As global food prices soar and population growth and urbanization shrink the supply of arable land, many countries have been forced to adopt new forms of production to secure their food supply. But instead of embracing sustainable land-use practices and improving rural development, some nations have shifted food production overseas, igniting a massive land grab in the developing world.

From the Persian Gulf to East Asia, governments and international companies alike have been lobbying developing countries in Africa and Asia to produce grain for food and alternative energy. The Guardian reported on November 22nd that Qatar recently leased 40,000 hectares of Kenyan farmland in return for funding a £2.4 billion port on the island of Lamu, a popular tourist site just off the Kenyan coast. The Saudi Binladen Group is said to be finalizing a deal with Indonesia to lease land for basmati rice production, while other Arab investors, including the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, have bought land rights for agricultural production in Sudan and Pakistan. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has been “courting would-be Saudi investors,” despite his country’s own deplorable food insecurity and chronic malnutrition.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported that South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics has been working to secure a 99-year lease for 3.2 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar that it will use to “grow 5 million metric tons of maize a year and 500,000 tons of palm oil” to use as biofuel in South Korea. The company says it expects to pay almost nothing besides infrastructure costs and employment training in return for its use of the land. Despite Madagascar’s rapid population growth and pervasive food insecurity, the deal, if signed, will allow the South Korean company to lease approximately half of the current arable farmland on the island state.

In an effort to combat a freshwater shortage, China has secured an agreement with Laos for a 50-year lease of 1,600 hectares of land in return for funding a new sports complex in Vientiane for the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. And with only 8 percent of the world’s arable land and more than one-fifth of the world’s population to feed, China continues to encourage its businesses to go outside China to produce food, looking to developing countries in Africa and Latin America.

Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, recently warned that these deals are a “political hot potato” that could prove devastating to the developing world’s own food supply, as several of these states already face severe food insecurity. Diouf has expressed concern that these deals could breed a “neo-colonial” agricultural system that would have the world’s poorest and most malnourished feeding the rich at their own expense.

And with land rights a contentious issue throughout the developing world—including in Haiti, Kenya, and Sudan, for instance—these agreements could spark civil conflict if governments and foreign investors fail to strike equitable deals that also benefit local populations. “Land is an extremely sensitive thing,” warns Steve Wiggins, a rural development expert at the Overseas Development Institute. “This could go horribly wrong if you don’t learn the lessons of history” and attempt to minimize inequality.

As food prices continue to climb, more and more countries are likely to scramble to gain access to the developing world’s arable land. Without land-use agreements that ensure a host country’s domestic food supply is secure before its foreign investor’s, long-term sustainable development could be set back decades, something impoverished developing countries simply cannot afford.

Photo: A man threshing in Ethiopia. Long plagued by acute food insecurity, Ethiopia’s arable land is sought by more-developed countries to ensure the stability of their own food stocks. Courtesy of Flickr user Eileen Delhi.

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“We have had enough of false promises” from the government, said one resident of the northwestern Guinean mining town of Boké, a sentiment shared by many of his countrymen. Long ruled by self-serving autocrats, members of this predominantly youthful society, angered by their lack of access to basic services like electricity, water, and education, have ramped up demonstrations against the central government in Conakry.

Despite its extensive reserves of bauxite—the ore from which aluminum is produced—Guinea, ranked 160 out of 177 countries in the United Nation’s Human Development Index, has long been plagued by underdevelopment and poverty. Pockets of protests have erupted throughout the country over the past two years, with the frequency increasing in recent weeks in response to high fuel prices and continuing lack of access to basic services such as water and electricity. President Lansana Conté has regularly dispatched state security forces to crack down on protesters, and these forces have murdered, raped, beaten, tortured, and unlawfully imprisoned unarmed demonstrators and bystanders. “There is a tremendous amount of frustration and anger in Guinea,” Corrine Dufka, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times. “People protest to express that anger, and security forces respond with excessive force.”

Given Guinea’s very young age structure—46 percent of its population is younger than 15—violent suppression by the central government heightens the already-high risk that the country will devolve into civil war. According to Elizabeth Leahy in The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More Equitable World, presented at a 2007 Wilson Center event, Guinea, like other countries with very young age structures—including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Uganda—is three to four times more likely to experience civil conflict than countries with more balanced, mature age structures, like the United States. And with the global economic downturn expected to take a devastating toll on the developing world, Guinea may soon find itself embroiled in conflict if the government maintains its violent tactics and fails to provide the services Guineans need.

