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- With up to 3 billion more people to feed by 2050, and increased protein in many diets, it is estimated that current global food production must be increased by 80-100%. Source
Image courtesy mac steve@Flickr
- China is now consuming 55kg of meat per person per year, which is half to one third of what the EU and the US are consuming. Source
- Agriculture accounts for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Source
- 97.5% of the Earth’s water is saltwater. Of the 2.5% available as freshwater, almost 70% is locked in glaciers and the rest is groundwater, lakes and rivers. Thus only a small
percentage of the Earth’s water is readily available for human consumption and agricultural production. Distributed among the world’s population, there is approximately 1,400 cubic meters of water available per person per year, however currently the average westerner consumes around 2,500 cubic meters per year. Source - Agriculture is a significant user of water in Europe, accounting for around 24% of total water use. This share varies markedly, however, and can reach up to 80% in parts of southern Europe, where irrigation of crops accounts for virtually all agricultural water use. Source
- In developing countries, agriculture currently consumes over 70 percent of the world’s water. Source
- China has close to a quarter of the world’s population to feed, but only 7 percent of its farmland. A similar situation applies in India. Source
- Since 2000, the demand for food has been growing faster than the supply. Source
- There have been 30 years of under-investment into agriculture. Source
- The number of people suffering from hunger is larger than the number of cars in the world today. Source
- The 2008 spike in global food prices caused riots in more than thirty countries and sent more than 100 million people into extreme poverty.
- More than five million children a year die from malnutrition. Source
- In the first half of 2009 high food prices have pushed another 105 million people into hunger, raising the total number of hungry people to over 1 billion. Source
I can pretty much guess what most people would answer to this question: the global economic crisis, recession, the financial crisis etc. Yet, they’d be wrong. As todays Financial Times puts it very well:
As we agonise about the recession, we should remember that humanity’s greatest economic problem is more basic: how to get enough food, a challenge still faced by millions. /…/ Food security is the greatest threat to human well-being today. It should not be lost in quibbles about the branding of Parma ham.
You can read it here – Financial Times: The world must feed its hungry.
Similar concerns were voiced by the Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman just over a year ago in his column in the New York Times. He cites three main reasons for the food crisis:
How did this happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy.
Dr. Nina Fedoroff, who has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, told the BBC One Planet programme that there are already too many people living on Planet Earth.
Cited as “one of the most influential science advisors in the US government”, dr. Fedoroff said that the emphasis should be on trying decrease the growth rate of the global population, since the planet can’t support many more people. I think it’s a very relevant question, one that people usually tend to disregard (probably due to the sensitivity of it) – considering that the size of our planet is constant and that there is a limit to the agricultural land that can be cultivated sustainably, the question of the maximal population able to survive on Planet Earth is an essential one.
She also makes a good comparison between GM foods and medicine: “We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century”. I don’t want to start debating the merits or risks of genetically modified food, but I do believe that GM food is approached with a certain amount of unhealthy and emotional criticism, which makes the possibility of constructive debate quite impossible.
Dr Fedoroff also sttated that in her view the US sooner or later has to sign up to legally binding targets on carbon emissions.
The article can be read here: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Earth population ‘exceeds limits’
