Plenty of food in the wrong place

The world is awash with food but too much of it is in the wrong place. Countries with a surplus, principally in the West, feed it to animals for meat production and process it into unnecessary snack foods. Countries with a food deficit can't afford to buy the surplus and there is no incentive to ship it to them other than in a crisis.

Science and technology has no answers for these problems, which exist because of politics, policy and finance. Planting acres of insect resistant genetically modified maize is of no value if farmers in the Horn of Africa attempting to grow it keep getting driven off their land by warring factions. Surplus GM soya won't help or harm hungry families if no one is willing to ship it to them.

"In the developing world you really have a crisis," suggested Prof Paul McNulty, head of the Department of Food and Agricultural Engineering at UCD. "You need to organise the political and financial elements first and the technological elements will come later."

Coming up with food surpluses in the developed world would not be difficult, he argued. All that was necessary was to guarantee prices for the producers. "If you could give the producers sufficient money to invest in their businesses then they will increase output. That is more important than any technological initiative."

Green Party MEP Ms Nuala Ahern agrees with this analysis. "We should be enhancing the ability of third countries to support themselves. Food aid is crisis management. Long term, we have to move away from that."

Achieving this has nothing to do with technology and again change is dependent on political advances. But Western countries could help the situation, according to Mr Trevor Sargent TD, Green Party spokesman for agriculture and food. Third countries grow cash crops such as coffee, bananas and cocoa to earn foreign cash to support food purchases, he said.

"There is a growing impoverishment that has nothing to do with growing food. The development of local food economies is the solution to world food supply," he said. Western states should make bilateral agreements with third countries conditional on setting aside land for food rather than cash crops, he argued.

Ms Ahern, through the EU parliament, is promoting the development of decentralised renewable energy sources based on technologies such as solar power and photovoltaic cells.

Prof Michael Hennerty, Professor of Horticulture at UCD, argues in favour of GM technology to enhance nutritional content. A modified rice enriched with vitamin A is already in production.

His group at UCD has developed a potato that can tolerate salty soils, one of the consequences of constant irrigation of crops using water from very deep wells. Salinisation will take as much as 30 per cent of currently cultivated land out of production in the next few years. "This is a problem that will only get worse," he warned.

He is also pursuing research into crop storage which could have a huge impact on food supplies. Up to 70 per cent of some foods are lost in storage and 25 to 30 per cent of rice is lost when stored. The problem is ethylene, a gas that is naturally released by vegetable matter. "If we could develop fruit and vegetables that don't respond to ethylene we would have a huge influence on world food supply," Prof Hennerty said.

dahlstrom@irish-times.ie