The World’s Greatest Stability Enabler – Can North American Agriculture Remain Resilient?

WHEN I FIRST SAW THIS CHART IN THE WASHINGTON POST ALMOST A DECADE AGO, I WAS GENUINELY SHOCKED TO REALIZE HOW CENTRAL TO GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY NORTH AMERICA HAD BECOME. The chart basically shows which regions in the world produce more grains than they need, thus making them available for export - in a net fashion. That's the key point:  everyone exports some grains, but which regions export more than they import? Where are the reserves in the global food system? Where can we count on our resilience as food producers to keep feeding humanity?

Grains are the obvious focal point of any thinking on global food security, because they provide the bulk of humanity's caloric intake. The thing is, thanks to globalization's enabling of the rise of humanity's first-ever majority middle class cohort (reaching 50% of the world's population back in 2006), that demand for more calories significantly outpaces population growth itself - translating into a far more quickly rising demand for grains (used - at varying levels of intensity - to create all manner of foodstuffs).

So, when you look at the map, you quickly realize how global grain reserve capacity exists really in only four regions: North America (US, Canada), South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile), the Black Sea Region (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan), and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand), with North America typically providing more than half and upwards of two-thirds of that moveable feast on an annual basis.

So what happens if North American agricultural production were to take a long-term - or even a sudden, short-term - hit? Well, food prices would spike globally, and when food prices spike in places like the agriculturally-insecure Middle East and North Africa, where the vast bulk of their food is imported AND accounts for the bulk of household spending, you get political instability and revolution. Bread prices rose dramatically in Egypt in the months leading up to the Arab Spring dynamics there.

Now, America has long viewed itself primarily as a security-exporter (US military's global footprint and operations) and a technology-exporter (Silicon Valley's numerous advances),  but, in truth, one can easily argue that the most important US export is food, where we rule on corn, soybeans, wheat and - unsurprisingly - food aid.

Yes, we can worry about the developed world's approach to monoculture agriculture, and we should remain vigilant on the subject of bio-terrorism against food production, but, long term, the chief threat is clear - climate change and the stress it puts on crops in terms of droughts (longer and more harsh, by all modeling).

I'd like to highlight two MSM pieces that recently bookended - in my mind - our current challenge. The first is a Time summation of a scientific study published in Nature:

Researchers ... found that drought and extreme heat reduced crop yields by as much as 10% between 1964 and 2007. Extreme cold and floods did not result in a significant reduction in crop production, according to the study.

The research provides key insight on the effects of climate on agriculture as policymakers prepare for the number of extreme weather events to spike in the coming decades due to global warming. The study, which evaluated the effect of 2,800 weather disasters on cereal crops like corn, rice and wheat, suggests that the effects of drought worsened after 1985 and are expected to continue to deteriorate in the coming decades. The study speculates that’s because of more intense droughts driven by climate change, increased vulnerability to drought and changed reporting methods, but couldn’t confirm any individual factor with certainty.

Developed countries experienced some of the most severe crop loss due to drought and heat, according to the research. Crop production in North America, Europe and Australia faced nearly a 20% decline(emphasis mine) thanks to drought and extreme heat, compared to less than 10% in Africa and Latin America. Researchers attributed the disparity to a difference between the agricultural methods employed in the different areas. Farmers in developed countries tend to grow crops uniformly across large areas. Drought affects those crops uniformly.

Recent spikes in global food prices typically unfolded in response to reduced production in places like the Black Sea Region and the Horn of Africa - important regions but nowhere near as important to the global system as North America.

So the question then becomes, how is North America - and the US in particular - readying itself for this looming technological challenge? The answer, as argued in a recent NYT op-ed, is not well at all:

DESPITE the four-year drought that has parched California and led to mandatory restrictions on water use, farmers there have kept feeding the country. California produces more of 66 different food crops than any other state, $54 billion of food annually.

Maintaining this level of productivity has been quite a challenge in recent years and is likely to become more difficult over the next few decades as weather patterns, available water and growing seasons shift further and threats of invasive weeds, pests and pathogens rise.

If agriculture is to have any chance of answering these challenges, we must have new and improved techniques and technologies. The problem is that agricultural innovation has not kept pace.

The last time our nation was in a similar crisis was just after the Dust Bowl years in the 1940s, but the country’s agricultural science enterprise was in much better shape. At that point, almost 40 percent of American research and development spending was focused on agriculture. This ambitious embrace of research was part of the “green revolution” that significantly boosted agricultural output around the world.

Today, farm production has stopped growing in the United States, and agriculture research is no longer a priority; it constitutes only 2 percent of federal research and development spending. And, according to the Department of Agriculture, total agricultural production has slowed significantly since the turn of the century. We need another ambitious surge in agricultural science.

Why not leave that to the handful of US agricultural multinational corporations that dominate the world's grain trade?

While private sector research and development in agriculture have grown over the past decade and now exceed what is federally funded, this financing is focused on shorter term benefits. On the other hand, more than 80 percent of federally funded research is designed to provide the building blocks for long-term production increases to address the many problems we face in the decades ahead.

So, how is the US Government doing on funding agricultural research? The answer is, awfully stingy when compared to the behemoth Defense Department R&D budget.

And that's something we should question as citizens of this world, as we collectively move deeper into this century of global climate change.