Global agricultural production will have to double over the next 40 years to avoid major deficits in the supply of food—and yet worldwide, investment in agricultural research has slowed or stopped.
The Australian Farm Institute (AFI) special report that remarks on this paradox also looks at another: the quickest route to greater global food availability may be high food prices.
“You need a period of high food prices to trigger an agricultural investment response, and agricultural research and development,” Mick Keogh, AFI executive director, says.
“It comes back to ensuring that the poorest people have food that is affordable.
"The point seems to be this might be best achieved through research in rich countries that flows on to poorer countries to help them become self-sustaining in food.”
The disjunct between concerns about global food security and levels of investment in agriculture are a recurring theme in the papers included in the latest AFI Farm Policy Journal, “Hunger pains: The Challenges of Global Food Security”.
Looking at the effects of biofuels on food security, Terri Raney and Andre Croppenstedt of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations note that the leap in food prices in 2007 pushed an estimated 75 million people into “chronic hunger”.
The biofuels expansion, however, had little effect on global food availability, the researchers say.
But in contributing to the sudden rise in food prices around the planet, biofuels did help push food out of the economic reach of poor people in food-deficit countries.
Tony Fischer and Denis Blight of the Crawford Fund, which in 2008 established a task force to consider Australia's role in global food security, consider whether the global food crisis has been exaggerated.
"Most observers think not," Dr Fischer and Dr Blight write.
Input costs had already begun to rise by the middle of this decade, about the same time as models reported the end of a century-long decline in real grain prices followed by steady real price increases–which prevail despite the slump following the 2008 boom.
"The lower prices prevailing now are in line with a real uptrend," the authors write, "and prospects for higher energy prices in the medium term, more subsidised biofuel production and climate change itself reinforce the likelihood of higher real food prices and hence greater threats to food security."
Their answer? More investment in Australian agricultural research so that it too becomes an export commodity.
Australia's efforts in helping the agricultural sectors of developing nations may have hurt export prices for some Australian farm commodities, Drs Fischer and Blight say, but the benefits are larger.
In the long term, helping developing nations boost their agricultural productivity leads to "greater and more stable imports of many grain and food items, as we have seen for example with China and South Korea".
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