The Economist just released a fabulous graph of the world by regions of food exporters and importers:
It describes the list of usual suspects: Africa imports and North America exports. Then it calls for an ag revolution in Africa.
The news story here is none of this is news. What's news is that we don't need just a revolution in food and ag in Africa alone, it's time for a global revolution in food and ag that addresses three challenges:
1) In an era of global climate uncertainty, why put all the eggs in the global food industrial food system? Why not have parallel systems?
2) What are we going to do about local grain? Most of the world that lives on the two dollars a day it has to spend on food needs grain that's local--not for dairy, not for eggs, and not for meat or poultry, they need it because grain is what they eat every day (hopefully). They don't call wheat the staff of live for nothing...
3) So, what would a revolution in acknowledgement of basic realities look like? Food prices are here to stay. Increased global demand in grain is here to stay. Grain is the oil of food. We either use it directly or make most of the rest of what we eat from it. Local and organic are here to stay, and so is GMO high tech global food and ag.
As John Naisbitt said, it's high tech, it's high touch, it's global and it's local. And it's all here to stay....Maybe we should talk about how we can cooperate or at least agree to disagree and get on with building the parallel food and ag systems. Because the reality is they are going to be built... in fact, the keels have already been laid.



