The theme for the 1989 World Food Day teleconference may be the most "topical" of any in the program's six-year history.  It is Food, Environment and Development.

Environmental pollution has become a media highlight in recent years largely because of quality-of-life issues Tike urban smog, pesticide residues in food and garbage on summer beaches.  Now, government officials and the scientific community are beginning to grapple with wider issues such as the impact of environmental degradation on economic development and world food security, and whether human activity is weakening the entire global, eco-system through emission of "greenhouse" gases and deterioration of the ozone screen against ultraviolet rays from the sun.

A growing number of scientists now believe that we are on the edge of an environmental crisis of world history, that through some combination of population growth, energy production from fossil fuels, deforestation, industrial development,  chemical pollution and abuse of land/water resources we have come to the edge of the Earth's carrying capacity.  The natural ecology of the planet may have reached overload.

These questions have only begun to be explored, fed into computer simulation models to show possible downstream consequences -- but it is already clear that if the basic supposition on global, environmental degradation is correct, then solutions will be long term, expensive and socially wrenching.  Panelists in the teleconference will discuss these ramifications not so much from a standpoint of technical but socio-economic challenges to North America and the world community as a whole.

Virtually all environmental scientists agree that the threat is global and that solutions will require global cooperation.  Then, willy-nilly, the nations of the world will be forced into a partnership of unequal parts — rich and poor countries, major and minor polluters, stable or exploding populations, fertile or arid lands, etc.

The nature of the problem — at least from this global framework point of view — is studied at some length in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, headed by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro, Harlem Brundtland.  -Entitled Our Common Future, it called for- a new ethos of "sustainable development" expressed through national policies and international cooperation and defined as one that would meet today's human needs without compromising the resources that will be needed by future generations to meet theirs.  In section after section, it returned to the inescapable links between food, environment and development.

This year's teleconference, Study/Action Packet explores at some length four main food/environment issues:  deforestation, land/water degradation, pesticide contamination and atmospheric climate change.  Each issue is studied within a context of population growth and physical population carrying capacity in terms of the ability to provide food and work for national and regional populations. Such an over-all view unfortunately, gives little reason for optimism:

• More than 11 million hectares of tropical forest are destroyed every year, and the tree cut-to-plant ratio is now running at more than 10 to 1.  A 'Tropical Forestry Action Plan" designed to provide more rational use of forest resources is behind schedule and under attack.
• About 20 million hectares of land become so degraded each year that they are no longer economically useful for food production.  Rates of soil erosion are acute on every continent and millions of tons of topsoil that has been thousands of years in the making are washed into the oceans each year.
• Farmers throughout the world spend more than $13 billion a year on pesticides that percolate through soil and water, then often appear again in the human food chain.  A new 'Code of Conduct' isn't working as planned.
• Average world temperatures could climb by 3 to 8 degrees Celsius in the next half century, making the world hotter than it has been in 2 million years.  Nobody knows the full impact on world agriculture and food supply.  Sea levels could rise several feet, inundating huge areas.
• Population will double again in the next half century — from 5 to 10 billion — with nearly all the increase in developing countries, most of them already in food deficit.

With warning belts ringing on every side, however, it is important to note that the first step toward solutions lies in the world paying attention, and it is. Not only in the U.S. but around the world press coverage of environmental problems has risen enormously. Colleges and universities are rapidly increasing environmental studies, and major business corporations are creating entire new departments of environmental affairs. The FAO theme and the annual teleconference are a part of that global education and awareness process. Three broad areas of enquiry have been submitted to the international panel for consideration:

1. Analysis of the dangers posed to world food security by current and projected levels of environmental degradation — soil, water, air/forests, oceans, climate — and whether there is popular will to support remedial action;
2. Possible changes in technology, lifestyles, socio-economic structures, international institutions, population planning and other factors which emerge as elements of environment/food security options; and
3. How environmental challenges carry the potential for new cooperation -- or, conversely, new areas of conflict — between countries and especially between developing countries and the industrialized world.

In preparing "middle hour" panels and presentations, teleconference sites may want to consider how local, state and national food/environment issues interact with the more global perspectives of the international panelists.