To Feed a Growing World Family,

Fund Science for Farmers

Robert M. Goodman / The International Herald Tribune14mar01

MADISON, Wisconsin Obesity and hunger coexist in the United States. Farmers in China rebel against low prices and high taxes. India raises excess grain but leaves its people malnourished in protein. Consumers rebel against genetically modified foods in Europe, where pesticide and fertilizer use is ubiquitous and uncontroversial.

These are a few of the visible issues that swirl around world agriculture today. More profound but less visible an issue is world food security. World population will grow in the next 30 years to 9 billion. All of this growth will occur in the less developed countries, where more than 2 billion people, mostly children, already suffer from grinding poverty, malnutrition, hunger and sometimes famine. In these countries the population will rise from 4 to 7 billion in a single generation. No one has a clue about how these people will be fed.

Since 1960, as world population doubled, agriculture has performed a small miracle. For the first time in human history, increasing food production came not primarily from using more land for crops but from advances in science. Any future increases in production will likewise depend upon wise investments in science.

Philanthropic dollars are trickling in - from the Gates, Rockefeller, Kellogg and Mc-Knight foundations, to name a few that work to improve nutrition by funding agricultural research. But it isn't enough.

The Green Revolution, which foundations and governments supported in the 1960s, made agriculture vastly more productive by increasing yields. But today's challenge goes beyond increased yields.

As agriculture was industrialized, first by machines and then by chemistry (pesticides and fertilizers), the environment suffered. The 19th century's westward expansion in North America was in part driven by impoverishment of soils in the East. Intensive tillage made possible by mechanization helped create the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Fertilizer runoff today pollutes rivers, lakes and groundwater. Pesticides damage beneficial organisms and force the evolution of resistant pests, making things worse in the long term while making them seem better in the near. Yet now we are forced to build future increases in food production on this shaky foundation.

What shall we do in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the pressure of population, the underinvestment in infrastructure, the degradation of the environment and the constraints of natural resources conspire to make hunger acute in the coming decades? Should we be promoting, as many are, adoption by developing countries of industrialized methods that are failing at home?

I say "no." We should apply programs that empower the people of developing countries to better feed themselves. Instead of food aid in crises, we should invest for the long haul in research that equips them to make decisions about agriculture that fit within their societies, environments and economies. It also will help them be intelligent shoppers for appropriate technologies that enable them to make progress.

Today's situation is much more difficult than the problem the developed world solved in the Green Revolution. Population has doubled and will double again. Technologies used in agriculture, including genetics and genomics, are controversial. Today we understand the environmental damage caused by some of the very methods that were seen as solutions back then. And today we in the developed world lack the political will to invest in agricultural development for developing countries.

For all of these reasons, we must look to philanthropic foundations and others of vision and means to step up to this challenge. With their resources and broad commitment to a better quality of life throughout the world, they can provide the leadership and money that will again draw public interest - and, in time, governmental commitment - to investment in agricultural advances in the poorer nations.

These nations need strong public institutions for agriculture and significant additional investments in research. And they need access to the best and most appropriate technologies, from modern genetics to organic methods, to serve the needs of farmers and local entrepreneurs who will play the critical roles. History shows the political consequences of hunger, disease and starvation in the human family. The scale of disaster that could result from agriculture's failure in the less developed countries would far exceed anything we have experienced.

The writer is professor of plant pathology, molecular biology and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and chair of the oversight committee of the McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Program. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.