Feeding the World
 
 Food is one of the most fundamental parts of our lives and is therefore a significant focus of the geographer's perspective on the world. There is almost no aspect of world regional geography that does not somehow relate to food, whether it's the processes of trade that allow food to travel great distances before being consumed, distinct regional food cultures and food taboos, or the way technologies change the human-environment relationship. The units in "Feeding the World" focus on both the international processes that allow food to travel the globe and the changes in agricultural technology that have enabled greater amounts of food to be produced than ever before. In each of the units, key political issues are considered. In the "Geography of Breakfast" units (also included in the "Globalizing World" theme), we consider the ways consumers and farmers who are separated by great distances are linked together at the breakfast table. A great deal has to happen before you can pour your morning cup of coffee or slice a banana onto a bowl of cereal, and these units—on coffee production in Central America and the United States–European Union "banana trade war" of the late 1990s—illustrate the ways that food links us to other parts of the world in ways we don't often realize. Two other units examine changes in agricultural technology by exploring the "Green Revolutions" and the question of whether China will be able to feed itself in the future. In both of these units, the key issue at stake is how new technologies in agriculture, developed in response to growing populations, also have broad-reaching social, cultural, and political consequences. These consequences are the subject of much debate, particularly in the case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other kinds of biotechnology.

 

Chapter 1: Geography: An Exploration of Connections

Feeding the World: An Overview

Chapter 3: Middle and South America

The Geography of Breakfast

Chapter 4: Europe

The Geography of Breakfast: The Banana Trade War

Chapter 8: South Asia

Green Revolutions

Chapter 9: East Asia

Can China Feed Itself?

 

Chapter 1: Geography: An Exploration of Connections

Feeding the World: An Overview

 

Feeding the World-An Overview (Chapter 1)       

Two major issues confront us in any discussion of "feeding the world": food production and food consumption. On the production side, the main issues focus on the development of "Green Revolution" technologies and genetically modified organisms. In the most general terms, food production has been steadily increasing around the world. On the consumption side, the main issue is whether people have access to the increasing amounts of food produced and what factors help or inhibit that access. The general trend in consumption, until recently, has seen a gradual increase in access to food around the world.

Production: Even as the world's population grows, increased urbanization has led to fewer farmers producing crops. This has not led to a shortage of food, though. With the increased use of genetically modified (GM) foods, agricultural technologies have helped increase yields around the world. For example, since the "Green Revolution," the international campaign of the mid-twentieth century to encourage the use of high-yield variety (HYV) genetically modified seeds, food production throughout the Third World has increased nearly 120 percent. Today, biotech industries continue to promise to change the quality and quantity of food forever. There are many skeptics of the claims of biotech industries and their methods of making genetically modified (GM) foods, ranging from those who question the ability of industries to keep up with growing demand, to those who fear the possible biological repercussions of making grains disease-resistant. While forms of crop modification have been around since the beginning of settled agriculture, genetic modification is change of a different magnitude, and has led some to call the resulting products "Frankenfoods." The issue of GM foods is highly charged throughout the world, especially in North America and Europe. The interrelations of biotech industries, farmers, and consumers provide an ideal case study for further geographic thought.
 
Consumption: According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the period 1995 to 2007 saw a consistent decline in the numbers of hungry people worldwide. However, between 2007 and 2010, that trend, when measured globally, reversed.  The FAO estimated in 2012, that 870 million people in the world were undernourished.  This represents 12.5 percent of the current global population. However, considerable differences in rates of undernourishment exist from region to region and from country to country.  Rates of undernourishment have been steadily improving in Asia and Latin America, but they have been worsening throughout much of Africa and in parts of western Asia.  Worldwide, the FAO reported in 2012 that an estimated 2.5 million children still die from malnutrition each year.  The vast majority of the world's hungry are, ironically, farmers themselves. They are overwhelmingly too poor to afford the costly technologies associated with either Green Revolution or GM food production, nor can they compete with wealthier farmers (particularly those subsidized by their governments), who are able to sell large quantities of food profitably for low prices.
 
What is the relationship between you and your food? Do you have a garden? Do you shop at a supermarket? Do you know where your food comes from? Thinking about how your food is grown and gets to your farmer's market, restaurant, supermarket, or kitchen table is one of the best ways to "think geographically" about something that you encounter every day.

In this section, we will examine the many sides of the GM debate, from the NGOs who fight for consumers' rights and bio-diversity to farmers and other groups who believe in GM foods.

