Published: July 23, 2008 05:39 pm            

Land Minds: The silent tsunami

Originally published in the July 11, 2008, print edition.

“This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.”
— From the hymn “This is My Song” by Lloyd Stone and Georgia Harkness

The Land staff writer Dick Hagen’s cover story on 2008’s “perfect storm” of extreme meteorological and economic conditions is well worth reading, but you probably don’t need us to tell you that these are exciting yet treacherous times in American agriculture.

While the hopes and dreams of many U.S. farmers and ranchers — and with them, the local communities they support — are being pushed and pulled by record grain prices and input costs, the hearts of folks in other lands beat swiftly with concerns just as great as ours.

Regular cover-to-cover readers of The Land are aware of the off-and-on farmers’ strike in Argentina, a protest against taxes the farmers say unfairly squeeze away what little profit they can muster, given the rising cost of fertilizer and other inputs. Truckers there are likewise striking, and the resulting food shortages and skyrocketing food costs have created chaos for people across Argentina.

Forty years ago, India’s “green revolution” started the poverty-stricken county on a path toward considerable prosperity; in recent years, however, agricultural production has failed to keep up with untamed growth. Decades of massive irrigation have drastically lowered water tables, and now only 40 percent of farms are irrigated. “When there is no water, there is nothing,” a farmer there told the New York Times recently.

Rising food prices across the globe have been called the “silent tsunami” by the United Nations’ World Food Programme, which describes the crisis as being on par with the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that resulted in a quarter of a million people dead, 10 million more destitute, and more than $7 billion donated in aid worldwide.

Unfortunately, the slow death of a global economic crisis simply doesn’t grab people’s attention like a single deadly disaster, despite all the food riots you hear about in “other places.” Much passing-of-the-hat would be needed to come up with $7 billion for something as pedestrian as feeding the hungry. It just might take capitalism — rather than humanitarianism — to solve the crisis, and agricultural capital investments in places like sub-Saharan Africa may provide a starting point.

The same types of institutional investors whose money has been jacking up grain markets are apparently starting to see high return-on-investment potential in African agriculture. By bringing in modern equipment, consolidating small plots and taking advantage of incredibly cheap land and labor, American-style (read: big, corporate, biotech) farming may transform the continent with a green revolution of its own.

The United Nations predicts the world’s population will peak at 10 billion souls in about 50 years. We’d better find a way — any way — to feed everyone, or we’ll be having food riots right here in the United States. I hope, and dream, we find a solution first.

        

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