Solutions from a Hunger Crisis

(page 2 of 2)

Browse Issues

Browse the BusinessWeek Archive

Outside a subsidized food store in Lahore K.M. Chaudary/AP Photo

Haitians demonstrating against the Prime Minister in Port-au-Prince Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

PRECISION AGRICULTURE

There's little relief for the food crisis in the farm bill now wending through Congress. It essentially maintains the status quo, continuing price supports and retaining the policy of requiring developing nations to use the U.S. aid they get to purchase American crops. That said, if a new WTO agreement is reached lowering subsidies, the farm bill will have to be amended later. Mary Kay Thatcher, director of public policy at the American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents agriculture interests, says that if the WTO agreement is reached, "we can make the farm bill fit."

While food policy remains tangled, there's a lot of new thinking about agriculture methods that promises productivity increases in the big food-producing countries and for small farms in developing nations. After major farm production gains worldwide between the 1940s and 1970s, investments by nations tailed off. Now that seems to be reversing.

The technology advances that have swept other business segments are now being felt full force in U.S. agriculture. So-called precision agriculture changes the way farmers manage their fields. Using sophisticated computer systems and global positioning satellites, a farmer can modify the amount of fertilizer, seeds, and water applied within a single field based on varying soil and moisture conditions. Techniques such as these bring efficiency gains of between 7% and 15%.

Meanwhile, the genomic revolution is coming to farming. When the Maize Genome Sequencing Project is completed this fall, seed producers will be able to identify the genes for key traits of various crops faster and more cheaply. At the same time, resistance by some countries to genetically modified grains appears to be easing.

But there's a catch. Now that some crops, such as corn and sugar, are fuel as well as food, advances in agricultural productivity won't automatically improve the food supply. "Crops will go to the highest bidder, and we in the Western world are willing to pay more for fuel than poor people are able to pay for food," says Patrick S. Schnable, professor of agronomy at Iowa State University and a researcher on the maize project.

THIRD WORLD FOCUS

So another challenge for policymakers is to make bigger productivity and crop yield gains in the agricultural sectors of the developing world. (An immediate problem is that farmers face soaring prices for fertilizer products, a market also experiencing shortages.) The U.N. on Apr. 29 announced a $1.7 billion plan to distribute highly productive hybrid seeds to farmers in the developing world to boost crop output.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports a handful of projects aimed at improving the entire business ecology of small farms. The groups it funds provide seeds, advice, low-cost technologies, and access to markets. "We think we and others can pull several hundred million people out of poverty in spite of the longer-term increase in the price of food," says Raj Shah, Gates' director of agricultural development.

In the meantime, 1 billion people are at risk of starvation or severe malnutrition. The WFP's Sheeran warns that during the so-called hungry period, just before harvest, "poor farmers will eat their seeds if they don't have anything else." To prevent that kind of outcome on a large scale will take plenty of smart thinking and political resolve in the years ahead.

With John Carey in Washington, D.C.

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.