Food shortage looming in Asia Pacific: Experts

Food shortage looming in Asia Pacific: Experts

BANGKOK (Reuters): The Asia Pacific region could face a serious food shortage in the next three decades because of sharply rising population and natural resource degradation, food experts said on Tuesday.

The shortage appeared particularly pressing in Asia, which is home to the world's largest concentration of poor rural people, according to Mogens Lemonius, a seed industry specialist for the Asia-Pacific Seed Association.

Speaking at a seminar on sustainable agriculture, Lemonius said the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had forecast that Asia's population was set to rise to 4.7 billion in 2030, compared to 3.3 billion in 1997.

To serve the increased demand in the next three decades, the region needs to raise output of cereal products, which is Asia's most important food, by as much as 50 percent.

The average yield for cereal production in the region as a whole needed to go up from the present 3.1 tons per hectare to 4.4 tons, Lemonius told the seminar.

Constraints to productivity increases in the future would be the limitation in planting areas and irrigation.

"New land brought under cultivation would have to be marginal and ecologically fragile and cannot make up for the land being removed from cultivation each year because of urbanization and land degradation," he said.

The FAO has found several key Asian nations, including Afghanistan, North Korea, Laos and Indonesia, to be struggling to source sufficient food to feed their citizens.

Food supply problems in those countries resulted mainly from adverse weather while in some other countries the situation was worsened by economic hardships.

At present, the Asia-Pacific region is still self-sufficient and able to supply a third of its cereal output to other regions.

In 1998, cereal production in the region amounted to about 966 million tons, while consumption was behind at 616 million.

"But Asian governments are paying insufficient attention to agricultural development," Lemonius said.

The solution to the expected food difficulty seems to be "the great challenge for the next millennium," said Dr Dimyati Nangju, an agronomist at the Asian Development Bank.

"The fundamental problems facing Asia at the moment stems from widespread corruption and mismanagement by governments across the region," he told the seminar.

Lemonius also added that in order to improve cultivation, appropriate technology and improved market access to farmers and new approaches to agricultural production was needed.

"Such approaches should emphasize high productivity and be environmentally sustainable," he said.