We should win the actual international starvation video games

Are food supplies running low?

By Michael Zacka, CEO for Tetra Pak U.S.
and Canada

Thankfully, we’re still a long way from the dystopian world
depicted in the best-selling “The Hunger Games” trilogy, where food is used as
a coercive political tool. Nevertheless, we have reason to be concerned about
the geopolitical consequences of world food supplies running low, as analysts
predict they will, following yet another summer of extreme weather, including record-breaking
drought in the U.S.   

As we’ve seen over the past several years, food shortages
and rising food prices can cause destabilizing stress here and worldwide.
America is the world’s largest grain exporter, and, as the 2012 drought marches
on, escalating damage to its corn and soybean harvest will be felt around the
world in higher prices — particularly for meat from corn-fed pigs and cattle.
Food shortages are a strong possibility in the world’s poorest nations, according
to Oxfam and other NGOs, but working families here will also feel
the pinch in their grocery budgets.

Simply put, those of us in the food industry are facing down
a perfect storm of challenges that will require an earnest and thoughtful
approach from all quarters: all hands on deck from farm to processing,
packaging and market.  How will we meet a
rapidly growing demand for food — especially since there’s even more to the
issue?

In the immediate future, a central issue in emerging
economies is hunger and poverty.  In
2011, world food prices went up by some 37% during the Russian wheat crisis,
driving 44 million people into poverty, according
to the World Bank. 
This year, the effects of drought may signal more of the same for food
prices in coming months.

Changing demographics are also putting new strains on our
food supply, as millions of “up and coming” consumers in places like India and
China buy more milk and meat to reflect newly middle class tastes, as
chronicled in
the Journal of Nutrition. In just this decade, there will be a
30% increase in global demand for milk, Tetra Pak’s (www.tetrapak.com/Pages/default.aspx)
own
dairy index forecasts.

Furthermore, food crops and farmland are increasingly being
diverted into biofuel production around the globe, making commodity crops
scarcer and more expensive. In 2009, U.S. corn prices were more than 20% higher
because of ethanol driven demand, according
to a study by the International Center for Trade and Sustainable
Development.

Meanwhile, as last month’s World Population Day reminded us,
we have over 7
billion mouths to feed. 
According to 2010 statistics (the last year available), about 14%, some
925 million, are already going hungry, including nearly 49
million in the U.S. at that time. And we have to make a place at
the table for the 9 million-plus projected by 2050.  To do so, we’ll have to ramp up production by
70%, according
to United Nations estimates.

The challenges are serious, and meeting them will require a
multi-faceted approach. First, we need to take climate change and the potential
effects of global warming seriously, and work on reducing carbon emissions
still further.

Climate scientists predict extreme weather events with the
potential to disrupt the food supply – including floods and droughts – will be
far more common in the coming years. The International Governmental Panel on
Climate Change recently released a clarion call to policymakers on this subject
called Managing
the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters To Advance Climate Change Adaptation.

In its own business practices, Tetra Pak endeavors to
operate as responsibly and sustainably as possible and has set clear and
ambitious goals for reducing its own carbon emissions. Between 2005 and 2010, our
company reduced its carbon footprint by nearly 13%
while, at the same time, our production increased by more than 23%. Moving
forward, our goal is to cap carbon emissions at 2010 levels by the end of 2020
while continuing to grow. With our forecasted annual growth rate achieving this
goal would require a 40% relative reduction in CO2 equivalent emissions.

In addition to mitigating climate change, we must also conserve
and protect both water and farmland, which, as the Food and Agriculture
Organization urges, should include a serious cost-benefit analysis of diverting
crops into biofuels. As the FAO outlines in its report “How
to Feed the World in 2050,” we must also encourage investment in
the agricultural infrastructure and research and development in the developing
countries where most of the rising population will be born.

Price spikes hurt people in developing nations
more, since they spend a much higher fraction of their incomes on food. As this
graphic from the Gates Foundation shows, U.S. households
spend about 6% of their total expenditures on food, as compared with 35% in
India and 45% in Kenya.

As a result, a 40% uptick in food prices in
developing parts of the world is beyond devastating – it’s destabilizing.

With that in mind, ensuring food security in
developing countries, where much of the population growth is forecast, becomes
even more vital. This booming population will live almost exclusively in
cities, which means they will rely on supermarkets and, therefore, packaged
foods.

But delivering a safe food supply presents
unique challenges in developing nations, including limited availability of
refrigeration, which requires energy and special equipment in transit, at
retail outlets and in homes. However, transporting and storing food
safely in those countries is a challenge that can be overcome with innovative
technologies like Tetra Pak’s aseptic packaging.

Consumers of all income levels in Asia and Europe already
buy milk and other food this way, in shelf-stable cartons, which can be stored
for six months without refrigeration or preservatives. Increasingly, moms in
the U.S. and Canada are turning to the convenience and portability of aseptic
packaging, since it permits individual-serve milk boxes to be packed in moms’
diaper bags and kids’ backpacks without worries about spoilage, or stored in
the refrigerator for the after-school set to grab for a snack. Happily, the
benefits of this safe-food technology are also a boon to the developing world,
where refrigeration is frequently not an option.

Everyone who engages in the business of growing, storing,
packaging and selling food is being called on to creatively adapt to the
tremendous food security challenges that are staring us in the face. That means
we must all hunker down, collaborate and innovate to win the real world hunger
games.

Image
source: The
U.S. Drought Monitor is a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation
Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of
Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Map
courtesy of NDMC-UNL.