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From wheeler@super.org Wed Feb 24 17:41:49 1993 Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 10:29:34 EDT From: wheeler@super.org (Ferrell S. Wheeler) To: tms@cs.umd.edu Subject: Self Sufficiency [Here are a few excerpts on the topic of food self-sufficiency from "Taking Stock: Animal Farming and the Environment" by Alan Durning and Holly Brough, published by the Worldwatch Institute in July 1991 as Worldwatch Report #103.] For a poor country where people eat few animal products, reaching self-sufficiency in food grains requires just 200 kilograms of cereals per person per year. But that number quickly rises when people switch >from a grain-based diet to a meat-based one. Rapidly industrializing Taiwan, for instance, increased per capita consumption of meat and eggs six-fold from 1950 to 1990. To produce those animal products required raising annual per capita grain use in the country from 170 kilograms to 390 kilograms. Despite steadily growing harvests, Taiwan could only keep up with the demand for feed by turning to imports from abroad. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990, the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used. Mainland Chinese are following the Taiwanese up the meat consumption ladder. Since 1978, when agricultural reforms boosted production, meat consumption has more than doubled to 24 kilograms. The growth has been particularly marked in cities, where the government has helped create pig and poultry plants using Western-style grain-feeding technology. Though the country's farmers have been able to grow sufficient feed grain for the swelling meat industry so far, few observers expect them to keep pace for much longer. The share of Chinese grain fed to livestock rose from 7 percent in 1960 to 20 percent in 1990. China's future may resemble the Soviet Union's present, where rising meat consumption has created economic problems. Since 1950, meat consumption has tripled and feed consumption quadrupled. Use of grain for feed surpassed direct human consumption in 1964 and has been rising ever since. Soviet livestock now eat three times as much grain as Soviet citizens. Grain imports have soared, going from near zero in 1970 to 24 million tons in 1990, and the U.S.S.R. is now the world's second largest grain importer. In the Middle East and North Africa, grain-fed livestock operations are proliferating, boosting the demand for imported feed. The richest Middle Eastern countries match Western levels of meat consumption by depending heavily on imported feed and meat. Egypt, the poorest country in the region, is also a major grain importer, partly due to rising grain-fed meat consumption in the cities. Since 1970, grain imports have risen from near zero to 8 million tons per year. Middle-income Arab nations, such as Syria, also have seen rising meat consumption and soaring feed demand. The Area in Syria devoted to barley for feed increased from 300,000 hectares in 1950 to almost 3 million hectares in 1989. Much of the expansion occurred on the country's dry steppes, which are ecologically suited only for grazing. Farmers in traditional barley-growing areas, meanwhile, are heeding government advice to plow under soil-conserving fallow fields for continuous barley cropping. Yet neither the addition of new land nor the switch to single-crop production has sufficed to keep up with feed demand. Syria, in 1965 a barley exported, now imports the cereal... On balance the Third World exported grain until the early sixties; by the late seventies, it was consistently importing cereals. The change came not just from growing populations but also from exploding livestock industries. The FAO reports that 75 percent of Third World imports of so-called coarse grains -- corn, barley, sorghum, and oats -- fed animals in 1981. Little has changed in the decade since. As U.S. Department of Agriculture trade specialist Gary Vocke Writes: Imports of corn and sorghum (for feed) have outpaced domestic production, leading developing countries to a lower level of self-sufficiency -- a trend that will accelerate as livestock feeding expands in the next 10 years. Higher meat consumption among the affluent frequently creates problems for the poor, as the share of farmland devoted to feed cultivation expands, reducing production of food staples. In the economic competition for grain fields, the upper classes usually win. In Egypt, for example, over the past quarter-century, corn grown for animal feed has taken over cropland from wheat, rice, sorghum, and millet -- all staple grains in Egypt. The share of grain fed to livestock rose from 10 percent to 36 percent.