There will be more crises, and bigger ones

The current food crisis we are being asked to respond to is happening in the Sahel, the stressed region of just-barely-sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at the whole Africa situation on the Famine Early Warning System Network created by the US Government, we can see that the Sahel crisis is really part of a belt stretching the width of Africa:

There appear to be multiple causes for this belt of food insecurity; civil conflict, drought, high prices, and weak infrastructure are probably the most significant. As appeals for help in response to such crises are brought to the world community, we often hear of "donor fatigue." Looking into the future, as food, energy and water availability are challenged globally, how often is the world going to have to respond to such crises?

I will argue that, on a percentage basis, there will be MORE AND LARGER such crises as the years pass. This is NOT based on any pessimism about food production levels. Although concerns abound about food production including the effects of climate change, there appear to be paths forward to make agricultural production meet the demand.

The problem for places like the Sahel as the Century of Scarcity unfolds is going to be in FOOD INFRASTRUCTURE: storage, processing, transportation and distribution. If this infrastructure does not keep pace with demand--and I will argue that it CANNOT--agricultural production increases will not stanch the frequency of food crises and famines. In fact, increases in production may be almost irrelevant to these crises.

The figure below is an attempt to isolate the INFRASTRUCTURE effects from the PRODUCTION levels.

The horizontal direction represents how much food is produced; the vertical direction, how much actually makes it to the consumer. Curve 1, the dashed green curve, represents the ideal situation: every calorie, every gram of protein or fiber, makes it to the person who needs it, even as the amount produced gets larger. That is clearly not happening--for example, we know that 30% of all food produced in Africa is lost due to poor storage--part of the INFRASTRUCTURE problem.

Curve 2, the orange curve, has the following meaning: some food is always going to be lost; but that is a fixed percentage of the total food produced. Could be--but here is what would be required:

• storage facilities, processing plants, distribution centers, and transportation all increase proportionately with agricultural production
• therefore, there must be no COMPETING demands for the resources that build the infrastructure.

But we know that ENERGY will become more dear as well as food. And ENERGY is a key factor in food processing and distribution, as well as for building storage facilities and roads. For this reason among others, the real relationship between food production and consumption will be more like curve 3:  as production increases, the infrastructure WILL NOT keep pace.

At the bottom of the figure are triangles for today's production level, and for a 2050 production level that is 70% higher--the amount estimated by the UN FAO to be needed. The population between now and 2050 will grow by "only" 28%, so perhaps the FAO production increase is intended to make up for the inadequate infrastructure.

But the problem with places like the Sahel is that they are at the end of the MOST DEMANDING distribution chains: long distances from PORTS, where food can be economically delivered by sea. The conclusion is that larger and more frequent food crises are far more likely in the coming decades.