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Enough Food to Go Around?

Friends and colleagues often refer to him as Einstein, and not just because of his hair.

Considered a legend in the swine industry for his work in swine nutrition, University of Illinois animal scientist Jim Pettigrew was awarded Alltech's Medal of Excellence at the company's annual International Animal Health and Nutrition Symposium in Lexington, Ky. this week. Professor Pettigrew earned the Medal of Excellence for his insight into cutting-edge technologies leading to the advancement of pig nutrition globally.

Pettigrew said agriculture and society must increase its investment in science and innovation to meet the demands of future population growth.

"We need to look at the twin challenges of food sufficiency and food security; one is simply producing enough food for the world, but the security question is more difficult – that's a question of making sure every person has enough food each day," he says.

"It's not only because population is increasing, it's also because living standards are improving in many developing countries around the world," he notes. "And that means those people want a new diet which includes animal protein. When poor people get money they improve their diet. That's happened throughout history and it's happening now throughout much of the developing world."

Farmers will need to do this on less land than the past 40 years, if urban development continues as expected. And they will need to produce with more scarce water and fossil-fuel based fertilizers. "The big unknown is climate change," he adds. "I believe climate change will at least make meeting this challenge of doubling food production more difficult, but we don’t know yet how difficult that will be."

Food sufficiency riddle

Unlike production, food sufficiency will be more difficult, Pettigrew believes. "Food security means enough food for every person every day, and it's an area where we have not had as much success," he says.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the number of people in the world going hungry every night had steadily decreased until 2008, when droughts and increased use of grains for renewable fuel squeezed food supplies. In 1970 there were 880 million hungry people, which fell to 800 million by the early 1990s. After the global financial crisis, the number soared to over 1 billion going hungry every day.  Over half the hungry are in Asia and another third live in Sub Saharan Africa.

"Most of the hungry are small farmers in rural areas," says Pettigrew. "Hunger is connected to poverty, but also war, drought, and inept or corrupt governments. Our success as we move forward in reducing the number of hungry people will be directly related to reducing the number of poor people."

Answers?

To overcome food insufficiency, Pettigrew says the world needs to recognize the challenge, invest in solutions and set in place innovative, market-based systems that encourage and reward hard work.

"We need to invest in research, education, extension and development," he says. "We need to make the investments like the kind we have made in the past, but have unfortunately slipped away from."

Pettigrew is a firm believer in renewable fuels, but believes cellulosic ethanol must have a greater research commitment to steer away from using food crops for fuel. "I have considered it fundamentally unwise to divert food to fuel, and it seems the way out of this problem is to move as quickly as possible to create cellulosic ethanol from nonfood materials," he says.

Food aid is important, but it's not the answer to beating hunger, he adds. "Food aid does not produce food, it only moves it around, so it does not contribute to answering the challenge of food security. Food aid can have very detrimental effects on agriculture inside the country where it is used, so it has to be used selectively and appropriately."