First, read the article by Hal Hamilton in Yes! "Three Scenarios for the Future of America's Food." This article gives a sense of the possibilities of the various scales of agriculture in the United States. After considering the future of the current state of agriculture, which is increasingly dominated by global agri-business but also includes the response of a growing number of local farmers, the article goes on to present two other scenarios. While one option is the total takeover of agriculture by corporations specializing in particular products and the elimination of the family farm, another is the increased localization of agriculture, through the purchase of locally grown and trusted produce, and the decreased mechanization of agriculture.

Next, explore the Web site of the NGO Friends of the Earth: Friends of the Earth. This group calls for more organic crops and less dependence on large, powerful biotech companies. A more lengthy definition of organic food and its benefits can be found on the website of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, which also provides a link to the USDA National Organic Program which began officially recognizing food as organic on October 21, 2002.

Lastly, read the article found on Reason.com

After reading these different sites regarding genetically modified organisms, ask the following questions:

A report about biotech/GM crops from 1996 to 2009 can be found at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications.

This report contains a map of countries producing biotech crops.

Additional resources can be found by entering “agricultural biotech” in the search feature of Reason.com.

Chapter 3: Middle and South America

The Geography of Breakfast- Coffee

THE GEOGRAPHY OF BREAKFAST - Coffee (Chapter 3)       

In Chapter 1 you learned about the many links between your food and your stomach. In this lesson, you will continue to explore the geography of breakfast by concentrating on one product: coffee.

To begin, listen to or read the story of some Guatemalan coffee growers from American Radio Works.

Next, read more about coffee growers in general at the following sites:

Consider the role of Starbucks and other large corporations in the global trade network. Since becoming Starbucks Corporation and having just 17 coffee shops in 1987, Starbucks has opened more than 17,600 locations in 60 countries worldwide, as of the end of July 2012. In 2000, Starbucks was even built within the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City, until public pressure convinced the company to relocate (see Chapter 9 - the Globalization Debate - for more on this story). (Incidentally, the store reopened but then closed for good in 2007, when the Forbidden City decided to manage all stores within the complex.) With its position in the global economy, Starbucks has purchasing power when it comes to coffee beans, and thus has a lot of influence in market practices and coffee prices.

Next, read more about the joint project between Starbucks and Conservation International has a program to provide coffee trees to growers in Chiapas, Mexico. Explore this site and read about biodiversity hotspots, the farmers' lives, the benefits of the canopy, and the economic benefits of the project.

Read “Ethical Sourcing” on the Starbucks website and follow some of the links to learn more.

Finally, answer the following questions:

 

Chapter 4: Europe

The Geography of Breakfast: The Banana Trade War

 

THE GEOGRAPHY OF BREAKFAST - The Banana Trade War (Chapter 4)      

The dispute between the EU and the United States and WTO over the banana trade offers a fascinating illustration of many of the key issues involved in the debate over globalization. The next time you slice a nice ripe banana onto your breakfast bowl of corn flakes, consider where that banana came from, the conditions in which it was grown, and what had to happen in order for it to reach your breakfast table. For your banana to make that journey, many things had to happen, including trade agreements between importing and exporting countries. Such agreements had to be negotiated by government trade representatives. In addition, farmers, harvesters, shippers, handlers, wholesalers, advertisers, and retailers all had to be paid for their role in this trade. Your banana is thus an important piece of the global economy, and as the global economy goes through transformations, the banana trade is a good place to see the impacts such shifts have throughout the process of bringing your banana from the farm to the breakfast table.

The EU often negotiates privileged access to world markets for European firms and farmers and for former colonies, and the EU employs protectionist measures that favor European farmers at the expense of consumers, who must then pay higher prices for foreign goods, at the expense of producers outside Europe in both rich and poor countries. The banana trade is a case in point.

First, read about the background to the US and EU banana trade wars at Banana Link, a UK organization that supports banana farmers around the world.

The Lomé Convention, first signed in 1975, and renegotiated as the Cotonou Agreement in 2000, provided privileged access to the EU market for agricultural producers in ACP states, that is, former European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific region, which produce agricultural goods such as bananas, beef, veal, sugar, and rum. Throughout the 1990s the EU faced pressure to change these practices in order to comply with WTO rules that saw the EU offering unfair privileges to certain producers and thus inhibiting free trade. One round of changes occurred in 1997, but the Cotonou Agreement was still regarded as protectionist by the U.S. government. U.S. pressure came at the behest of the major banana-producing companies in the United States (Dole and Chiquita), who were not been able to successfully break into the EU banana market because of the Cotonou Agreement. In 1999, because the United States felt that the EU was still unfairly restricting trade, it imposed trade sanctions on a number of key EU goods, and the "banana trade war" was on.

