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Hello, I'm Mike Cannon, and this is conversation. Last week, the United Nations observed its 40th birthday in New York City. Most of the member countries were represented by heads of state or foreign ministers. Despite its obvious success in medicating world political violence, the United Nations is still witness to widespread warfare, terror, hunger and disease.

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One of the reasons that might be adduced for these continuing problems is the unequal distribution of the world's natural resources, either by nature or by man. I thought that we would talk about that on this conversation when I return in a moment with my guest conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day.

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Your host is Michael Vegan in professor of history and ethics and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Mhm. My guest on this conversation is Nigel Smith, associate professor of geography and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Florida.

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Nigel, Welcome to conversations. It's good to have you here and so appropriate to talk about natural resources at a time in which I suppose the world is has its gaze fixed globally, perhaps for the first time in a long while because of the 40th birthday of the United Nations.

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When you see the global village, as we're beginning to call the planet Earth, do you see us in a better condition? So far as natural resources are concerned today than we were 40 years ago? Yes, I do. Surprisingly, perhaps, considering how much strife and unrest and poverty and famine there is around the world, I feel this way for a number of reasons.

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Uh, perhaps the most important being that, uh, the global community is more aware of the problems of population growth, food production that has been in the past. And I see governments, individuals, scientists, universities, um, watchdog groups and so forth bringing this attention to bringing these problems to the attention of the world community and governments actually started to do something about the problems of feeding humanity, checking solar ocean, preventing as much environmental damage as possible.

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So in spite of much gloom and doom, I'm actually somewhat optimistic that mankind can in fact get a handle on these problems. What are some of the reasons again? Why we seem to have more arable land and better productivity off the land. You've mentioned some, but would not better pesticides be another reason for this?

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And the Green Revolution? Perhaps? Yes, I can remember. When I was a student, there was a book called a Famine 75 which predicted that much of Asia would be suffering from horrendous famine by 1975. Well, the green Revolution came along and changed that, uh, high yielding varieties of wheat and rice were developed for, uh, irrigated areas of the tropics with the use of fertilizers and pest control.

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And we find, for example, India which back in the 1966 were suffering from horrendous famine, at least as bad as Ethiopia's right now and now they're exporting wheat, and their population has increased by something like 220 million people, which is the size of population in the United States.

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So I've seen a country like India which has now got nearly 800 million people, get a handle on its problems in terms of feeding its population. And I think Africa can also do the same. But you must have vision and some optimism I think. Earlier this fall I had Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winning originator of the Green Revolution.

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I suppose we could call it the program, and he mentioned India and also China as another country that is now exporting grain. That's right, with a population of one billion, has done a superb job. I think they've taken somewhat different tactical than India has. Their population is dependent on more greater variety of crops as I see it.

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But they've gone into some high tech type of agriculture, such as hybrid rice. In fact, hybrids are often match maligned as being, uh, the putting farmers at the mercy of seed companies and so forth to go back. But if you look for the country with the most hybrid rice in production in its China, and the reason for this is that hybrid rice produces something like 10 to 15% more than ordinary rice, and the Chinese have got one quarter of their Iceland now in hybrid rice.

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So here's a country that had had a tremendous population problem, one billion people. They had to try and tackle it in one of the ways that that's not the only way But one of the ways have done is to go into hybrid rice production. Now when we use that word hybrid, are we describing a process that is genetic and character?

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Are we talking about genetic engineering of Well, it's not not recombinant D n a or sort of laboratory thing. It's just crossing to two different rice lines and to get what we call hybrid vigor or hetero CIS, as the biologists call it, and you get usually 10 to 20% yield increase.

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But it does take control breeding, and it does take organized seed production and the case of China. This is in the hands of a state run operation in the United States. Hybrid seeds are usually produced by private companies. It can be done by either as long as it's quality control.

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You mentioned the scary predictions for 1975. I suppose it was about at that same time that many people were predicting that the Earth was going to run out of arable land. And yet we not only have seen stabilising of arable land, have we not also seen an increase in discovered or developed arable land?

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Well, yes, there's been in the last 10 15 years, there's been more land brought into production, particularly the Third World. But that course that process can continue indefinitely, and we've got we expect something like a doubling or even tripling the world population before it levels off, so that process can't continue forever.

