Race
Sierrans for US Population Stabilization

    The growing world population could overwhelm the food supply in the next century, warns a new report from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.  There are signs that by 2025, when world population is projected to total over 8 billion people, food production may not keep up with demand.  The Hopkins report urges a dual strategy of overcoming constraints to increasing sustainable food production and at the same time slowing population growth by meeting people's family planning needs.

    Even today, although there is sufficient food to feed the nearly 6 billion people on Earth, one in every three people is malnourished. Each year about 18 million people--mostly children--die from starvation, malnutrition, and related causes.  A combination of poor distribution, protectionist trade policies, growing populations, and diminishing productive land prevents many developing countries from adequately feeding their people, according to Winning the Food Race in the latest issue of Population Reports, published by the Population Information Program at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication
Programs.

    Throughout history, food production has raced to keep up with population growth.  In the last 40 years, the Green Revolution helped triple food production while population doubled.  But can the food supply continue growing faster than world population?  The outlook is uncertain, according to the Hopkins report.  Since 1990 global grain production has risen only slightly, and, despite slower rates of population growth, grain supplies per capita have fallen. Africa is the worst example.  It now produces nearly 30% less food per person than in 1967.  The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the
United Nations estimates that, to feed a world of 9 billion people in 2050, without allowing for additional imports of food, Africa would have to increase food production by 300%; Latin America by 80%; and Asia by 70%.  Even North America would have to increase food production by 30% to feed its own projected population of 348 million.

    In many developing countries small farm size and large families have resulted in a reduced capacity to grow food for sale.  An FAO survey in the early 1990s found that over half of all farms in 57 developing countries studied were less than one hectare (2.47acres) in size--not enough to feed a family with four to six children and also produce a surplus.  In some countries, with every new generation of sons, farm plots are divided into smaller and smaller units.  The report's author, Don Hinrichsen, quotes a farmer in Burkina Faso: "My grandsons cannot make a living from their plots....They spend half a year in
Ouagadougou doing odd jobs."

Constraints to Increasing Food Production

    Why shouldn't we win the food production race in the future?  On the demand side there are 80 million new mouths to feed each year.  On the supply side there is a shortage of arable land, degradation of land (worldwide nearly 2 billion hectares, an area larger than the US and Mexico, suffer from moderate to severe soil degradation), loss of agricultural land due to urbanization, irrigation problems, water shortages, collapsing fisheries, disappearing genetic diversity, and climate change.  Attempts at reversing these trends range from introducing new seed varieties (a possible second Green Revolution),
reduction of pollution, improved irrigation, to creation of urban gardens.  But whether these measures will suffice remains to be seen.

Can Family Planning Help?

    Although the recent reproductive revolution has slowed population growth, many countries find it difficult to feed their growing numbers.  Between 1985 and 1995, food production lagged behind population growth in 64 of 105 developing countries studied by FAO. In 1996, 82 poor countries, half of them in Africa, were classified as food-deficit countries, unable to grow enough food and without sufficient funds to import it.

    "Helping couples prevent unintended pregnancies by providing family planning would slow the growth in demand for food," according to the Hopkins report.  Slowing population growth would buy time to increase food supplies and improve production technologies while helping to conserve natural resources. Surveys reveal that at least 100 million married women in developing countries would prefer to avoid pregnancy but are not using any contraceptive method.  Finding ways to serve these women is one part of the solution, according to the report.

    The sooner replacement-level fertility of about two children per couple could be reached, the sooner that "...world attention could shift away from the need to increase food production continually and toward improving the quality of life for all,"  writes Hinrichsen." To reach replacement-level fertility, contraceptive use in developing countries would have to increase from the current level of 50% to the 73% level of developed countries.

    "Winning the food race is likely to require decades of effort at international, national, and local levels," writes Hinrichsen.  It
will require cooperation among policies and programs in agriculture, sustainable resource management, health care including family planning, and economic development.  "In any strategy, reaching replacement-level fertility as quickly as possible provides a needed foundation."

    Don Hinrichsen, author of Winning the Food Race is a Senior Consultant with the United Nations Population Fund and author of the forthcoming book, Coastal Waters of the World: Trends, Threats, and Strategies, published by Island Press in December.  His analysis appears in Population Reports, an international review journal of important issues in population, family planning, and related health matters.  It is published four times a year in three languages by the Population Information Program at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs for more than 150,000 family planning and other health
professionals worldwide, with support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).  USAID administers the US foreign assistance program, providing economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide.

UNEP-CGIAR Project Homepage
Pesticide Information Center
CARP, Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia
Floresta
Goldstein, S.M. 1997. Managing Editor, Population Reports <sgoldste@WELCHLINK.WELCH.JHU.EDU>

References

American Farmland Trust has released a  guidebook on how to prevent farmland from being destroyed. The  book, "Saving American Farmland: What Works," is designed for policy makers, communities and concerned citizens and addresses the findings of AFT's March 1997 "Farming on the Edge" report that 4.3 million acres of farmland were lost between 1982 and 1992 to development. The guidebook complements AFT's Farmland Information Center which promotes alternatives to selling farm or ranch lands for development. Contact Shannon Weller, AFT,  (202)659-5170 ext. 3032.