To explore the trade war and its implications, start with Rebecca Cohen’s article in The Science Creative Quarterly

Then examine the following sites, which offer reports detailing the concerns over the banana trade:

An article on Global Exchange’s website about Banana Plantations in Ecuador  

Global Issues banana campaign

The Caribbean Banana Exporters Association

Chiquita's home pageThe banana trade wars have ended according to these reports- the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and this article in Carribbean 360.

Now that you are an expert on bananas, here's a final activity: Write a biography (or, you could think of it as a travelogue) of a banana as it journeys from a Caribbean farm, or a Latin American plantation, to a European or American breakfast table.

Chapter 8: South Asia

Green Revolutions

 

Green Revolutions (Chapter 8)      

You have been introduced to the topic of genetically modified (GM) foods in the Overview for this theme. Here we consider the topic again in the context of India’s "green revolutions." The question of genetically modified crops is a fundamental question of geography, since it focuses our attention on the changing relationship between humans and their environment (i.e., the ways humans modify their environment in increasingly innovative ways).  It is also a question of globalization, since the debate over genetically modified crops in India is very much a debate over India’s integration into global agri-business and the benefits and drawbacks of such integration. Your textbook introduces the basic issues of India’s Green Revolution and the debate over GM crops can be viewed as an extension of many of the same issues raised in your textbook’s discussion.

Our primary resource for this unit is the American Radio Works project, "The Global Politics of Food." The story, "Engineering Crops in a Needy World" focuses on the debate over GM foods in India from a variety of perspectives. Probably the best place to start is by reading the "Story" by John Beiwen, or you might first want to view some of the slide shows by clicking on "Slideshows" From India near the bottom of the page.  The site also contains a summary of pro and con arguments in the GM debate, a summary of the GM food situation around the world ("Global View"), a "History of Genetic Engineering," and an introduction to "How a Gene is Spliced."

Other sites for this unit include:

A report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations on "Women and the Green Revolution," where you can read about how Green Revolution technologies have impacted rural women in India differently than men.

The following questions should guide your reading of these sites:

Putting yourself in the driver’s seat:

Write a report in which you propose the best possible solution to the debate. What’s your proposal? Who’s testimonial do you find most persuasive? Should India "join the global capitalist economy" and reap the productivity gains of biotech? If so, how will you deal with the potential drawbacks? Or, should India "keep the West at arm’s length" by limiting GM foods and the privatization and marketization of the rural economy? How will you deal with the drawbacks of this solution, if you adopt it?

 

Chapter 9: East Asia

Can China Feed Itself?

 

Can China Feed Itself? (Chapter 9)   

In this unit we consider the question of China's food security. China has a rapidly expanding population, which, by 2012, had reached 1.35 billion. One fifth of the world's population lives in China, and yet China has only 7 percent of the world's arable land resources. Some people feel that as its population grows, and as its economy becomes stronger, China will increasingly turn to the world grain market to meet its food needs. This prospect has alarmed Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, who wrote a book in 1995 entitled Who Will Feed China? In this book, Brown argued that China's modernization would involve the sacrifice of its arable land resources to industrial and urban uses (such as building roads, housing, factories, and other non-agricultural conversions). China's resulting reliance on the world market, Brown argued, would severely destabilize the world's food security, since China would become such a massive buyer of grain.

See several synopses of Brown's argument at the following sites:

What are the key components of Brown's argument? Why does he believe China's food production will not be able to keep pace with its growing population? Why would China's buying food on the international market be a problem, according to Brown?

Brown's "Wake-Up Call" struck a nerve both within China and among international politicians and food security experts. While many disputed the accuracy of his findings, China itself took the position that it would—through technological improvements in its agricultural sector—be able to meet its own food security needs without relying heavily on the international market, as Brown claimed. See China's "White Paper" on “The Grain Issue in China” here.

Meanwhile, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a research institute based in Austria, decided to look into the question. The result was a comprehensive on-line resource addressing the multiple dimensions of China's food security.

View the IIASA site, Can China Feed Itself?: View the abstract at the IIASA site here, Can China Feed Itself?

A summary and discussion of both sides of the arguments is the paper by Shenggen Fan and Marcedita Agcaoili-Sombilla (you must have Acrobat reader to view this report).

This is a very comprehensive resource that compares the conclusions of  Brown and other scholars and organizations. After spending some time exploring the site, answer the following questions:

Finally, one additional answer to the question of whether China can feed itself was provided by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which by December 2004 was claiming that China no longer had a food security problem and thus was no longer in need to international food aid. Indeed the WFP urged China to play a larger role as an international food donor, arguing that China now has the resources to provide food aid to needy countries in Asia and Africa.
 
Does the WFP's claim mean that people no longer go hungry in China? Is food insecurity caused by insufficient food production?