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And so now more and more governments and agricultural sort organizations realize that we must produce more from the existing man that is now in production. And one of the reasons for this is that if you continue to clear new areas for land for food production, you're going to destroy some of the remaining natural habitats primary, primary, rainforest and grasslands and so forth.

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And these have their intrinsic value for aesthetic scientific reasons and, ironically, for food production. Because many of the wild habitats or natural areas contain plants which are relatives of our crops, and they contain genes for resistance to diseases and pests and adverse soils and climates. These genes may not be found in cultivated forms, so it's very important that we try and intensify our agriculture as opposed to making more extensive.

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So we're running out of room a little bit. In other words, the belt can't open up many, many more notches now. We now have to squeeze as much as we can increase what production with what we have. And is there not a danger that as trees are removed, the land becomes sandy and dry and blows blows away, topsoil blows away sometimes.

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Well, that can happen. And soil erosion, of course, is a serious problem in many parts of the world. Uh, however, of course, you can take corrective measures. You can put windbreaks in there and you can tear us the source so it doesn't get eroded away as quickly.

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But I'd like to touch on that just for a moment about this business of deforestation and changing the climate. There is some indication that if we continue to cut the tropical rain forests of the world, there are some models that predict there will be a drying of the climate in certain areas, particularly in the temperate grain growing or the Midwest farming belt.

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If you like those kind of environments, if that is true and we don't quite sure, but I have a hunch, that's probably correct. We want to be bit careful here, because if we have a downturn in agricultural productivity from the primary farmlands, the great, the food basket of the world if you like, uh, it's not gonna look so good for many of these countries that have to import food.

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So I think there's very good reasons to try and intensify agricultural areas we have now and save those tropical rainforests for other reasons. Climatic, stability and other factors. Aren't we losing a lot of topsoil in our own Midwestern breadbasket states right now, right in the backyard here, That's right.

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And here we have the U. S. Agriculture, which has done a brilliant job of, of efficiency, of production and so on and so forth. What? You've got 3% of the population of the United States living on farms, and they produce enough food to not only feed the U.

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S population, but to export 200 countries and so forth, but at a cost. And it's going out, of course, through the Mississippi, out into the Gulf, tons and tons of topsoil. But again measures. I'm somewhat optimistic because measures are being taken. There's no till farming to reduce soil erosion and our measures being taken now I don't want to whitewash it.

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There's still some problems, but at least some corrective measures are being taken. Why are we so astonishingly successful at farming and drawing out of the earth? Such enormous yields, by comparison with, say, farmers in the Soviet Union? Well, the United States is blessed with pretty good chunk of real estate.

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Uh, the US prairie soils, the Midwest are infinitely better than what Russia has to farm with. Also, climatically were a little bit better blessed the Soviet Union. It has much harsher, colder climates, generally speaking, than the United States. So from the outset, the United States, I think, had an advantage.

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Flat soils that could be developed easily put out the railroads and get them into production. Secondly, of course, I think free enterprise has had a lot to do with this stimulated production efficiency, as opposed to the Soviet Union, with its rigid quotas and lack of incentives.

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So I think that the United States is productive for a number of reasons, and Soviet Union is an importer of grain to the tune of 40 million tons a year right now from the United States, mostly while they're diversifying after the boycott of course, Now they're buying it from Argentina and other sources as much as possible.

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They don't want to be quite so beholden to Uncle Sam as they were in the past. Yes, let's talk about Africa, Nigel, Because the world's attention for the last year has been focused on the starving millions in Ethiopia, Nigeria, so many other countries. In the subsidy, he'll come areas of North Africa of Africa.

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There, one finds agricultural practices which have not proved to be successful, at least not proved to be sufficient to feed the teeming populations. Combined with a drought that seems to be long term. Is there any hope that we can see agriculture brought to a level that will be sufficient for feeding the native populations in the next two or three years?

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Well, not in the next 23 years. I'm afraid that the picture will remain somewhat gloomy. There will be still malnutrition and in some areas, perhaps starvation. Unfortunately for the next few years, because Africa's food production problems that require long term plan Africa could easily feed itself, but its existing farming systems have to be adjusted and improved.

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Some of them worked quite well, but the problem is now. Of course, Africa's population is much higher than it has ever been, so we must intensify. Now. There are a number of problems here. First of all, the ecology of Africa is extremely diverse, so there's no one single magic solution that you can say.

