American Agriculture Key to Blunting World Food Crisis

By Stewart Truelsen
Friday, May 2, 2008 2:17 PM CDT

Stewart Truelsen

If there is one thing the world doesn’t need right now it’s another crisis, but the food crisis is front-page news along with gasoline prices, home foreclosures and other causes of instability and widespread concern.

Prices of food commodities like wheat and rice have soared. World food stocks are historically low, and food riots have broken out in a few hotspots around the globe. Americans are experiencing higher food prices too, but today’s rate is not as steep as what was seen as recently as 1990 and 1991. Certainly, higher food prices in the U.S. today are nothing compared to poorer regions of the world where food is a far bigger component of the cost of living. One big factor? American agriculture.

Doomsayers and scaremongers always seem to come forward at times like this. Take Ted Turner’s outrageous comments in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in which he predicted, “We’ll be 8 degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow.” The media giant and restaurant owner continued, “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

Veteran doomsayer Lester Brown wrote in The Washington Post that “food-to-fuel mandates” have contributed to a global food crisis and caused major environmental harm.

The last time there was a food crisis, in the 1970s, Agriculture Department Economist Don Paarlberg warned about what he called “the myth of immutable forces,” that humankind was helpless and doomed. His biggest worry was that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’re not doomed, but a food crisis is a serious matter. As Josette Shereen, director of the United Nations World Food Program, said, “It is not an option to not deal with hunger.” In remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Shereen said the crisis is a “wake-up call” to the importance of agriculture and food security.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has been saying the same thing for years. Food is a national security concern and vital to the stability of the entire world. Much of world food aid comes from the United States.

One of the world’s best safeguards against a worsening food crisis is American agriculture - the productivity of our farmers and the science and technology that equips them to be the best and share their knowledge and abundance.

The same is not true with the energy crisis. We depend on foreign sources of oil. Even with the financial crisis, investments by foreign governments known as sovereign wealth funds, bailed out several large U.S. financial institutions. No American would want to be in the middle of a food crisis and be so dependent on foreign goodwill.

In the 1970s, the food crisis didn’t last long and was eventually followed by a long period of adequate supplies and price stability. There is no reason to think the same won’t happen this time, but the world does need to wake up to food realities.

There have been attempts to discredit the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work that spawned the Green Revolution - an era of significant increases in agricultural productivity. This is not the time for developing countries to turn away from biotechnology and other science. Traditional seeds and traditional farming methods have not kept pace with an expanding world population.

Fortunately, there is no reason for this food crisis to last as long as the energy crisis, especially with America as the world’s leader in agriculture.

Stewart Truelsen, a regular contributor to the Focus on Agriculture series, is currently authoring a book that chronicles the first 90 years of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

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