Hunger and food – two sides of the same coin

This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the United Nations World Food Program for "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict". It so happens that October 16th is World Food Day, established by the UN General Assembly on the anniversary of establishing the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

The WFD was introduced in 1979, and a year later a UN resolution stated that "food is a prerequisite for survival and successful human development and is a fundamental human need." In the following years, Decades for the Eradication of Poverty were announced twice. In 1996, at the first World Food Summit, attended by representatives of 185 countries, a decision was made to reduce by half the number of starving children, men and women, by the year 2015.

These were not the first global responses to hunger decimating people around the world. In 1918, the German chemist Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize for the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. The scientific world was certain that what Haber did enabled us to produce nitrogen fertilizers. This meant another step in increasing yields, and therefore in fighting hunger. At the same time, however, global and local conflicts or natural disasters prevented the effective eradication of the problem. The 1970s saw famines in Sahel, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. In the 1980s, people starved in Mozambique, Sudan and Ethiopia. There have been millions of suffering people, but one thing stays the same – the victims are mostly children. According to UN Food and Agriculture estimates, 821 million people went hungry between 2016 and 2018. The problem is still most severe in the developing countries, with only 16 million of the hungry living in the developed ones.

Professor Andrzej Kotecki, head of the Institute of Agroecology and Plant Production at the University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Wrocław, openly states: – The problem of hunger in the world is a problem of poor food distribution and lack of solidarity. No more, no less.

And he recalls Norman Borlaug, an American scientist with Norwegian roots, one of the world's most outstanding specialists in the field of plant breeding, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

- Borlaug worked to reduce the problem of cereal rust that travelled from the Gulf of Mexico towards the United States. His task was to develop varieties resistant to this disease and he was not particularly successful. However, during the work already undertaken in the 1950s, he came to the conclusion that wheat is low-productive – explains Professor Kotecki and explains that 70 years ago wheat looked different than today. The plant was even 1.4 meters high, and most of its photosynthetic energy went into the stem instead of grain. So Borlaug became interested in the possibility of growing a variety that would be shorter and would thus have more grains.

- So he had to find dwarf plant forms and then dwarfism genes. It was not at all easy, but he had clues coming from the theories of the outstanding Soviet botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, destroyed by Stalin because he was against Lysenko's pseudoscientific theories – says Professor Andrzej Kotecki.

Vavilov, who created the law of homologous series, argued that if dwarf forms occur within a species, then they should also occur within other species. Eventually, Borlaug found "his" dwarf wheat on the Japanese islands, where the norin variety was grown. The American scientist named it norin10 and introduced its genes into wheat, which resulted in the reduction of straw and increase in grain yield.

- In the 1960s Borlaug donated the seeds of this dwarf variety to India, where millions of people were starving. But I am also telling this story to show how crop production has developed from the 1960s until now – admits prof. Kotecki and calculates: in 1961 there were just over 3 billion people in the world and the production of cereals was at the level of approx. 870-880 million tons – that is 280 kilos per person. Presently, the production is almost 3 billion tons, and there are almost 380 kilos of grain per person.

- The population has grown 2.5 times, and the amount of grain per capita has not decreased, but increased. This proves that the world can feed itself, even if the number of people grows by 100 million annually – emphasizes Professor Andrzej Kotecki.

Professor Krzysztof Matkowski from the Department of Plant Protection is of the opinion that this year's Nobel Peace Prize is primarily a signal concerning the environment and our responsibility for it.

- Certain processes are closely related to nature. These processes concern also our life, economy and redistribution of goods. There number of people in the world is increasing, but especially in poor places – the places where the resources are dwindling – says Professor Matkowski and explains that in Central Africa, apart from mountain regions, there is practically no access to water, and these shortages cannot be covered by wells dug by charity organizations such as the Polish Humanitarian Action.

- The lack of water means migration, because people cannot live without it. So they will go where the water is available – that means north. This migration will be followed by social and political changes and conflicts that we can already observe not only in Europe, but also in the Americas. Lack of water, followed by hunger, results in the rise of nationalisms, xenophobia, and decline of human solidarity – admits prof. Krzysztof Matkowski and adds that there are two closely related things: caring for resources in the rich part of the world and plundering resources in the poor, where the simple argument is: "why should we stop extracting oil, burning coal and cutting forests? You did it 100 years ago, you got rich and now you are so smart?”.

Professor Matkowski explains the not-so-obvious chain of consequences: climate change, leading to the lack of water, means that we need to grow plants that cope with this deficit better. There is also another important element – temperature. High temperatures in winter may prevent some species from flowering in spring, i.e. those which must go through the so-called vernalization, i.e. chilling.

- The lack of the vernalization process means that we will stop cultivating plants that have produced great yields so far. In their place, we will have to introduce new species, and here again it is the role of science. Another issue directly related to food and its production is the new tendency to limit animal breeding. Everything indicates that it will continue, because breeding requires a lot of water and a lot of energy. But this animal protein will have to be replaced with vegetable protein, so the scale of soybean cultivation will probably increase in Europe – explains Prof. Krzysztof Matkowski and adds that new crops mean new problems since new pests and diseases are bound to appear.

