The enormous increase in agricultural productivity since WWII may have run its course—but increase in population hasn’t, and we’re beginning to see the very frightening consequences:

Food supplies are shrinking alarmingly around the globe, plunging
the world into its greatest crisis for more than 30 years. New figures
show that this year’s harvest will fail to produce enough to feed
everyone on Earth, for the sixth time in the past seven years. Humanity
has so far managed by eating its way through stockpiles built up in
better times – but these have now fallen below the danger level.

       
         
         
            

Food prices have already started to rise as a result, and threaten to
soar out of reach of many of the 4.2 billion people who live in the
world’s most vulnerable countries. And the new "green" drive to get
cars to run on biofuels threatens to make food even scarcer and more
expensive.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA), which produce the world’s two main
forecasts of the global crop production, both estimate that this year’s
grain harvest will fall for the second successive year.

[. . .]

The world’s food stocks have shrunk from enough to feed the world for
116 days in 1999 to a predicted 57 days at the end of this season, well
below the official safety level. Prices have already risen by up to 20
per cent this year.

[. . .]

Between 1950 and 1990 grain yields more than doubled, but
they have grown much more slowly since. Production rose from around 630
million tons to 1.78 billion tons, but has only edged up in the past 15
years, to around 2 billion tons.

"The near-tripling of the harvest by the world’s farmers was a
remarkable performance," says Brown. "In a single generation they
increased grain production by twice as much as had been achieved during
the preceding 11,000 years, since agriculture began. But now the world
has suffered a dramatic loss of momentum."

Apart from increasing yields, there has always been one other way of
boosting production – putting more land under the plough. But this,
too, has been running into the buffers. As population grows and
farmland is used for building roads and cities – and becomes exhausted
by overuse – the amount available for each person on Earth has fallen
by more than half.

There are more than five people on Earth today for every two living
in the middle of the last century. Yet enough is produced worldwide to
feed everyone well, if it is evenly distributed.

It is not just that people in rich countries eat too much, and those
in poor ones eat too little. Enormous quantities of the world’s
increasingly scarce grain now goes to feed cows – and, indirectly, cars.

The cows are longstanding targets of Brown’s, who founded the
prestigious Worldwatch Institute immediately after the 1974 conference,
partly to draw attention to the precariousness of food supplies. As
people become better-off, they eat more meat, the animals that are
slaughtered often being fed on grain. It takes 14kg of grain to produce
2kg of beef, and 8kg of grain for 2kg of pork. More than a third of the
world’s harvest goes to fatten animals in this way.

Cars are a new concern, the worry arising from the present drive to
produce green fuels to fight global warming. A "corn rush" has erupted
in the United States, using the crop to produce the biofuel, ethanol –
strongly supported by subsidies from the Bush administration to divert
criticism of its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says
Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This
year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it
sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 – mostly
poor – countries.

From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed
exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed
poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in
the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state’s crop.

This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of
grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers.
Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they
simply cannot afford to do so.

Brown expects the food crisis to get much worse as more and more
land becomes exhausted, soil erodes, water becomes scarcer, and global
warming cuts harvests.