The world needs new ways to grow food

By Peter C. Kahn

If you’re reading this, you probably have enough food and water. But tens of millions of people around the world do not, and tens of millions more will join them if we don’t rethink the way we grow our food and use our resources. For half a century, we’ve concentrated on growing annual crops such as wheat, corn and rice — crops that have to be planted and harvested every year, wearing out the land and using vast amounts of water for irrigation. This is not sustainable.

But we can reverse the trend by reinvesting in agriculture, especially in perennial crops — plants that don’t have to be replanted every year. Perennials can produce food and fuel, and their cultivation is less damaging to land and water. Perennials include food and fuel-producing trees, grasses and — at least potentially — perennial variations of many crops now cultivated annually.

Annual crops have had a good run in the past half-century, frequently staving off famine. This success has led farmers, governments and corporations to miss the advantages of perennials almost entirely. At current yields, for example, a mere 2.5 acres of walnuts could supply a nutritious 10 percent of a 2,000-calorie diet to 47,000 people. We want to redress that imbalance, not by replacing annual crops, but by using perennials to reclaim hundreds of millions of acres of damaged land all over the Earth.

Other perennial crops — acorns, carob and mesquite, for instance — can provide food for humans and livestock.

Our overdependence on annual crops has caused land to lose productivity through deforestation, development, overgrazing and poor agricultural practices. Annual single-crop cultivation forces us to pump water out of our aquifers faster than nature can refill them, dropping water tables and leading us to hunt for water in “fossil aquifers,” laid down millions of years ago. Those aquifers are not rechargeable. When they go dry, agriculture dependent on them ceases. The 16 percent of the world’s crop land that is irrigated produces 36 percent of the global harvest.

Perennials would increase soil organic matter, reduce pollution, stabilize soils against erosion and would help fields, forests and rangelands retain water, reducing flooding and helping aquifers to recharge. The approach also would harvest large quantities of carbon dioxide, thereby helping to ameliorate global climate change.

All this is easier said than done, but that’s no argument for not doing it.

To develop new perennial crops and new uses for old ones, we need research and development stations around the world — something similar to the agricultural research stations that exist in every state. There should be at least three each in Africa, South America and North America, China, South Asia, Japan, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. The stations would develop plants needing as little external input — water, fertilizer and pesticides — as possible. Economic, political and cultural analyses would thus constitute a large part of the stations’ work and would be integrated with plant breeding and agronomy, creating a model that can be adapted to the many other policy problems in which science plays an essential role.

Eventually, we would plant millions of perennial plants in the region of each station.

Each station would be endowed with $20 million to $40 million and could be run on the investment income from its endowment. We cannot rely on governments for that money because it can’t provide the stable, long-term funding needed for crop development. Foundations, corporations and private individuals will have to step up, and soon.

A society that fails to feed its own people, degrades its soil and depletes its water is unstable and a threat to its neighbors. Failed states are an increasing danger. If we do nothing, the future of civilization will be increasingly nasty, brutish and short. If we succeed, the prospects for peace and prosperity on our planet will be greatly enhanced.

Peter C. Kahn is a professor of biochemistry at Rutgers University.