Brown, L. 1997. Can we raise grain yields fast enough? Worldwatch 10(4): 9-17.

Engleman and LeRoy. 1996. Sustaining Water: Population and the Future of Renewable Water Supplies. Population Action International.

EPA. 1994. National water quality inventory, 1992: Report to Congress. Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds, US EPA, Washington, DC.

Kane, H. 1997. Eco-farming in Fiji. Worldwatch 10(4): 29-34.

Mitsch, W. 1993. Ecological engineering. Environmental Science and Technology 27: 438-445.

Pimental, D. 1997. US food production threatened by rapid population growth! CCN, 2000 P Street, Suite 240, Washington, DC 20038.

Pimentel, D. et al. 1997. Water resources: agriculture, the environment, and society. BioScience 47: 97-106.

Pinkham, R. and S. Chaplin. 1996. Water 2010. Four scenarios for 21st century water systems. Rocky Mountain Institute, Snowmass, CO.

Postel, S. et al. 1996. Human appropriation of renewable fresh water. Science 271: 785-788.

Plucknett, D. and D. Winkelman. 1995. Technology for sustainable agriculture. Scientific American 273(3): 182-186.

Swaminathan, M.S. 1992. Cultivating food for a developing world. Environmental Science and Technology 26(6): 1104-1107.

SUSTAINABILITY OF AQUATIC FOOD PRODUCTION

Webliography: Aquatic Foods and Blue Harvets

American Fisheries Society
Aquatic Biodiversity Crisis (Nature Conservancy 1997)
"Troubled Waters Statement" (Marine Conservation Biology Institute 1997)
Greenpeace International Toxics Campaign Home Page
Greenpeace Marine Services Home Page
National Fisherman Homepage
Salmon Conflict Investigations
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service World Wide Web Site
Sustainable Fish Farm at The Earth Centre / Index
Fisheries Environmental Crisis

Overfishing

        There are different types of fisheries resource exploitation:

Underfishing: many fish die of "old age" because production is greater than removal by fishing.
Sustainable fishing: using the ocean's "surplus capacity", e.g. where natural recruitment in balance with fishing effort.
Overfishing: fishing to the level where natural recruitment cannot replace the catch.
Biomass fishing: investing in small mesh nets to catch everything to make fish meal and oils for chicken, pig and aquaculture feeds. In 1950, one half of the world's marine fish were distributed fresh; this percentage dropped to 20% by 1982.
Malthusian overfishing: a desperate attempt to fish to survive where fishers destroy the very     environment that the fish (and they) depend on for survival using poisons, dynamite, etc.

    It is amazing to contrast the information on marine fisheries from just 30 years ago with today. Emery and Iselin (1967, p. 1281) compared developed of food resources on land and oceans in 1967 and concluded that "the development of marine food resources is in a more primitive stage than the development on land. Progress in inhibited by political factors... and industrial factors (conservative design of fishing boats and equipment, and preference of American fishermen for small independent boats rather than the large factory ships used by the Soviets and Japanese".

    Compare those comments about the "primitive" nature of fishing with the information given by Dayton (1995), Safina (1995), and Botsford et al. (1997). Between 1970 and 190 the world's fishing fleet grew at twice the rate of global catch. Safina (1995) reviews the technological marvels now used to catch fish, sonar, helicopters, drift nets, pair trawls, etc., etc., calling it a "war on fishes". He states the world's fish cannot survive this technological and monetary onslaught. To catch $70 billion of fish the fishing industry spent $124 billion; the $54 billion balance came from taxpayers.

    In an OECD (1997) report called "Towards Sustainable Fisheries" the history of the global fisheries crisis is reviewed. Throughout the late 40's and 1950's scientists estimated that fish stocks could be exploited to levels of 200-1,000 million tons (the 1993 world yield with all our technology was 100.4 million tons). In addition, there was strong support for "Freedom of the High Sea" because fish were though inexhaustible. These scientific projections were terribly wrong, and by the end of the 1960's the number of heavily exploited fish stocks increased so dramatically that some scientists were calling for restraint. However, new technologies and massive government investments and subsidies flowed into capture fisheries in the 1970's-80's. "New fisheries could be developed so fast that time was not allowed to design management measures" (OECD 1997).

    OCED (1997) blames the following actions for the crisis:

high yield expections
technical advancements in harvesting and processing
distant water fleet expansion
increasing aquatic protein demands
domestic political pressures
limited success of regulations
absence of well defined property rights.