Photo: In the capital of Conakry, demonstrations fueled by lack of opportunity and civil services have continued unabated despite violent repression by the central government. Courtesy of flickr user martapiqs.

The University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health recently received $15 million from the Fred H. Bixby Foundation to expand the Bixby Program in Population, Family Planning & Maternal Health into the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability. The Bixby Center will highlight population’s impact on global public health, climate change, poverty, and civil and international conflict. “I think the huge challenge for the human race in the 21st century is whether we can move to a biologically sustainable way of life on this planet,” said Malcolm Potts, chair of the Bixby Center. “Population plays an essential role in that,” he added. The Bixby Center will also address the well-documented unmet need for family planning around the world.

Although it will be housed within the School of Public Health, the Bixby Center will partner with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Berkeley Center for Global Public Health, the Berkeley Population Center, and other initiatives.

New York Times environment reporter Andrew Revkin recently invited readers to post cost-effective environmental proposals on his blog, Dot Earth. He promised to send the 10 best ones, as determined by readers’ recommendations, to the Obama transition team on energy and the environment.

Intriguingly, two of the proposals focus on population. “In a world of increasing scarcity, if we do not get a handle on our own population, it will get a handle on us,” writes one reader. “Because of sustained exponential population growth, we are collectively destroying what remains of the natural world. We are also putting our species at grave risk for rapid catastrophic population decline. We cannot expect to sustain exponential population growth indefinitely,” warns another.

If you missed this opportunity to put in your $0.02 on environmental and population issues, don’t worry: You can submit your comments directly to the energy and environment policy team on the Obama transition website.

Yet another venue for influencing influential people is Thomas Friedman’s Chapter 18 Project. Friedman’s latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America, consists of 17 chapters, but he has said that the second edition will include an additional chapter comprising readers’ best ideas on how to make the transition to clean energy, improve our global environmental stewardship, and revitalize America’s economy and international reputation by “going green.” You can submit your proposals on his website.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles last week to accept a Global Media Award for Excellence in Population Reporting from the Population Institute (PI) —the New Security Beat won the “Best Online Commentary” award—I was greeted by a massive gift basket from PI. The rest of the week was equally bountiful, full of interesting people and vibrant exchanges of ideas.

After a dinner for the award-winners and PI and Population Media Center (PMC) board members and staff on Monday night, we spent most of Tuesday at a conference sponsored by PMC designed to help Hollywood writers and producers incorporate climate change and other serious environmental issues into their work. After Dr. Howard Frumkin of the Centers for Disease Control and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn (Ret.) outlined the health and security impacts of climate change, various industry insiders—from “CSI” and Fox, for instance—shared how they have managed to include climate change impacts in their jokes, dialogue, and storylines without sacrificing entertainment value. It was truly fascinating, and I encourage you to read more about it in another New Security Beat post.

Paul Ehrlich, who is Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, was the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony on Tuesday night, and he discussed the connections between population and environment in his trademark candid manner. “As long as you keep the population and consumption growing, you are, in the technical term, screwed,” he said. Bill Ryerson, president of both PI and PMC, and former CNN anchor Carol Lin presented the awards:

• Best Combined Media Effort: DZMM Radio, Philippines
• Best News Service: Reuters
• Best Online News Service: PUSH Journal (Communications Consortium Media Center)
• Best Individual Reporting Effort: More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want (Robert Engelman)
• Best Film or Miniseries: “Planet in Peril” (CNN)
• Best Print Editorial: “Global Overpopulation Is the Real Issue” (Boris Johnson, Mayor of London)
• Best Online Commentary: New Security Beat blog (Environmental Change and Security Program, Wilson Center)
• Best Magazine Article: “Why Have Scientists Succumbed to Political Correctness?” (Albert Bartlett)
• Best Radio Show: “The Naked Scientists” (BBC Radio)
• Best TV Show: “Morning Joe” (Joe Scarborough)
• Best Editorial Cartoonist: Don Wright (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, 1966 and 1980)

On Wednesday afternoon, several of us award-winners gave presentations on our winning projects at the UCLA School of Public Health to an audience of students, professors, and PI and PMC staff.

