Growing ... Growing ... Gone

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Historically, the world had two food reserves: the global carry-over stocks of grain and the cropland idled under tire U.S. farm program to limit production. The latter could be brought into production within a year. Since the U.S. land set-aside program ended in 1996, however, the world has had only carry-over stocks as a reserve.

Food security has changed in other ways. Traditionally it was largely an agricultural matter, but now it is something for which our entire society is responsible. National population and energy policies may have a greater effect on food securi ty than agricultural policies do. With most of the 3 billion people to be added to the world's population by 2050 being born in countries already facing water shortages, childbearing decisions may have a greater effect on food security than crop-planting decisions. Achieving an acceptable balance between food and people depends on family planners and farmers working together.

Climate change is the wild card in the food security deck. It is perhaps a measure of the complexity of our time that decisions made in ministries of energy may have a greater effect on food security than those made in ministries of agriculture. The effects of population and energy policies on food security differ in one important respect: Population stability can be achieved by a country acting unilaterally; climate stability cannot.

THE CASE FOR PLAN B

Although the stakes are high and time is not on our side, solutions exist to the problems we face.

Unless quickly reversed, the damaging trends we have set in motion will generate vast numbers of environmental refugees -- people abandoning depleted aquifers and exhausted soils, and those fleeing advancing deserts and rising seas. In a world where civilization is being squeezed between expanding deserts from the interior of continents and rising seas on the periphery, refugees are likely to number not in the millions but in the tens of millions. As aquifers are depleted and wells go dry, refugees already are escaping drifting sand in Nigeria, Iran and China, and we now face the potential wholesale evacuation of cities.

A reversal of the basic trends of social progress of the last half-century has long seemed unthinkable. Progress appeared inevitable. But now we are seeing reversals: The number of the hungry may be increasing for the first time since the wartorn decade of 1940. And a rise in life expectancy -- a seminal measure of economic and social progress -- has been interrupted in sub-Sahara Africa by the HIV epidemic.

As millions of able-bodied adults die, families are often left with no one to work in the fields. The disease and spreading hunger weaken immune systems and thus, reinforce each other.

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