    "On Oct. 3, 1997, NMFS announced the release of a report to Congress entitled Status of Fisheries of the United States identifying 86 species as overfished, 10 species as approaching an overfished condition, 183 species as not overfished, and 448 species of unknown status.  Regional Fishery Management Council are required to develop programs to end overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks.  This report states that these numbers probably understate the number of fisheries that will eventually be determined to be overfished". (Sustainable Fisheries Act, NMFS)

    Globally about half of fish stocks are fully exploited and 22% are overexploited (Botsford et al. 1997). Fisheries remove about 8% of global primary production but 24-25% of production in coastal areas. But this removal is not limited to products for consumption or economic use. The level of waste in industrial fishing operations (called "bycatch") is threatening the very basis of the ocean's food web. In a number of fisheries, bycatch exceeds the catch actually utilized, and the "throwbacks" change the form and functioning of the marine food web. Discards cause aggregations of predators, oxygen depletions and changed behaviors of marine animals. Jones (1992) shows where decomposing discards caused a disease which eliminated a scallop fishery. Shrimp bycatch can be as high as 125-830% (Safina 1995). Australian data show that 3000 tons of living animals were discarded for each 500 tons of shrimp (Dayton 1995). Fishing threatens a wide variety of marine mammals that are caught as bycatch (Dayton 1995). And the bycatch is not only restricted to aquatic creatures. Tuna longliners have been implicated in the annual kill of 44,000 wandering albatrosses.

    Fisheries employ about 200 million people and account for 19% of total human consumption of animal protein, producing revenues of $70 billion per year. No country has a successful fisheries management strategy in place or plans for recovering the bounty and beauty of the world's oceans. A fish war nearly erupted in the early 1990's between Spain and Canada because of illegal overfishing and fraud on the high seas. Canadian military seized a Spanish ship on the high seas. The boat had two sets of log books, illegal size fish and nets. Distant water nations fished 16 times the quotas of fish set for the Grand Banks from 1986-92 (Safina 1995).

     The ocean commons is clearly at an end but this will be very difficult for governments to do. Many nations will have to move thousands of people out of fishing and dramatically cut subsidies for fishers. Governments will have to apply the "precautionary principle" (Botsford et al. 1997, p. 514). Botsford et al. (1997) state, "The challenge for the next century lies in crafting new local and regional institutions, not just in filling the scientific gaps. The best hope for greater sustainability of marine ecosystems is to insulate management from pressure for greater harvest while attempting to reduce uncertainty through a comprehensive ecosystem view." Dayton (1995) goes further, stating "We point out that in almost all cases the situation is so desperate that we cannot afford to wait for more research but must begin strong risk aversion management now. The traditional view is that resource exploitation is a right rather than a privilege and that restrictive management cannot be justified without conclusive evidence of adverse effects. A scientific hypotheses are never proven, only disproven, conservative management is very difficult because exploiters can always point out uncertainties about the causal relationships between exploitation and environmental degradation. We suggest that the burden of proof more properly lies with the exploiter."

    As late as 1992, the world's fishing fleets were still increasing. The number of vessels in 1992 was 3.5 million, an increase of 136,000 since 1989 (FAO 1995). 70% of the world's fish stocks are now regarded as fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. FAO warns nations to constrain production to rehabilitate stocks, or else stock collapses may become permanent. Waste reduction, habitat rehabilitation, and development of sustainable aquaculture must also be a part of creating a sustainable future for the blue planet.

Hopeful Actions?

Asian Development Bank On Oct. 16, 1997 the Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced a new fisheries policy moving to emphasis on "equity, efficiency and sustainability', and not increasing production. The new ADB policy seeks to encourage greater private sector involvement in fishery production and processing while fostering regional cooperation in long-term policies for sustainable fisheries management.

The Resurgence of the Striped Bass on the US East Coast  In late October 1997 the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission nade a formal declaration that the Albermarle Sound-Roanoke River striped bass population had recovered to historic levels. Similar determinations were made in 1995 for the Chesapeake Bay and New England striped bass populations.

But Conflicts with Aquaculture

Salmon Conflict Investigations and The Oregon Plan
Georgia Strait Alliance
British Columbia Environmental Assessment Office

References

Botsford, L. et al. 1997. The management of fisheries and marine ecosystems. Science 277: 509-515.

Dayton, P. et al. 1995. Environmental effects of marine fishing. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems 5: 205-232.

Emery, K. and C. Iselin, 1967. Human food from ocean and land. Science 1279-1281.

Roodman, D. 1997. Reforming subsidies, p. 132-150. Chapter 8 in State of the World. Worldwatch, Washington, DC.

Safina, C. 1995. The world’s imperiled fish. Scientific American 273: 46-53.

Other References

Fanelli, G. et al. 1994. Human predation along Apulian rocky coasts (SE Italy): desertification caused by fisheries. Marine Ecology Progress Series 110: 1-8.

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization). 1995. State of the World's Fisheries. FAO, Rome, Italy.

Jones, J. 1992. Environmental impact of trawling on the seabed: a review. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 26: 59-67.

National Research Council. 1995. Understanding Marine Biodiversity. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 1997. Towards Sustainable Fisheries. OECD, Paris, France.

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