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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Focus Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A week in the world
Delivering hunger
By Peter SnowdonNature -- as regular readers of this column will be well aware -- is not always a bundle of laughs, especially now that man has got his teeth into it. February has been no exception, as southern Africa has been buffeted by the worst storms the region has seen in decades. Botswana received 75 per cent of its average annual rainfall in three days, the Kruger National Park in South Africa has suffered extensive devastation, while in Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of people are reported homeless, and tens of thousands of acres of farmland have simply been swept away. Torrential rains were followed in short order by Cyclone Eline, which crashed through Madagascar, tearing up houses and forests in its wake, before making landfall near the town of Beira. Another cyclone, with the similarly deceptive name of Felicia, was expected to hit the east African coast this week, wreaking further havoc.
Throughout the region, electric lines are down, drinking water supplies to towns have been disrupted, and disease and hunger are beginning to make their presence felt.
The cyclones are due to exceptionally high water surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean. And what leads to exceptionally high water surface temperatures? Well, according to presentations to the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held last week in Washington, D.C., the answer would seem to be "global warming" (surprise, surprise). Eminent scientists presented papers whose conclusions were extensively anticipated in an article in this paper over two years ago (see issue no. 356, 18-24 December, 1997). Once again, readers of Al-Ahram Weekly found themselves one step ahead of the pack. (If you haven't done so already, today might be a good day to think about renewing your subscription, while stocks last.)
Among the predictions on offer in Washington, participants suggested that over the next 100 years, sea levels are likely to rise by a full one metre, an event which by itself will have devastating consequences for global drinking water supplies, agriculture and coastal communities. Since these latter include a majority of the world's major cities, as well as a few whole countries, such as Holland and Bangladesh, this is a subject which bears some thinking about.
In a parallel session, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Institute, forecast that by 2010, 680 million people in the developing world will not have adequate access to food to maintain their health. World grain production will have to rise by 40 per cent to meet this increased demand, said Pinstrup-Andersen, and the developing countries will have to double their cereal imports, and their consumption of meat, simply in order to keep pace with the appetites of their rising populations.
Of course, none of these projections take into account the impact of global warming on the amount of agricultural land actually available. By supposing that the cultivated surface of the earth will remain constant, they ignore both the alarming effects of erosion and nutrient depletion on the world's soil resources, of which 17 per cent have effectively been lost over the last decade due to intensive chemical farming, and the direct and indirect impacts of rising sea levels, loss of ground water, adverse climatic change -- another AAAS contributor predicted that by 2030, the rich agricultural lands of the southern US will have been transformed into rough savannah -- and, equally important, the large scale migration of peoples which is likely to follow.
To call then for more resources to be devoted to conflict resolution, as a prime factor in determining patterns of malnutrition, as Pinstrup-Andersen did, is rather like whistling in the wind, when you think of the scale of the conflicts which ecological processes already set in motion are likely to bring about. Nor is it possible to take seriously the claim that biotechnology and transgenic plants are the only possible solution to problems caused by human greed, cheap petrol (yes, even at $30 a barrel) and the unequal distribution of basic resources, when their precursors - artificial fertilisers and pesticides -- have already played a key role in depriving the poor of access to land, degrading global soil resources, and breeding a new generation of chemical-resistant pests which threaten to do more damage than the old-fashioned bugs they have replaced ever dreamt of.
Still, we will get those super-weevils and those mega-worms, and the thin fruitless salt-encrusted soils that go with them, whether we like it or not. For they are not just natural creatures, but the Cruise missiles and Scuds of agricultural extension work. As such, they have the full might of the US establishment behind them. Senator Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican, in full McCarthyite voice, warned the AAAS meeting that those who oppose biotechnology will "condemn the world's population to unnecessary malnutrition, blindness, sickness and environmental degradation", while Susan McCouch, associate professor of plant breeding at Cornell University, asked the assembled delegates: "What level of sophistication does the public need to have, in order to consider the planet a system that needs to be safeguarded and thought carefully about -- as we have to, in fact, figure out some way to deliver food to people who need it?"
What such fine sentiments obscure and ignore, of course, is that our modern techno-economic culture -- the culture which brought you the Beastie Boys, the Mexican peso crisis, Maggi instant noodles, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome and central air-conditioning -- is probably the first culture in the history of the world not to have placed safeguarding the integrity of the natural world at the head of its list of priorities. It is certainly the first to have the power to inflict its own standards of contempt and neglect on virtually the entire surface of the planet. Nor is it an accident that those who have least to lose (or even most to gain) by global warming and widespread food shortages in a world economy dominated by long-distance trade always think in terms of "delivering" food to an audience (the "public"), rather than creating the space for people -- by which I mean: all of us -- to grow the food we need for ourselves.
