Famine Present, Brazilian Future?

A recent Economist article is shocking, if not blindly optimistic in its revelations about the world's prospective ability to feed itself.

The piece, published in the Aug. 28th edition, attempts to present Brazil's agricultural reforms of the past 40 years as a road map to insuring against future famines.  However misguided in its conclusions, the article is honest in its presentation of the problem of world hunger, acknowledging that "by 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production must double to meet demand."  One may wonder if these increases would only serve to maintain the current balance of global food supply and demand, which provides enough food at low enough prices to properly feed only 5 out of 6 people on the planet (WHO statistic), leaving more than 1.1 billion people in a constant state of mortally dangerous hunger and malnutrition.  The author also admits that these increases must come in spite of "flattening" growth in global grain-yields, a lack of "extra farmland" and "renewable water running short.".

The article opens with the suggestion that the current Malthusian pessimism, as far as agriculture is concerned, is trivial enough to be fit for making puns, and that the world has been subject to such doomsaying before, such as in the 1968 Best-seller The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich, which predicted that in the "1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."  Nevermind the fact that Erlich was essentially correct in his prediction, and nevermind that such a state of affairs continues to be true, with current WHO estimates attributing 36 million deaths per year to hunger and malnutrition.

Attempting to offer constructive and positive suggestions as to the problem's solution, the Economist lays out the basis for what it terms "Brazil's agricultural miracle."  Brazilian farms are "many times the size even of American farms," America being the home of large-scale industrial farming; that "Farmers... sell crops on a scale that makes sense only if there are world markets for them... they depend critically on new technology," and that "Brazil's progress has been underpinned by the state agricultural-research company and pushed forward by GM crops."  The article minimizes damage to the Amazon rainforest as a part of the "miracle" to the point of incredulity, saying that Brazil is an example of how to "save the world's imperilled ecosystems" by growing "so much food elsewhere that nobody would need to touch the natural wonders."  One is left to speculate on what type of statistics underpin this fantastic argument. 


Ambiguation and pun making aside, the article makes no account for certain troubling facts.  According to the WHO, 11 million Brazilians remain "undernourished," even as Brazil is a net food exporter, and while this number is on the decline, one cannot separate the economic, agricultural and land reforms of the past 40 years in Brazil from the military dictatorship which initiated them in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  It was an iron fist that swept aside property rights and civil liberties, and held down working-class wages in the name of agro-industrial progress and upper-class economic growth.  Former General/President Emilio Medici famously gave an honest assessment of his government's policies: "A economia vai bem, mas o povo vai mal"- "The economy does well, but the people do poorly." 

If the Economist is correct in its assertion that food production will need to increase dramatically in the next 40 years to meet demand, it remains unclear how other countries could manage to duplicate the 'milagre Brasileiro,' which would require them to conjure new farmlands and sources of fresh water, of which Brazil had untapped abundances of; to make multiple technological breakthroughs allowing more and more efficient use of those ever more scarce lands and resources and to abandon democracy, property rights and free markets in favor of central planning and speedy consolidation. To replicate this "miracle" outside Brazil seems less an option than a strange dystopic pipe-dream of plutocratic control and alchemy, perhaps just as nightmarish as any Malthusian prediction.


Read the Economist article at http://www.economist.com/node/16889019