IMPEACH BUSH

As world leaders grapple with the global financial crisis, another equally threatening international disaster is unfolding - and begging for a co-ordinated international solution. The most acute food shortage in more than 40 years has, according to the World Bank, already left 800 million people "food insecure". Australia and other major food exporters are being called on to boost production.

Unlike recent food shortages, it is not confined to sub-Saharan Africa and is not temporary. Food supplies are declining in Africa, south Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Food riots brought down the Haiti Government this year. Over the past 12 months China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt and others have temporarily banned rice exports to preserve local supply.

The World Bank's 2008 Agriculture For Development report predicts global cereal production must increase by 50 per cent and meat production by 85 per cent between 2000 and 2030 to meet demand. Others estimate food production must double in the next 40 years.

In October the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, announced at a World Food Day ceremony in Rome that only 10 per cent of $22 billion pledged this year to promote global food security had been received. And Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, called for a world food rescue effort equivalent to the international response to the global financial crisis.

Last month agricultural leaders including Australia's Tony Burke attended FAO's 35th session in Rome, at which food security was top of the agenda. However, the financial crisis occupies global attention, and solutions were not forthcoming.

What has caused the catastrophe? Among the main reasons are population growth, rising affluence coupled with urbanisation and industrialisation in China and India, climate change, a lack of new genetic and technological food production breakthroughs, declining pasture and crop seed banks, international trade barriers, rising energy costs, an increasing diversion of crops to produce biofuels, a shortage of food production specialists in key disciplines, and hefty cuts to developed countries' agricultural aid budgets.

The extent to which wealthy countries are prepared to tackle the food crisis is the $64 question. World leaders must address how food production and distribution can be organised and co-ordinated to feed an extra 70 million mouths a year - 2 billion more people - by 2040. "We're back to an equivalent situation to the green revolution in the 1960s," says an Australian food expert, Dr Beth Woods, the executive director of innovation and bio-security investment at the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries.

"Major technological gains meant that for the past 25 years the world was on a path of increased food supply. But technology has now run out, and shortages have re-appeared. It doesn't mean the green revolution failed. In fact, it's still working. But it just hasn't gone to the next phase."

Woods is a member of the Australian-based Crawford Fund World Food Crisis Task Force that last month published a report calling for an increase in funding for agriculture and rural development, increased Australian food exports and a greater percentage of Australia's aid budget to be provided to agriculture in poor and developing countries.

"For the next five years we may be able to just keep our head above water but [after that] is a real worry," Woods says. "I can't see where supplies are going to come from. Making matters worse is that countries with the capacity to increase food production over the long term have become captive to short-term - three- or four-year - political cycles."

As a significant global grain exporter, Australia is feeling the strain. Drought-induced poor wheat harvests for several years have contributed to the global shortage. And this year will be the third successive near-zero rice crop, after million tonne annual harvests until 2003. The country's sole rice exporter, SunRice, maintained its $700 million export market only by buying a majority share in a Californian rice mill.

Meanwhile, the Crawford Fund task force leader, James Ingram, a former Australian ambassador to the Philippines and Canada and a former chief executive of the World Food Program, warned that Australia must carefully manage its response to the food crisis.

"Because we stand to benefit economically from the likely long-term rise in agricultural export prices, much will be expected of us," he said when the task force report was published. "Even more than now, in a more crowded world, Australia will be seen as privileged, enjoying advantages not shared by more densely populated countries in Asia and Africa. The long-term hunger challenge is not just a challenge to our altruism. Dealing with it successfully is in our national interest. Failure to significantly reduce poverty could eventually destabilise world peace and security, to say nothing of the impact of global famine on the movement of people."

So, what can be done?

Population growth may be temporarily slowing and the rise in affluence in India and China may be stifled by the financial meltdown. But between them the two economic tigers have a middle class of 500 million, almost all of whom "graduated" from rice and carbohydrates to protein-rich foods. China already consumes about 80 million tonnes a year of red meat, twice that of the US.