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Okay, all you need to do is adopt this variety and you're off and running. There won't be a big green revolution for Africa, such as it happened with The rice is in the paddy rice is of Asia or the dwarf wheats in the Punjab of the Indian subcontinent.

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So they've got to be a lot of in depth on site research to adapt crops to particular environments. That's one problem now. The problem is that I would have to say that African governments in general are younger than many parts of the Latin American Asian regions and therefore the not as well organized agricultural research organizations in Africa are much younger than in other parts of the world.

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Mexico City in Peru had universities in the 15 hundreds. Africa can't boast of anything like that, so they just don't have the skill mount power in place that they've developed a third major problem, I think for Africa has historically been after independence, usually in the fifties or sixties.

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They thought industrialization was the way to go. Let's join, let's get right up there and let's skip the agricultural development stage Well, they're finding out that that didn't work out. And however, policies have been not favoring farm production have not favoured farmers. They have usually been had ray low prices for products, so farmers have no incentive to produce much in excess of their own needs.

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So what capital cities have done like Diego's and other countries have simply import the food, often with aid money? And so there's not been enough incentive for agricultural aid money coming from the United States and other donor countries. If you're West Africa and French speaking, the French probably helped him, so there hasn't been enough.

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And now, of course, the politicians often don't perceive their power bases, particularly in the rural areas, so they cater to the urban poor and open people, and to keep a lid on food riots. You keep your food prices low artificially, and but that doesn't give the farmer much incentive.

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If you look at the soil in the say hell, that tier of countries just below the same. How does it compare with the soil in the Midwest? United is not as good. It's not terrible, but it's not as good. Some some scope irrigation there's some scope for crops are adapted to that kind of an environment.

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Now, of course, Africa's going for large parts of Africa in the last few years have gone through a dry spell. Now they've been dry spells before severe dry spells in Africa before. But Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington has come up with an interesting idea.

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It's somewhat controversial, but he feels that man made changes in Africa. Deforestation, overgrazing, fuel, wood gathering have pushed the brink of the ecosystem to the breaking point. And he what he thinks is happening now, and I think he may well be right. I'll sort of throw in my my bet along there with him, that what we're witnessing in Africa today.

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Sure, we've gone into a very dry cycle, but I don't think you're going to return to quote normalcy. I think we're going to see a gradual drawing of the climate in Africa, and this of course, is very alarming, if that's true, and I think why would that be true?

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Because vegetation has a very important part to play in recycling water. And if you cut that down, the water falls, flows off into the rivers and then out to the sea, and it doesn't stay in the system very long. And so, with continued deforestation, this may well happen.

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And, of course, that is the case. Uh, we have to do with just crops for drier environment, and it doesn't make the job any easier. We must, in fact, have a massive replanting program for Africa for trees. What are some of the crops that are grown?

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Would they be sorghum? Things like that were different parts of Africa, different crops that would say maze and maniac or cassava. The two main food crops in most of Africa saw guns to some degree, and then in Ethiopia, you have locally developed grains such as teff, which most people probably never eaten.

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Small, little seeded think and there are several types of millets in different parts of Africa. So which one of these crops could use some work and has to be adapted to different environments. There's no can't simply import to, say hybrid corn from Iowa and just say here, go with it.

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It has to be developed the local situation. Part of the reason is because local tastes different not only if we got to mold the crops to fit the different environments of Africa, which are changing, and they have to have a dynamic reading program to meet those changing circumstances.

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But the cultures of Africa are very diverse. Some people may prefer a shiny white corn. Others may want a yellow one. Others may make an orange one, and so that complicates the job of for breeders. You can't just import one kind of grain quality, so local cultural taste and their preferences are often very important.

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Also. What about South Africa? Does it have a rich farm economy? Much South Africa? Yes, is well. South Africa. Republic of South Africa has one of the most successful farming systems in the world, but certainly it's very, very productive. South Africa is exporting food to about 11 12 black African nations that's not widely known.

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Black African countries, for obvious reasons of pride, don't like to admit that, but they have a great deal to offer. South Africa has a great deal of black Africa in terms of helping it feed itself. They've been very successful. General, let's cross the oceans and come to a country on this side of the of the world.

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And I mean Brazil, a country with which you are very familiar. I'd like to find out first how you came to concentrate your interests on Brazil. And then secondly, what do you think is the future of that country? And what while you're ruminating on that, let me say that at the Army War College about 10 years ago, I heard the director of the C I a predict that Brazil would be the next great world power, that it had the resources and that it had the momentum.

