Center for a New American Security

The global food crisis is perhaps the least reported big event of the year. It stands to kill far more people than the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China. First it will kill through starvation, and then through the conflict over resources that it spawns. At a conference of experts that Kip observed on Afghanistan several weeks ago, all agreed that rising food prices were the single thing capable of throwing the country into utter and perhaps unrecoverable chaos. The same might be true of nuclear-armed Pakistan as well, not to mention several dozen other weak or failing states.

Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin of the NY Times yesterday authored an article detailing how the diminishing investment in global food research since the Green Revolution has contributed to the crisis. The highlights:

This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world’s agricultural system. Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.

The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.

“People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the rice institute....

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. World leaders are scrambling to respond. On May 1, President Bush asked Congress for an extra $770 million to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries. That network includes the rice institute.

Robert Bertram, who oversees the funding for the United States Agency for International Development, said he was still trying to stop the cuts and argued that research to improve crop yields was “like putting money in the pockets of poor people, and I mean billions of poor people.”...

In Africa, where yields have remained stagnant since the 1960s, efforts to bolster them have been hampered by cuts not only in research but also in programs like fertilizer distribution...

Adjusting for inflation and exchange rates, the wealthy countries, as a group, cut such donations roughly in half from 1980 to 2006, to $2.8 billion a year from $6 billion. The United States cut its support for agriculture in poor countries to $624 million from $2.3 billion in that period.

“Agriculture has been so productive and done so well, people have kind of lost sight of how fragile it really is,” said Jan E. Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University who works with rice. “It’s as if we have lost track of the fact that food is linked to agriculture, which is linked to human survival.”...

Yields soared [as a result of the Green Revolution], and by the 1980s, the threat of starvation had receded in most of the world. With Europe and the United States offering their farmers heavy subsidies that encouraged production, grain became abundant worldwide, and prices fell.

Many poor countries, instead of developing their own agriculture, turned to the world market to buy cheap rice and wheat. In 1986, Agriculture Secretary John Block called the idea of developing countries feeding themselves “an anachronism from a bygone era,” saying they should just buy American.

For the long warriors of the 21st Century, food security cannot be an issue on the back burner. Jared Diamond makes a compelling argument in Collapse that such poor resource management was, for instance, the deep cause of the massive genocide in Rwanda.

In Afghanistan, rising prices may result in further entrenching the opium economy as the sure way to provide the cash needed to import grains. This would be bad news for the counterinsurgency effort, which needs to weed the populace and the government off of the proceeds of opium if we are to have a shot at winning.

The current food crisis will both exacerbate existing conflicts and contribute to new ones. Solutions will require not only the military but also the other elements of national power acting in a concerted, unified effort to manage these conflicts. Thinking about items like new investment in agricultural research will be required. Family planning may be an important and politically sensitive topic. The political challenges remain daunting to preparing for conflict, however.

Congressmen like to pose next to us men (and women) in uniform working with our job-producing, high technology weaponry.

Posing by rice institutes doesn't quite have the same cachet (and even less, being the lead on administrative reform of the Departments of Defense, State, Agriculture, Transporation, etc.).