Across the globe millions of agricultural hectares a year are being urbanised, not only depleting capacity for food production but placing extra demands on it. Then there is the killer punch of climate change. The World Bank says: "More frequent droughts and increasing water scarcity may devastate large parts of the tropics and undermine irrigation and drinking water in entire communities." This already is reality in many parts of Asia.

In Australia poor grain harvests have prompted fresh assessment of the production potential of the wet tropics. Although sparsely populated and remote - and despite environmental concerns - there is a groundswell of support for diverting some agricultural production from southern Australia to the north.

The Burdekin River region of North Queensland is one area where production is rapidly expanding. Woods says Queensland is keen to increase agricultural production there, and elsewhere in the tropics.

"Coastal North Queensland already has $1 billion-plus horticulture and sugar cane industries and there is considerable growth potential," she says. "Although it is a difficult argument to convince the public that new agricultural areas need to be developed, most people will eventually come to a position that we have to help feed the world."

For the past two years a Liberal senator and Junee farmer, Bill Heffernan, has advocated financial incentives to encourage farmers to "move where the water is". He argues that Australia must adopt a "more technological" farming regime and heed warnings of big reductions in water run-off in the Murray and Darling river basins.

"To keep abreast of the world, and to punch above our weight as an agricultural provider, we are going to have to develop one of the last regions in the world that I would call an undeveloped agricultural frontier," he told ABC TV this year.

Genetic engineering has boosted some crops, but agriculture has had too few technological breakthroughs in the past two decades. Biotech crops are grown on just 115 million hectares in 23 countries, and further development is constrained by the lack of environmentally responsible regulatory systems.

The Crawford Fund says unnecessarily stringent standards are denying developing countries access to biotech products such as golden rice, which is more nutritious and higher yielding than traditional varieties.

Barack Obama's victory and the Democrats' entrenchment in the US Congress threaten to seize up the already stalled Doha round of world free trade negotiations. And the Democrats' traditional propensity to farm trade protection is likely to harden with the present financial crisis.

In an open letter to Obama, published in October in the New York Times Magazine, the influential US commentator Michael Pollan wrote: "Expect to hear the phrases 'food security' and 'food sovereignty' on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies [heavily subsidised US farm production] that have contributed to over-nutrition in the first world are now contributing to under-nutrition in the third."

The end of cheap energy poses other threats. It reduces the profitability of grain production and renews emphasis on biofuels, shifting food from mouths to fuel tanks.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says 38 per cent of the US maize crop and 50 per cent of Brazilian sugar production is diverted for ethanol, while almost all Europe's oilseed harvest will be needed to meet the community's 2008 target for biodiesel.

The US Department of Agriculture estimates 65 million tonnes of American corn will be needed annually for ethanol by 2010. Most of the additional corn production will be diverted from livestock feed and exports.

Australia's ability to increase agricultural production is exacerbated by a critical shortage - also felt in other countries - of graduate agricultural researchers, extension officers and agribusiness managers. The Crawford Fund identified a shortfall of more than 1200 agricultural graduates a year in Australia.

"If current trends continue, Australia will be unable to sustain its intellectual and human resources contribution to international agricultural research," it warned. The report recommended a more general science degree in universities to attract urban dwellers to agricultural research.

The final straw may be the decline in foreign aid, likely to be further inhibited by recessions in rich countries. The Crawford Fund says official foreign aid to agriculture fell from 18 per cent of total aid 30 years ago to 3.5 per cent in 2004.

Beth Woods has no doubt Australia should increase agricultural investment, build water efficiency, improve distribution and supply logistics, push for free world agricultural trade and develop alternative fuel sources so food is used for eating. "If it gets to the point where we produce less food there will be a very serious impact," she says.

This is becoming a real possibility. Falling food prices and higher production this year offer some hope, but plantings and harvests may decline from next year.

The FAO director-general, Jacques Diouf, says: "Last year it was the pan; next year could be the fire."