CHURCHVILLE, VA—In a normal year, Haiti must start now preparing for the spring planting season, which ends in May.  The spring crop usually produces 60 percent of the country’s food.  Unfortunately, many families have had to eat or share the seeds they were saving for the next crop. Any improved seed varieties brought in now as aid are all too likely to be hijacked for immediate consumption by the portside mobs and thugs. Almost no chemical fertilizer is available, and Haiti has neither trucks nor usable roads to get it to the farms.

 

Most Haitians are underfed in their good years, with about 60 percent of kids under five suffering anemia and other diseases of malnutrition. Many of the kids will go blind or die due to severe Vitamin A deficiency, because they get few livestock calories. In hurricane years, the people suffer even more. In 2008, for example, the country suffered three hurricanes and a tropical storm. And now the massive earthquake. Food supplies are at urgent risk.

 

Over the years, poor Haitians who couldn’t afford to burn kerosene turned their local trees into charcoal.. Now most of the forest is gone, and soil erosion ravages the steep slopes. Mudslides overrun roads and irrigation systems.

 

The Haitians grow root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes because they produce more food calories per acre. But the root crops, too, aggravate the already-serious soil erosion. Beans and corn are other major staples. The once-subsidized rice industry collapsed. Could it now be revived?

 

Agriculture provides one-fourth of the country’s economic output most years, and perhaps 70 percent of the jobs. Of course, there would be lots of jobs today in the island’s rebuilding—if anyone had the money to hire workers.

 

Most of Haiti’s grain, more than a million tons per year, has been imported. Now there is no money to buy more grain. The World Food Program is asking for $279 million in food aid funding, but has been promised only $60 million so far.

 

Ten thousand fishermen ply the waters around Haiti, catching mostly crab, scampi, and shrimp—but their decrepit boats don’t dare venture far out, and fishermen from other countries are competing with big diesel boats, fancy nets, and electronic fish finders.

 

Where does Haiti build for the future? Half of its economic output has disappeared in the past 20 years as a defrocked Catholic priest named Aristede preached revolution from the President’s chair and whatever capital Haiti had fled the country. Eventually, the U.S. Marines spent years trying to maintain order in the streets, but no real political settlement has yet been reached. Radicals still preach about a “New World Order,” but there’s no longer a Soviet Union to provide guns—or food.  

 

The in-bond manufacturing sector is now largely gone, because foreign capital and foreign managers don’t dare risk Haiti’s combination of political unrest and corruption. In fact, there are few potential avenues for growing jobs and incomes in Haiti, at least as long as the thugs prevent civil governance. The risks are too high for outside capital and managers to take on.

 

The World Bank wrote a plaintive report saying that remittances from Haitians in other countries are now the only prop for the economy (about $1.87 billion in 2009, equal to 35 percent of Haiti’s own economic output). And that report was written in 2005, before the latest set of storms and the earthquake.

 

The farmers could grow truck crops for export, but lack the roads to reach the ports; and even then they’d still many sea-miles from markets. Kenya grows cut flowers for air-freight to Europe on a space-available basis. But few airliners fly from Haiti to the affluent countries. Tourism? The few “good” hotels were flattened by the quake, many with their visitors inside.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The World Bank is warning of “climate chaos” and demands a rebuilding of the world’s agricultural science centers to keep everyone fed. The basic message is right on target, even if it is swathed in climate hype. Katherine Sierra, the World Bank’s vice president for sustainable development, says climate change will mean more droughts, floods, more outbreaks of pests and disease, more heat stress for livestock and less arable land for crops.  She warns the world “dropped the ball” on agricultural science after the Green Revolution saved a billion people from starvation and preserved 16 million square miles of forest from being plowed for more low-yield crops.

 

We are delighted that Ms. Sierra now agrees with us—that the world faces its biggest-ever food production challenge in the next 40 years—but global warming doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. World temperatures today are just about the same level as 100 years ago. 

 

The real food challenge is the world’s last surge of population growth and the continuing surge of human affluence.  Population will increase another 40 percent before it starts to decline in the 22^nd century. The World Bank also says per capita incomes will double rapidly due to technology and trade—if there’s energy.  

 

Crop yields are fortunately still rising, thanks in part to plant breeding and biotech—and partly to the “CO₂ secret.” Experiments show that more CO₂ in the air acts like fertilizer to all plants, even as it increases their water use efficiency.  But yields won’t double by 2050 at their current pace.  Hence, the need for another Green Revolution.

 

Droughts will continue to be important in the 21^st century, but they’re always the biggest threat to our food supply. California had century-long droughts during the Medieval Warming, and a cave stalagmite in West Virginia tells us to expect a century-long mid-Atlantic drought sometime during the next “little ice age” in 500 years or so. These droughts happen roughly every 1,500 years, thanks to unstoppable solar cycles.

 

Luckily, there’s no upward trend in storms. The climate records tell us the cold phases of the cycles were terribly harsh and unstable compared to the sunny, well-fed Roman and Medieval Warmings.

 

The best news is that high-yield farming will serve humanity and protect our forests whether the climate warms or cools. We ardently agree with Katherine Sierra that science—especially biotechnology—offers the best hope of being able to feed 8-10 billion people (up from the current 6.5 billion) in 2050. Major progress is already being made on drought tolerance, nitrogen efficiency and stacked pest resistance traits. We urgently need more investment in hardier varieties of such secondary crops as potatoes, yams, peas and beans where companies see little profit opportunity.  

 

History says the 1,500-year warmings have been abrupt but moderate, so we’ve probably had most of the heating from this one. Expect another half-degree C or so by 2100.. Expect science and technology to keep developing new sources of energy, communication and wealth creation. About 7 billion affluent people will thus have fewer children but lots more pets.  They’ll demand more meat, milk, ice cream—and more of Fluffy’s favorite food.    

 

Unless crop and livestock yields at least double, quickly, anxious people will clear the remaining forests to plant more scraggly crops, wiping out vast numbers of wildlife species as they cut and clear.     

 

Dennis Avery is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years.

 

Alex A. Avery is Director of Research and Education for Hudson’s Center for Global Food Issues and the author of The Truth About Organic Foods.