- Our role is not only to diagnose and treat these diseases, but also to shape attitudes, explain and educate. From 60 to 70 percent of the crops in Poland are cereals, the rest are rape and potatoes, and therefore monocultures, which have an impact on the environment and soil degradation. The share of agriculture in our GDP is around 3 percent, so it is not very significant to the economy. Of course, it provides food, but at the same time it greatly influences the environment in which we live. Therefore, our task today is to promote biodiversity. It is not about protectionism, but about education. If we start afforestation of inter-field paths today, allow drainage ditches to overgrow, give water a chance to flood the fields from time to time, then in 25 years we will avoid a catastrophe, which will mean hunger, lack of water, and thus armed conflicts, because people will fight for access to food and clean drinking water – says prof. Matkowski.

The necessity to adapt agriculture to climate change is also mentioned by prof. Szymon Szewrański, head of the Department of Spatial Management.

- At the level of a university operating in a specific environment, we can talk about local contexts important for a given community. Of course, we see global challenges and problems, but in the European context I would not talk about hunger, but rather about the security of food supplies, which is of course in accordance with 2030 budgetary perspective of the European Union and the Green Deal – says Prof. Szewrański and adds that two doctorates are being prepared at the University of Environmental and Life Sciences in Wrocław, dealing with the problem of food from two different perspectives. One concerns the carbon footprint and the other cities’ food supply zone.

As emphasized by prof. Szymon Szewrański, at UPWr, the problem of food security is considered in the context of… spatial conflict.

- Simply speaking: we have different interested parties with different needs. Space is a finite resource and the conflicts arise from the fact that a developer wants to build a housing estate, an entrepreneur – a solar farm, and a farmer wants to grow beetroot. Therefore, each decision to develop this space has different consequences – explains prof. Szewrański and adds that the issue of consumer responsibility and the problem of food waste must not be absent from the discussion about food.

- On the one hand, there is an overproduction of food in Europe, but on the others there are such problems as consumers’ inability to distinguish between the expiry date and the use-by date. Szymon Szewrański admits that discussions on food production and distribution, which also involve scientists, bring new phenomena and trends. This includes the "Eat Locally" movement, which focuses on shortening supply chains and buying food from local producers, which in turn leads to the emergence of food cooperatives active especially in social media.

- Food losses do not result solely from the attitudes of consumers, although I must admit that I buy only as much food as I need and I do not understand those who buy too much and then throw it away – says prof. Agnieszka Nawirska-Olszańska from the Department of Fruit, Vegetable and Plant Nutraceutical Technology. She recently produced a report on the scale of food waste at different stages of plant-based food production.

- The first stage – the production stage, is the harvesting of crops from fields and orchards. Machines are not able to harvest exactly all the crops from the fields – some remain in the field and some get damaged. Of course, you can send people to pick up the vegetables you left behind, but if it concerns, say, 60 hectares, who will bear such costs? – explains prof. Nawirska-Olszańska and adds that the crops left in the ground decompose and fertilize the soil, and the damaged ones are used for feeding animals.

- Therefore, it is difficult make definite statements about waste at this stage, rather about the process, losses, etc. The next stage, of course, takes place during storage. The losses may seem small, amounting to 3 percent, but if this 3 percent concerns the processing of 100 tons of apples, carrots, potatoes or plums, we are already dealing with a very large amount of food that is actually not used and does not reach the consumer – says prof. Agnieszka Nawirska-Olszańska, who, like prof. Szewrański, believes that the hunger related to the lack of food currently impacts mainly developing countries affected by drought. – This does not mean, of course, that in Europe, and therefore also in Poland, there are no poor people or hungry children, but it is a consequence of certain attitudes rather than a result of disasters, droughts or floods.

The problem of how consumerism affects the Earth's water resources is also discussed by prof. Ewa Burszta-Adamiak from the Institute of Environmental Engineering: – Annually, about 9 million tons of food is wasted in Poland, ending up in landfills or dumps. We do not notice the fact that its production requires water, which seems to be plentiful when we look at global maps, but when it comes to fresh water – which is the source of drinking water, but also the water used in agriculture – we already feel its shortages.

Prof. Burszta-Adamiak is a co-author of several catalogues of good practices proposing methods of small retention in cities, which, in the long run, should lead to the protection of water and people against violent phenomena related to climate change: periods of prolonged drought alternating with torrential rains and urban floods. In her own words, she combines scientific work with its practical application. As she explains: – We are facing a redefinition of consumer attitudes. I believe that vegetarianism and limiting animal production will become more and more common. The reason is very simple and comes from the amount of water we use. This consumption shows us our water footprint – an indicator telling us about the scale of use of water resources, which are by no means unlimited.

What are the numbers? It takes 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef, a bar of chocolate needs almost 2,000 litres, and 1 kg of tomatoes, a little over 200 litres.

- Our role as scientists is, on the one hand, to study the phenomena that occur around us, and which in the context of nature, are largely influenced by human activity. But research, analysis and forecasting is only part of our job. Another equally important area, is looking for solutions to problems faced by specific communities and also, to a growing extent, education and shaping attitudes out of responsibility for future generations – emphasizes prof. Ewa Burszta-Adamiak.

Katarzyna Kaczorowska