The Need for Sustainable Food Production Systems - Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems - page 16

the world reached a dubious milestone: the number of
overweight people (about 1.1 billion) grew roughly
equal to the number of underweight people (Gardner and
Halweil, 2000). This statistic indicates that the unequal
distribution of food — which is both a cause and a con-
sequence of global inequality — is at least as serious a
problem as the threats to global food production.
Developing nations too often grow food mainly for
export to developed nations, using external inputs pur-
chased from the developed nations. While the profits from
the sale of the export crops enrich small numbers of elite
landowners, many people in the developing nations go
hungry — an estimated 815 million in 2002 (FAO, 2004).
In addition, those with any land are often displaced as the
privileged seek more land on which to grow export crops.
Besides causing unnecessary human suffering, rela-
tionships of inequality tend to promote agricultural policies
and farmer practices that are driven more by economic
considerations than by ecological wisdom and long-term
thinking. For example, subsistence farmers in developing
nations, displaced by large landowners increasing produc-
tion for export, are often forced to farm marginal lands.
The results are deforestation, severe erosion, and serious
social and ecological harm.
Although inequality has always existed between
countries and between groups within countries, the
modernization of agriculture has tended to accentuate
this inequality because its benefits are not evenly dis-
tributed. Those with more land and resources have had
better access to the new technologies. Therefore, as long
as conventional agriculture is based on First World
technology and external inputs accessible to so few, the
practice of agriculture will perpetuate inequality, and
inequality will remain a barrier to sustainability.

RUNNING OUT OF SOLUTIONS

During the 20th century, food production was increased
in two ways: by bringing more land under production and
by increasing the land's productivity — the amount of food
produced per unit of land. As detailed above, many of the
techniques that have been used to increase productivity
have a great many negative consequences that in the long
term work to undermine the productivity of agricultural
land, and in many cases these techniques have approached
their physical and practical limits. Conventional means of
increasing productivity, therefore, cannot be relied on
to help meet the increasing food needs of an expanding
global population — a population that surpassed 6 billion
in 2004, according to U.N. estimates.
However, increasing food production by cultivating
more land is also problematic. Most of the land on the
Earth's surface that is amenable to agriculture has already
been converted to human use, and of this chunk of land,
the proportion that can be farmed is actually shrinking
due to urban expansion, soil degradation, and desertifica-
tion. In the coming years, the growth of cities and indus-
trialization will continue to claim more agricultural land
— and often the best land, too. In addition, climate change
threatens to take large areas of agricultural land out of
production, especially in the tropics, where warming and
drying may accelerate desertification in some areas and
rising sea levels will inundate low-lying land.
Figure 1.10 shows the problem graphically. In the
mid-1980s, the regular annual increases in the area of
arable land worldwide observed since the 1970s (and
earlier) ceased, and shrinkages have been observed in the
periods 1988 to 1992, 1994 to 1995, 1997 to 1999, and
2001 to 2003.

1410000

1390000

1370000

1350000

1330000

1310000

1970 1974 1978 1982 1986 1990 1994 1998 2002

FIGURE 1.10 Worldwide arable land area, 1970 to 2003. As the total amount of arable land remains about the same each year,
population growth continues its upward trend. Source: Data from Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT database, 2006.