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And by the turn of the 21st century, we should see it moving into a position of of superpower. Was that too optimistic? Projection? I think we might push it back a few decades. In other words, perhaps not at the turn of not at the twilight of this century, but maybe towards the middle of the next century, I think China well, come along a bit first before Brazil.

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But Brazil, of course, is a country that's always fascinated me. Since I started reading tars and books, remember, that's really what we started me going in the tropics and so forth. Uh, these aesthetic things, as opposed to scientific things, can get somebody hooked on the subject I remember was fascinated with Charles and climbing trees, all that diverse ecosystem.

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I thought I'd love to go and look at some of these places. One day when I was a student, I had a professor was organizing a field trip to Brazil to the Amazon. I thought, This is great and I studied hard and I got an A and he took me along.

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And indeed, it was absolutely intoxicating that love the climate, that people seem to be warm and friendly and interesting, and it was fascinating. So that's how I got to study the Amazon. And that's been a focus of much of my concern. And it's been a good place to cut my teeth because it's a very complex ecosystem, one of the most complex in the world.

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There's a lot of development going on there so I could see dynamic processes of change culturally and ecologically, and so I continue to have an interest in Brazil, although my research now is a more global nature. But returning to why I think Brazil will take a little bit longer.

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Sure, it's in terms of natural resources. It's one of the best endowed. But what slowed it right down has been very important fossil fuels. So that put a crimp in its development process. And now, of course, it's heavily indebted. And so it slowed slowed down that stride a little bit.

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But I think since it's got a population of about 140 million as nearly as big as the continental US, it's nearly as well in redoubt, in many resources, not quite as good as soils, but in many resources, I think, perhaps give it about 50 60 years.

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Nothing has a good chance. There won't be a superpower. Tell me about the Amazon. It's a legendary river. It is supposed to be long and having to have an infinite variety of plants, trees growing on its banks. And I suppose animals and birds abounded. Profusion throughout its length.

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Tell me how you have experienced the Amazon, what it is meant to you? Well, it's been so many wonderful experiences of 14 years of field work there in various places. I think one of the things that I'll always strikes me about the Amazon, of course, is its sheer size.

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It's the world's largest wilderness. It's about almost half the continental United States and a tropical rainforest. It's the world's largest remaining tropical rainforest, and therefore, of course, it has some of the mystery and awe of the such areas that will have. And I've been up in remote rivers.

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I don't want to sound like a sort of born trekking off in the jungle like this, but I've been on a survey teams looking for Indian groups ahead of highways and up in remote river regions. And I've really enjoyed the natural landscape, the sort of warm humidity.

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That's why I like Florida to, of course, to some degree. But what I've also really enjoyed it is seeing how these people make a living from that kind of environment, fishing the waters, hunting the forest, planting in the forest, the kind of problems they've encountered in their local solutions to this problem.

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So it's been a very educational experience for me. I've always gone there to learn, not to teach. And whenever I've done any research projects in the Amazon, I've never gone in there as they say in Brazil and mystery a master to come and tell them what they should be doing.

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I've always gone to see what they can teach me about what they're doing. And of course, hopefully that in that process, one hopes that there's some feedback into the development process that can develop. That feedback is rather inadequate. To be honest, the link between academic research about what's going on and then the policy making process.

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I'm now working on trying to improve that kind of a link. Have you found native populations deep in the reaches of the Amazon, living in a fairly primitive state? I haven't personally had an experience with Indian groups at least relatively isolated kinds. I've spend a little time visiting contacted Indian groups that as people are already wearing clothes and have radios and so forth in contact with society, the Brazilian government has had a policy of trying to keep people from visiting those kind of things, and I think it's a sensible one.

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You don't have hordes of people descending on these Indian groups and messing up their cultures. Anthropologists, of course. And some geographers have done that. One of the reasons I haven't is that, of course, there's enormous investment in learning a language, often to study one of these groups, and there may only be 50 of them left.

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So I've taken a somewhat more pragmatic approach of studying peasant society or people who are mixed ethnic origin living within the national society. It's still in a in a primitive way, if you like. Is the Amazon healthy environment Well, I consider I've always people ask me about that when I go down.

