The Land Myth

Brazil, for example, has the Cerrado, an area of 207 million hectares (800,000 square miles) of tropical savannah in the southwest of the country with regular rainfall, which is already delivering promising crops of soybeans, maize, and other grains. Brazilian scientists estimate that the Cerrado could yield around 350 million tonnes of grain per year— which sounds like a prodigious quantity but, seen in the context of world demand, would provide feed for only one- sixth of the livestock required to meet the forecasted growth in meat demand, and would not even replace the grain soon to be burned as biofuel. Also, the Cerrado’s soils are acidic, requiring heavy applications of lime, and low in nutrients, requiring heavy fertilization— meaning that the Cerrado is both high- cost and high- risk to develop. The Australian agricultural scientist Tony Fischer comments, “The Cerrado region will make an important and growing contribution to the world’s food and feed supplies, but not the huge contribution that we will need all too soon.”

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development considers that there are 23 million hectares (88,000 square miles) of good farming country lying idle in Rus sia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, of which just over half could be brought back into production fairly quickly and safely, boosting the harvest by at least 30 million tonnes (33 million U.S. tons) and making Rus sia the world’s second largest grain exporter. Even combined with Brazil, however, the total potential of these “food bowl” regions falls well short of the two to three billion tonnes of additional grain needed to feed humanity in the midcentury— and other mea sures will be needed, particularly in the form of higher yields.

Peak land is an issue that some experts seem eager to downplay or dismiss because their maps appear to suggest that the Earth has plenty of spare terrain. As we have seen, however, there are serious impediments, costs, or risks to opening up much of this land and, if the experience of recent years is anything to go by, it will be opened only at rates far too slow to match the rising demand for food on its own.

This, essentially, forces us back to four main strategies: 1. Redouble output from existing land and water using better and more sustainable farming methods, both small- scale and large. Make a global effort to turn lost or degraded land back to productive use. 3. Develop new ways to produce food that don’t take up a lot of room. 4. Stop wasting food. Some people would add: reduce the population. Although this is very important to addressing the global food challenge (see chapter 10) in the longer term, this is unlikely to happen in the next half century, short of a catastrophe.

Khuzestan Province: the Land of Sun and Date