Food and Agriculture

Policy wonks and academics produce voluminous tomes on sustainability issues, but how to get these before a larger audience? One wonkish think tank hard at work on this problem, the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, is producing a series of short films to tell the stories that move these concerns toward a wider audience. The idea is to take complex, interacting factors and show how they affect real people.

A documentary film, The Cotton Road, directed by Laura Kissel was shown on March 18^th at the Woodrow Wilson Center as part of the 23rd Environmental Film Festival in Washington. The film takes viewers on a journey with cotton from South Carolina to China that tries to stitch together some answers. More than 160 films from 31 countries are screened to promote dialogue and build understanding of environmental challenges and opportunities.

For the past three decades an onslaught of urban development, desertification, and pollution has been eating away at China’s once-endless sprawl of tiny farms. China is facing radical challenge to feed its large population. “You have urbanization — people travel abroad,” says Susan Chan Shifflett, China Environment Forum’s associate. “They go to France, they see cheese, and they think, ‘why can’t I have brie in China?’ They’re changing their diets — meat consumption has quadrupled over the past 30 years.”

Africa’s Sahel region is one of the most harsh environments on the planet with one of the highest birth rates as well. Food security, particularly when combined with population dynamics and the impact of climate change, is a monumental challenge. The Wilson Center’s Roger-Mark De Souza just returned from Niger, where he met with experts from a variety of countries for the purpose of identifying what works and what doesn’t. We discuss what he learned in this edition of Wilson Center NOW.

The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is ramping up talks with China, the world’s largest producer of apples, to allow both countries to ship more of the produce item across borders. China produced roughly half of the world’s supply, but it is a much bigger consumer of apples than exporter, according to the USDA, and the country will likely ship mostly Fuji apples to the United States, which will not add up to much — about 10,000 tons per year. The U.S., meanwhile, is the world’s largest exporter of fresh apples.