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Aren't you scared about going into that dangerous jungle with those beasts and the diseases and insects? And I'm much more scared walking at night in Washington D. C. Than I am in the jungle. I've had malaria. There are dangers, of course, Yeah, but it's not as bad as people make out, I think.

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Well, I would say that there's no more unhealthy than any other part of the world that doesn't have a primary medical care. If you have primary medical care, you have access to doctors and so on. It will be just as healthy there as anywhere else. When you go to the cities in Brazil, what do you experience there?

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How does city life differ from city life in the United States? To take one example? Well, in many ways, I like city life in Brazil better. One of the reasons I do is that if you walk around a city in the United States, well, if you go out in the suburbs, people inside, watching TV and I got the doors locked and the air conditioners going in a Brazilian town or city, people like to sit outside and they chat and shoot the breeze and you can go on by and you can talk and you hear them commenting on the passers bys.

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Very much more human type of contact society. I like that. Does the weather favor that kind of activity to some degree, or women as it is here? Of course, it is changing because now more and more presidents are having air conditioning and TV, so they're sitting inside like they are in the United States and Britain.

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But Brazil, I used to know more, like, say, in the sixties and the seventies and eighties. So it's changing now was one of which you could walk around the streets and you could strike up a conversation very easily. Of course, there's some other things that aren't so good.

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Many of these cities are built around 15, 1600 therefore traffic is a tremendous problem trying to get through, so there are some negative aspects. But I would say in a nutshell, that the many Brazilian cities, I think have much more of a flare as wide Aviva.

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Mhm silver, warm human contact. Now I like living in America. There many conveniences to that. But it's that human contact, I think so interesting with Brazilian cities. Indeed, when I went to Brasilia for the first time, which is the showplace capital, I went there in 1970.

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I found it like a desert I didn't like it at all, had all these freeways and these people living in blocks block apartments. And there was there wasn't that kind of rhythm of life that you could see, and I hear that the Brazilians don't like it.

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It's sterile city Brazilians are Brazilian izing Brazilian now, so it's not quite as bad as it was when it started out. And in fact you'll see people get quite upset if you criticize Brasilia, so they are adapting to it. But it's true, certainly at the outset of trying to open up the interior.

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They built that thing out in the boondocks to try and develop that area and there was tremendous resistance. People were just hated it. They wanted to be by the beach in Rio de Janeiro, which is where the capital had been. When do you go back? Well, I'm not sure when Brazil is going to be appearing on the on the Internet.

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The next, I think, more likely to be back in Africa, partly because my work in recent years, as I still have an interest in Brazil and Latin America, of course. And indeed I was in Latin America this summer. But I consult with the consultant group of on international agricultural research at the World Bank on these very issues of agriculturists research for developing regions in the Third World and I often travel on research missions to India, Philippines and it looks like Africa, I don't know, but I think it's more likely to go back to Africa.

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So you may be fastening your attention and energies on Africa for the time being, because this is a thing that is causing so much concern right now. Yes, indeed, all over the world there is that concern. And that concern has expressed itself in gifts of food which have poured into the port cities of Africa, where much of it has rotted on the wharfs for the failure of the native governments to take it into the interior.

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Why is that? Is it because of lack of transportation, or is there some other darker reason? Well, there is the infrastructure problem. I mean, very few African countries have a well developed infrastructure, roads, electricity. So I think I don't think it's really by design or malicious intention for that to be piling up like that.

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I think it's just simply that they just don't have the trucks or the road network to get it out there. But I think thing to remember about that kind of thing is that it is important to try and help people in their hour of need like that.

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But it is a short term solution, and I think more attention has to be focused now on how these people going to help feed themselves in the future. I think that's what we really need to be in the next two or three years, the next 10, 20 years.

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It's a long term in technology development in general. You need a lead time of 10 to 20 years from the time you start researching on a problem to coming out with a solution. So we won't expect anything any dramatic turnabout. I don't think in the next few years, of course, the rain's coming back and they are much part of Africa.

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Now. That's going to be helpful, of course, but we need to think about some of the long term issues as well. Thank you, Nigel, for explaining all of that to me and to my viewers on conversation. Nigel Smith, associate professor of geography in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Florida.

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Thank you. And thanks to my viewers for joining us on conversation. But it's Yeah, mhm. Next case. Yeah. No. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah, yourself. Mhm.