Population remains an underreported issue, but as challenges like climate change, food shortages, water scarcity, and lack of youth opportunity in the Middle East rise to the top of the international agenda, a growing number of journalists seem to be incorporating demographic angles into their stories. Thanks go to PI for calling attention to some of these important contributions.

Photo: The New Security Beat‘s Global Media Award for “Best Online Commentary.” Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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Released at the National Press Club on November 12, 2008, the UN Population Fund’s State of World Population 2008 encourages policymakers and the development community to embrace culturally aware approaches to achieving human rights such as gender equality and reproductive health. Noting the role local culture plays in these issues, the report makes suggestions for addressing traditional attitudes toward maternal mortality, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and contraceptive use, highlighting the need to develop alliances with local opinion leaders in program design and service delivery.

U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) urged both policymakers and development professionals to carry out development projects within the context of local cultural norms. According to Maloney, the Obama administration has promised to allocate funds to help implement the report’s recommendations. Azza Karam, senior culture advisor with UNFPA, explained that much development work still does not guarantee women’s rights and argued that State of World Population 2008 includes effective approaches to addressing harmful cultural practices. Karam encouraged the development community to approach culture pragmatically, demonstrating to local community leaders how changes in cultural practices benefit the whole community.

State of World Population 2008 devotes an entire chapter to the need to include women in post-conflict reconstruction, using case studies to demonstrate how gender equality can be incorporated into a variety of different peace interventions. The report pushes policymakers and program managers to endorse gender-sensitive approaches and abandon preconceptions that women lack the expertise to assist in long-term peacebuilding. Increasing women’s participation in post-conflict reconstruction “can help development practitioners mitigate some of the ill effects of conflict, minimize deterioration in gender relations and work with local communities and relevant stakeholders” to ensure women’s rights such as reproductive health and gender equality.

As U.S. governors and international climate representatives met at the Beverly Hills Hilton for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate change summit on November 18, a group of Hollywood writers and producers—plus a few climate change experts—gathered on the other side of Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center for “Changing Climate…Changing People: Connecting to the Biggest Story of Our Time,” a unique conference sponsored by the Population Media Center on how to incorporate climate change into mainstream TV and film.

Entertainment industry insiders like Sonny Fox emphasized that “earnest isn’t enough and won’t cut it”—that a show or film’s entertainment value cannot be compromised by its addressing serious issues like climate change impacts. Yet Chris Alexander, senior vice president of corporate communications for 20th Century Fox, showed that this is possible, with examples of how “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill,” and “Boston Legal” have seamlessly incorporated environmental issues into jokes, dialogue, and storylines.

David Rambo, a writer and supervising producer for “CSI,” described how “CSI” has addressed climate change impacts in two separate shows: one that examined the surprisingly large effect of a degree or two difference in temperature; and another that explored the high concentration of pharmaceuticals in water that has been recycled due to water shortages. According to Rambo, after that episode aired, “CSI” received grateful letters from public officials and educators from around the country, who said that the fact that “CSI” had addressed water reuse had made it acceptable for them to broach this once-taboo topic.

The conference was also anchored by some heavy-hitters—Dr. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn (Ret.). Frumkin discussed the potential health impacts of climate change, which include increased levels of air pollution; higher incidence of allergies; geographic spread of vector-borne and waterborne diseases; severe disruptions to water and food supplies; and mental health problems, often resulting from exposure to natural disasters. McGinn explained that because climate change is a threat multiplier for instability, it could increase the risk of humanitarian disasters, failed states, civil conflict, extremism, competition over scarce natural resources, and mass migration.

In addition to panels, the conference also featured a one-act play, “Shuddering to Think,” about the challenges of incorporating serious issues into mainstream entertainment. It sounds dull—but was actually funny and incisive, thanks to sharp writing by Jon Robin Baird and adept acting by Bruce Davison, Scott Wolf, and Bradley Whitford, whom you may remember as Josh Lyman from The West Wing. Speaking after the performance about media’s power to convince the public to get serious about climate change, Whitford observed, “The press failed, the government failed, science failed—but Al Gore’s movie [An Inconvenient Truth] worked.”

Military leaders and climate experts gathered in Paris for a November 3-5 conference on the role of the military in combating climate change. A conference report will include “proven strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while improving military effectiveness.”