The world food crisis may not be new, said food-policy experts speaking on campus April 3, but it is certainly growing increasingly complex in terms of water, climate, energy and cost, to name just a few factors.

Tim Lang, a researcher at the Centre for Food Policy at the City University in London, was the keynote speaker at the "Visible Warnings: The World Food Crisis in Perspective" two-day conference at Cornell. World experts examined the history, economics, ethics, ecological implications and politics of food security and the current food crisis.

Part of the crisis, Lang said, stems from the enormity of the 20th-century food revolution. Repercussions of that revolution are widespread: Obesity has become a huge financial and health concern in developed countries; Coca-Cola's annual marketing budget is twice the budget of the World Health Organization; and on Lang's walk from his London train station to the bus stop, he passes 25 eating places. All this growth has had consequences to the environment, the economy, society and politics, he added.

Meanwhile, as Jane Silverthorne, deputy director of the National Science Foundation's Biological Division, noted in her talk on a similar topic April 7 at the Boyce Thompson Institute, more than 900 million people live with chronic hunger and 1.1 billion live on less than a $1 per day.

Another problem is that all the levels of governance are "distorted," "fractured" and "fissured" to the point where "there are no institutions that can respond to us ... we have to argue for new institutions, new ways of doing things," Lang said.

Recent global food reports concur that the world is facing a systems crisis, said Lang. We need new approaches that must include systemic kinds of thinking and input not only from social scientists and nutritionists but also from growers and bankers. The 21st century, he said, also presents new issues in addition to the old ones -- including climate, water, energy/fuel/oil, land use, soil, waste, population, urbanization, labor, nutrition and public health -- and they must all be woven together to resolve the current food crisis.

We also need new paradigms to measure good food systems that combine health-based epidemiology with ecological health, he said. For example, future diets could be assessed by how many hectares or how much water they require (e.g., beans require the fewest liters per calorie and beef the most). Such measurements create new patterns, Lang added, and federal agencies should be working on them.

In responding to Lang's talk, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Cornell's H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy, noted that real food prices have increased by only 4 percent per year over the last six years. The real problem, he said, is "dramatic price fluctuations" that are hard for poor people with very little financial buffer to absorb. The real food-price crisis, he added, occurs at local levels where, for example, regional droughts cause starvation. The world needs to link food democracy with sustainable management of natural resources, he added.

"When somebody does not have enough food to live a healthy and productive life, that person has a crisis," said Pinstrup-Andersen. "Millions face that crisis every day. We are talking as much about ethics as policy."

The conference was sponsored by the Polson Institute for Global Development, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Institute for Social Sciences and the Department of Development Sociology.