NO GLOBAL STARVATION

By William Urban

We hear periodically that starvation is a world problem. Yes, there are places where people are dying, and more where hunger persists. The difference between starvation and hunger is significant, though alarmists seemingly seldom understand why. Starvation has an immediate impact — death. Hunger is long term — people still have enough strength to protest, to join in food riots.

However, the scenes of panic we associate with Indiana Jones movies (set in Asia in the 1930s) have vanished from India and China, and it’s hard to remember if any American mothers have ever formed mobs, brandishing empty food dishes and yelling that their children are dying. Black Friday sales day yes, but not in front of grocery stores.

There are malnourished Americans, usually because of a poor diet that reflects poor education, poverty, alcohol, drug use or just bad habits. We sometimes face hard choices — either diet drinks that are unhealthy or regular soft drinks that make you fat, or the local water. People with no fat on their bones are either mentally diseased homeless people who live under bridges rather than go to shelters or models in New Yorker ads. Obese people have been making poor nutrition choices, too — so much so that being overweight is a greater health problem than being too thin. Although we are told that “you can’t be too rich or too thin,” my own take, informed by the tabloid press, is that those ultra-thin people aren’t all that happy. We all know that it’s not easy to take off the pounds that holidays put on us, but the people who get back to normal by moderate diet and moderate exercise are happier than those who resort to extreme tactics.

The matter of being unhealthily fat is not simple. The charts are only moderately helpful, and anyone being weighed at a doctor’s office where they don’t care if you have ten pounds of clothing on can legitimate suspect that the nurses are looking for folks who have put on thirty or forty pounds since their last visit. There are multiple reasons for obesity, some of which we do not understand well. What is clear is that the world is producing enough food for everybody, and providing it in greater variety and abundance than at any time in human history.

We find shortages of food mainly in war-torn regions or where floods or droughts have occurred, or where — as in the Irish potato famine — crops have been hit by disease. Ireland had wheat, but grain farmers preferred to export it to England than give it to people who had no money. Crop failures usually result from cyclical patterns of weather — a hot decade in the Great Plains combined with plowing fields that should have been left as pasture produced the Dust Bowl of the Thirties.

My grandmother said that she didn’t need to travel. She could just sit on the porch and watch the states blow by. She could laugh because the next decade brought more rain and by the time the hot cycle returned when I was young, farmers (and the state and federal governments) had learned how to avoid a recurrence. Changing crops was one answer, putting more land in pasture was another, and small farmers just moving to the cities was yet another.

Short term natural disasters are not a problem in well-organized states. Even in Illinois, where we had little rain for much of the past summer, the crops were good. Long term problems, like the Sahel in Africa may be impossible to solve. Only the Israelis have been able to make the deserts bloom, and the Arabs will not forgive them for doing that (and for many other reasons, including for existing). Most regions remain habitable if people adapt and governments are responsive.

My example is the aforementioned Great Plains, which switched from raising corn to wheat. Corn needs water in the summer. Cycles of wet and dry means that some years there simply isn’t enough rain in Central Kansas for corn. Wheat, in contrast, needs moisture in the fall and spring, then is harvested in June and July, just before the summer dry spell sets in. Today Kansas farmers don’t plow until fall, but it wasn’t always that way. I remember the clouds of smoke from burning stubble, a practice now abandoned.

Forty years ago alarmists predicted that population growth would lead to massive starvation, the breakdown of law and order, and even the closing of universities (which would cause the alarmists to lose their jobs). Even in Monmouth people who had three children were chided for not caring about the future, while childless couples flaunted their superior morality.

So what happened? Why no massive starvation? Why was there a collapse in American births so great that most communities have had to consolidate schools? Why do we need immigrants to keep the economy going?

White and Black pregnancy rates have fallen below what is needed to replace those who die, and many pregnancies are unmarried teenagers who did not plan the blessed event. Even there the number is going down. Hispanic immigrants still have three and four children, but the second generation is taking up the voluntary two child policy.

Europe is below replacement, too, and Japan, too. Aging populations make people wonder who will pay the taxes needed for health, education, and welfare. Those are real problems, not starvation.

World food production has increased. First there was the Green Revolution that taught Asians and Africans how to use better seeds, then to apply fertilizer and insecticides. Experimentation produced better seeds and reduced the number of bulls that ranchers summarized as all horns and balls. More recently we have genetic engineering, which has been so successful that alarmists call it dangerous — perhaps even making people infertile. Lastly, the ability to move foodstuffs around, and the willingness of governments to give emergency aid, has practically put the traditional private charities out of business. The problem now is that deliveries of free food to troubled areas are ruining local farmers, so that when times become better, the food crisis will remain.

Ironic that a natural food shortage will be replaced by an artificial one. That’s the law of unintended consequences, and another reason not to jump blindly into radical solutions for any problem, especially not problems which appeal more to our emotions than our brains.

Review Atlas (Feb 6, 2014), 4.