Management of World Food Supply

Significant Challenges in the Management of World Food Supply

Introduction

Today, in a world with abundant food, more than 700 million people are chronically undernourished. Over the next 20 years, the world's population will probably double. The global food supply would need to double just to stay even, but to triple for the larger population to be fed adequately. Meanwhile, we are approaching limits in arable land and productivity and are employing practices that are destroying the soil's capacity to produce food. This paper discusses the significant challenges in the management of world food supply in a concise and comprehensive way.

Discussion

Some see biotechnology as the answer to the problem of enabling this much larger population to feed itself. But biotechnology, if by this we mean crops engineered to contain new genes, is not essential. It could play a minor and useful role in developing new agricultural products (Atkins and Ian, 2001), but other factors -- including other kinds of breeding technologies -- will be much more important than transgenic crops in determining whether we meet this challenge. It would be a tragedy if other necessary actions were not taken because of a mistaken belief that genetic engineering is some sort of a panacea for hunger. Some of the reasons biotechnology should not be relied on to enable the world to feed itself are outlined below. More productive crops are only part of the solution to the world's food crisis.

There are many reasons for the current and projected food crisis. Among the most important are lack of income to buy food, lack of infrastructure like roads to get products to market, trade policies that disadvantage farmers in the developing world (Atkins and Ian, 2001), lack of inputs such as fertilizer, lack of information, and low-yield farming practices. More productive crops will do little to alleviate hunger if deficiencies in those areas are not addressed as well.

Where more productive crops are needed, there is little reason to believe that genetic engineering will be better than other technologies -- in particular, sophisticated traditional breeding -- at producing higher yielding crops.

Many technologies can increase the yields of crops. These include traditional breeding, production of hybrids, so-called marker-assisted breeding (a sophisticated way of enhancing traditional breeding by knowing which plant cultivars carry which trait), and tissue culture methods for propagating virus-free root stocks. All of these could help improve the productivity of crops in the developing world, but currently only limited resources are available for applying them there.

So far, there no reason to believe that genetic engineering would be markedly better than these more traditional technologies in improving crops (Critser, 2003). Early "gene dreams" were of nitrogen-fixing crops, higher intrinsic yield, and drought tolerance. But so far none of these seems realistic because most involve complex multigene traits. For the most part (Critser, 2003), genetically engineered crops are limited to one or two gene transfers and have relative few applications of use to hungry people. Those that are of use, such as insect ...