Feeding the world will require tough choices

Fred Pearce, consultant

In One Billion Hungry, Gordon Conway is unwilling to rule out any options for meeting the world's food needs

IF YOU wanted someone to come up with a grand plan to feed the world, you might be hard pressed to find a person with better credentials than Gordon Conway. Trained in the UK as an agricultural ecologist in the heyday of the green revolution, he has worked on food and economic development from Wales to the West Indies, Delhi to DC. He has worked for NGOs and the World Bank, been vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex and president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

It's not a bad r?sum?, and this book, praised on the back cover by both Bill Gates and Kofi Annan, looks like that grand plan. Yet the trouble with Conway's prescription is that he fails to make the hard choices. He wants everything: big farms and small farms, global markets and local control, "designer crops" and agroecology, free trade and "a major focus on getting poor rural people out of poverty".

Of course, everyone should put their shoulder to the wheel to double global food production by 2050, and he insists this is doable. He quotes US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying: "The question is not whether we can end hunger, it's whether we will." His eclecticism about how that could be achieved makes for a compelling read - only it doesn't explain away the contradictions.

Seed companies across the world are continually promising new water-efficient, salt-tolerant and climate-resilient crops, and as a techno-optimist, Conway believes in the power of such scientific innovations to deliver a new, more environmentally aware, green revolution for a resource-constrained century.

He also understands that, for the foreseeable future, it is the hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across the world who will continue to supply most of our food - something he recognises is no bad thing. After all, contrary to popular perception, smallholders are "in many respects highly efficient [and] produce more per hectare than large farms".

So he wants researchers to redouble their efforts to help smallholders grow their businesses to feed the world. Hooray. We hear too much self-serving propaganda about how only agribusiness can stop hunger, and peasant farmers should get out of the way.

But then, disappointingly, he drops the ball by arguing that a smallholder renaissance can go hand in hand with greater power for global markets. Surely, one of the lessons of recent land-grabbing across Africa is that when the big boys move in, it is the smallholders who lose out.

Conway's faith in markets seems not so much optimism as foolhardiness. As the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) reported four years ago, "opening agricultural markets to international competition before basic institutions and infrastructure are in place can undermine the agricultural sector, with long-term negative impacts for poverty, food security and the environment". Bob Watson, IAASTD chair and until a few months ago the UK government's chief scientific adviser on agriculture, has said such a move would "mean the Earth's haves and have-nots splitting further apart".

Every page of Conway's book underlines that he does not want that to happen. He seeks to put the poor first. But he does not confront the possibility that, when it comes to feeding the world, unfettered international capital and commodity markets might be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Just as big pharma is great at delivering drugs for the rich world and lousy at fighting malaria and other poor-world diseases, so big farming may be great at filling granaries but lousy at filling empty stomachs.

By failing to take a stand in a critical debate, he risks making more likely the outcome he least wants.

Fred Pearce is the author of The Land Grabbers (Eden Project Books/Beacon Press, 2012)

Book information
One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world? by Gordon Conway
Cornell University Press
$24.95

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