Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor of sustainable development and health policy, isn't afraid to criticize the ethanol industry, local food production and the entire food industry.

On the same day that billionaire-philanthropist Bill Gates inspired his audience at the World Food Prize with a centrist approach to fighting global hunger, Sachs followed up with a talk that he said would be a downer.

"We're not winning the battle against global hunger and even less are we wining the battle against global malnutrition," said Sachs, who has advised two of the United Nations' secretaries-general.

Continue article

ADVERTISEMENT

Not only are 1 billion people on the planet chronically hungry, another 2 billion suffer from many types of malnutrition -- from iodine deficiency to lack of omega 3 fatty acids. Add in those in developed nations who are obese, and the majority of the human race, about 4 billion out of 6.8 billion, isn't eating well.

All this is happening while food prices and the energy costs that pervade the food system are still high enough to burden poor nations. Greenhouse gases contribute to climate shocks that are "a changes of state of the world, not just a string of bad luck," he said. Just this year a weak El Nino interrupted the monsoon enough in India to send global sugar and pulse prices upward.

"These are not going to go away. They're going to intensify," he said.

"The biofuels choices we have made, which I believe are deeply wrong-headed, have added to stress," he said.

Food production, the biggest share of the global economy and one we all depend on, has a huge effect on the environment and sustainability, he said. Not only is it a leading cause of climate change through deforestation and fossil fuel use, it's also linked to groundwater depletion, some 60,000 dams on the world's rivers, and 130 hypoxic areas of the oceans similar to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this is happening at a time when the public mistrusts a food system considered less safe, less healthy, harder on the environment and "wrongly, I believe, it has lost confidence in GMOs [genetically modified organisms]." This mistrust has helped give rise to the local food movement in developed nations. "There is no way the planet could feed itself with local food," he asserted.

Sachs offered a list of 10 solutions to these daunting challenges:

1. A global fund for small landholders, which as Bill Gates pointed out earlier in the day, make up three-fourths of the worlds poorest farmers.
2. Taking steps so slow climate change, and to adapt to it.
3. Move toward agroecology to conserve water and other resources.
4. End the conversion of corn into ethanol, which he argues isn't saving fuel or economical and which competes with food production.
5. Pay more attention to how nutrition affects crop use. Forty percent of grain is used for animal feed, he said. "The nutritionists tell us persuasively that our beef consumption is so high that it is highly deleterious to our human health," he said.
6. Adopting an urban strategy to food policy. "We need healthy fast food," more fruits and vegetables in city neighborhoods, he said.
7. More effort to improve early childhood nutrition. Even in the U.S. 30% of African American children and 30% of Hispanic children are malnourished. "They're not getting the nutrition the need for proper brain development," he said, which causes irreversible damage.
8. "We need a population policy," he said. Without better birth control, population growth will swamp food production gains from technology.
9. The global rescue effort needs the support of the food industry. "I tell you we cannot go on the way we're going and we need the food industry to say it first and foremost," he said.
10. The message needs to get out. "We need a venue to address these challenges," he said.

Stay tuned to next year's Borlaug Dialogue at the World Food Prize. Sachs got a promise to keep these issues front and center.

Sachs' ideas are, in fact, widespread. He has written two books that are New York Times best sellers -- Common Wealth, and The End of Poverty. In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time magazine.