Eating like an American

According to a front-page report in the NYT this morning, the world's farmers have the pedal to the combine metal, yet can't keep up with the demand. Excerpt:

The world’s grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades.

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”

In contrast to a run-up in the 1990s, investors this time are betting — as they buy and sell contracts for future delivery of food commodities — that scarcity and high prices will last for years.

If that comes to pass, it is likely to present big problems in managing the American economy. Rising food prices in the United States are already helping to fuel inflation reminiscent of the 1970s.

And the increases could become an even bigger problem overseas. The increases that have already occurred are depriving poor people of food, setting off social unrest and even spurring riots in some countries.

More:

As the newly urbanized and newly affluent seek more protein and more calories, a phenomenon called “diet globalization” is playing out around the world. Demand is growing for pork in Russia, beef in Indonesia and dairy products in Mexico. Rice is giving way to noodles, home-cooked food to fast food.

Though wracked with upheaval for years and with many millions still rooted in poverty, Nigeria has a growing middle class. Median income per person doubled in the first half of this decade, to $560 in 2005. Much of this increase is being spent on food.

Nigeria grows little wheat, but its people have developed a taste for bread, in part because of marketing by American exporters. Between 1995 and 2005, per capita wheat consumption in Nigeria more than tripled, to 44 pounds a year. Bread has been displacing traditional foods like eba, dumplings made from cassava root.

Several thoughts on this subject this morning:

1. Michael Pollan writes about how the spread of the Western diet throughout the world, displacing traditional diets, has led to the appearance of diseases that had previously been known in populations that had been living on a traditional diet. To what extent is this a real crisis -- that is, not enough grain to feed the world's people absolutely -- and to what extent is it a "crisis" of not being able to meet the demand of the world's people to eat like Americans? That is, will people go hungry, or will they be able to return to a traditional diet?

2. To what extent do Americans have an ethical responsibility to feed the planet? Given the soaring cost of wheat flour, a US bakers' trade group floated the prospect that the nation reduce grain exports to keep the national supply high (and prices low) -- but they backtracked. At what point are Americans morally justified in keeping back grain from the world to feed our own population? For the record, I would say we're not remotely close to that point, but it's worth contemplating at what point we arrive there. Do Americans have to sacrifice their own diet to the point where we're eating like Third Worlders before we're on solid moral ground in withholding exports? To what extent are people of other nations obliged to adopt more sound agricultural practices (e.g., in Zimbabwe, which used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa, bad government by the tyrant Mugabe has destroyed the agricultural economy)? To what extent have free trade agreements and the US government's promotion of grain exports and American agribusiness hamstrung the abilities of peoples of other nations to feed themselves?

3. The story reports that US farmers are going to put more acres into production to meet the demand. Isn't it the case, though, that to meet that overwhelming demand, they're going to employ unsustainable industrial methods of growing that debilitate the soil and cause other environmental problems? To what extent should Americans tolerate this eating of our own seed corn, so to speak, to meet world food demand?

4. Burke, the father of modern Anglo-American conservatism, famously described history as "a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.” We -- well, traditional conseratives, at least -- cannot be indifferent to the effect of our own decisions on others in society. A purely individualist ethic is not conservative. Along those lines, to what extent should our decisions in eating take into consideration Kant's categorical imperative ("Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.")? That is, how far should we go in judging the morality of our diet by asking, "If everybody in the world ate as I do, what kind of world would it be?"

Discuss.