At the dawn of the 21st century the world is mired in poverty. During the past three decades, the situation has been significantly changed yet, an unacceptably high number of people live with food insecurity. Of the world’s 6 billion people, 2.8 billion - almost half - live on less than $2 a day, and 1.2 billion - a fifth - live on less than $1 a day.

About 900 million or 68 per cent of the world’s poor live in Asia; about 500 million in South Asia, 300 million in East Asia and 100 million in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. About 526 million people are undernourished, including 160 million children (FAO, 1999). They lack not only sufficient money to buy food and other essentials, but also access to adequate schooling, housing and medical care. Those in rural areas are often short of water and fuel. Fertile land and water for farming are increasingly scarce. The urban poor lack money to buy enough food. What they can afford to buy may be deficient in proteins and essential vitamins and minerals.

This widespread destitution of poverty persists even though human conditions have improved more in the past century than in the rest of history — global wealth, global connections and technological capabilities have never been greater. Yet the distribution of these global gains is extraordinarily unequal. In East Asia, the number of people living on less than $1 a day fell from around 420 million to around 280 million between 1987 and 1998, but in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the number of poor people has risen. In the countries of Central Asia, poverty has increased more than twenty fold (World Bank, 2000). The average income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times the average in the poorest 20 — a gap that has doubled in the past 40 years.

Food insecurity associates closely with poverty. About 800 million people do not have access to sufficient food to lead healthy, productive lives. About 280 million of these food insecure people live in South Asia, 240 million in the East Asia, 180 million in sub-Saharan Africa and the rest in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa.

According to recent FAO projections, the World Food Summit (WFS) goal of halving the number of food insecure people from 800 million in 1995 to 400 million by 2015 will not be achieved until 2030. Results from the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) revised and updated global food model suggest that there will be similarly slow progress in reducing child malnutrition. Under the most likely scenarios, 132 million children under the age of six years - one out of every four - will be malnourished in 2020.

During the next two decades, the world’s population is projected to increase by 24 per cent to reach 7.5 billion in 2020. Virtually all of the population increase will take place in developing countries, and much of it in urban areas. With rising incomes and urbanization, global demand for cereals is expected to increase by 35 per cent between 1997 and 2020 to 2,497 million tons and for meat by 57 per cent to 327 million tons. Almost all of the increase in demand will take place in developing countries. How will increases in cereal demand of this magnitude be met? Primarily through increases in productivity, because the natural resources available for further expansion of farming have been virtually exhausted.

The situation is particularly serious for Asia, where most good agricultural land is already farmed and the region as a whole may have passed the safe limits for agricultural expansion. The FAO estimates (1999) that in South Asia, for example, with virtually no reserves of land with crop production potential, land use per person will fall from 0.17 hectares in 1990 to 0.12 hectares in 2010. This pressure on the land will have three main effects.

First, traditional farming systems, with low productivity, will become inappropriate. Second, increasing numbers of the rural population will be forced to farm marginal and unsuitable land, which becomes quickly degraded. Third, more people will move to urban areas, adding to congestion and pollution and removing yet more prime agricultural land from production. Agricultural land use, increased by 13 per cent or 170 million hectares in the last 30 years, is already achieved largely at the expense of lowland forests and their rich biodiversity (the Asian Development Bank, 2000).

Meeting the food needs of Asia’s growing and increasingly urbanized population requires increases in agricultural productivity. To meet this demand, cereal production will need to increase by at least 40 per cent from the present level of about 650 million tons annually. Most of the increase will have to come from yield increases. In addition, meat demand will double during the period. Production increases must be achieved by increasing yields in a sustainable way, to conserve diminishing and degraded natural resources. Nearly all of these production increases will need to take place in developing countries because on average 90 per cent of the world’s food is consumed in the country where it is produced.

In this millennium, we face a food, feed and fibre production challenge in highly complex farming systems, for several reasons: Water will become the most important limiting factor in agricultural production because its quality and quantity will decline as a result of pollution, forest degradation and increased agricultural, domestic, and industrial use (Asian Development Bank,2001). Urbanization will mean the loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development and a decline in the number of farm workers. Most farmers are poor with small landholdings. Farming systems are commonly heterogeneous with mixes of food crops, livestock, and trees. Most of the cultivated land is rain fed, with unreliable distribution and intensity of rainfall.

Thus, the increase in food production during the next 25 years will have to be achieved using less labour, water, and cultivated land. This can occur only if scientists can develop new crop varieties with high yield potential and high water use efficiency. New understanding of plant and animal genes may offer ways to increase crop yields to the levels required to feed the growing population in Asia adequately and sustainably. Increasing small holder agriculture productivity will not only increase food supplies, but also reduce poverty and malnutrition, increase food access and improve living standards of the poor.

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