The theme for the 1990 World Food Day teleconference is Food for the Future: Science Policy and Ethics.  At issue will be whether we can maintain the world's food security over the next half century in the face of another doubling of population, increasing pressure on land/water resources, local/global environmental decay, and public resistance to potentially health threatening technologies.

While there is no immediate fear of Malthusian famine, real doubts about food security are growing, particularly after three deficit production years in 1987-1989.  In those years, the world simply ate more food than it produced. The huge surpluses that came to be assumed have disappeared.  World grain stocks have fallen since 1987 from 28% to 17% of consumption.  This is barely the amount needed for pipeline re-supply over the course of the harvest year and below the level which the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) believes is required for world food security.  Crops are expected to be better in 1990, but not good enough for a major stock, replenishment.

Meanwhile, 500 million people in developing, countries still suffer from acute malnutrition.  Food aid from surplus countries to these hungry millions has fallen as grain prices rise and as food is diverted to meet new priorities in Eastern Europe.

In 1990, the U.S. Congress writes new farm legislation.  At the same time, the GATT-negotiators at Uruguay and then Geneva debate the role of subsidies to farmers — whether they provide a defense against world famine or are a hinderance to Third World agricultural development. Questions like these raise the issues of who makes the decisions about who else will go hungry.  A negative outlook for the world world food prospect as we near the 21st century would include these factors:

• Production.  The world food problem Is not one lot total supply but radically skewed production among regions.  Advanced, market-economy countries have about 15% the world's population but produce more than a third of the food.  Developing countries hold close to 60 of the population but produce less than half of the food.  Grain imports of the 95 poorest countries are running at about 50 million tons a year and climbing at an average rate of 3 million tons a year.  Yet, half a billion people in these countries are still seriously malnourished.
• Population.  World population reached 5 billion in 1987 and will hit the 10 billion mark according to demographic experts, sometime In the second quarter of the new century.  The world is now adding about 90 million people a year.  But nearly all the increase in human numbers over the next half century will be in countries with a food deficit or limited potential for production increase. In Africa, even the rate of population growth is still climbing, and is now estimated at 3.1% a year.
• Resources.  Over the past four decades, world cropland has expanded by only 11, meaning a per capita loss of 32%.  Worldwide, there is now less than an acre of cultivated land per person.  Future expansion of cropland will be limited, especially as awareness of environmental damage mounts. Water supplies are also limited.  Irrigated land worldwide has risen by more than a third in the past 30 years, but this growth has stopped. Irrigated land in both the U.S. and China has actually fallen over the past decade, and aquifer depletion is a growing problem.
• Environment.  Most of the food-deficit countries of the world are located in the tropics, where agro-ecological conditions tend to be the most fragile; newly cleared forest soils are usually shallow and acidic; mountain watersheds are extremely prone to erosion; semi-arid grasslands are easy prey to desertification if they are plowed or overgrazed.
• Technological Response.  In the future, most increase in food production will have to come from higher productivity rather than cropland extension. Yet there is a growing public distrust in the kinds of technological fixes now offered, such as genetic manipulation or the high use of inorganic chemicals.  There is rising fear that our basic foods aren't safe to eat, yet FAO warns that 1,600 insect species have developed resistance to major pesticides over the past half century.

There can be a more positive and hopeful view of the future than these negative factors indicate.  It would start with the awareness that fear of global famine is as old as recorded history, and that farmers and scientists have never failed the challenge put to them as world population has grown from one billion to five in a single century.

The international panel of experts assembled in Washington DC for the seventh World Food Day teleconference will consider these subjects in terms of options for the future — the scientific, political and ethical decisions that will influence the production and distribution of food, and the use or abuse of the food resource base, in the next century.  Four broad areas of enquiry have been submitted to them for consideration:

1. Perspectives on world food security in the light of environmental decay. population growth, technological developments and the new focus on "sustainable" agricultural systems.
2. Ethical reflections on a post Cold War world view — an analysis of poverty and hunger alleviation and a "right" to food, women's rights and child mortality, equitable rural systems and stewardship of earth's resources, and interdependence among peoples and nations.
3. The role of food and agriculture in North-South relations, with a special focus on development, trade, debt repayment and how these factors weigh on efforts to meet basic human needs.
4. In the light of the recasting of U.S. legislation, analysis of its impact on world food security, trade, reserves and amounts and uses of food aid and world hunger alleviation.

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