World Food Day

Food is one of the most basic of life's necessities, not just a source of nourishment but comfort and cultural identity. Yet all around the world there are people wondering where their next meal is coming from. The United Nations World Food Program says there are 925 million undernourished people in the world today.

The environmental toll of agriculture has been heavy, according to the researchers. Humans have already cleared 70 percent of all grasslands, half of all savannas, 45 percent of temperate deciduous forests, and 27 percent of tropical forests. In addition, intensification of agriculture -- changes in irrigation, fertilizer use, and other practices aimed at boosting per-acre yield -- has increased water pollution, local water shortages, and energy use. Strikingly, agricultural activities such as clearing land, growing rice, raising cattle, and overusing fertilizers make up the single largest contributor of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, accounting for roughly 35 percent of the total.

A team of researchers from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Germany has come up with a five-point plan to double the world's food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture.

”Feeding the nine billion people anticipated to live on Earth in 2050 without exhausting the Earth’s natural resources is possible, provided that we adopt a more sustainable food production approach.”

This is the conclusion from a paper just published in Nature by an international team of scientists. The study concludes that we can feed the increasing amount of people on this planet without exhausting the world’s resources.

Halting farmland expansion: Land clearing for agricultural purposes should stop, particularly in the tropical rainforest. Clearing land for agriculture cripples its ability to store carbon, recycle nutrients, retain water, and support a diverse array of plants and animals.

Improving agricultural yields: Many farming regions in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe are not living up to their potential for producing crops. They say improved use of existing crop varieties, better management and improved genetics could increase current food production by nearly 60 per cent.

Supplementing the land more strategically: Current use of water, nutrients and agricultural chemicals suffers from what the research team calls "Goldilocks' Problem": too much in some places, too little in others, rarely just right. The study recommends "strategic reallocation" of these essential elements.

Shifting diets: Growing animal feed or biofuels on prime croplands, no matter how efficiently, is a drain on human food supply, the researchers say. They say dedicating croplands to direct human food production could boost calories produced per person by nearly 50 per cent. Averaged across the globe, 35 percent of total crop production is for growing animal feed. It takes 30 pounds of grain to produce one pound of boneless beef. The study says shifting non-food uses such as animal feed or biofuel production away from prime cropland could make a big difference.

Reducing waste: One-third of the food produced by farms ends up discarded, spoiled or eaten by pests. Eliminating waste in the path that food takes from farm to mouth could boost food available for consumption another 50 per cent.

"For the first time, we have shown that it is possible to both feed a hungry world and protect a threatened planet," said lead author Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.

He also said " A lot of our current agricultural practices are driven by policy, government subsidies, trade regulations, and consumer preference. These can change over time."

Hmmm...SOYMB believes that the researcher may be exaggerating since there has been very little dispute that the world can feed its population - plus more - and do so benignly with less damage to the environment. He is also overly optimistic that problems that are inherent within the manner capitalism operates can be overcome by fiscal measures.

As Oliver de Schutter, Special Rapporteur on the right to food at the FAO Conference, November 2009, said: "We live in a world in which we produce more food than ever before and in which the hungry have never been as many.”

What’s wrong with capitalism is that if someone is hungry and needs food but has no money and if someone else has a field, will the owner of the field grow crops to feed the hungry person? No, they won’t or can’t, because it would not be profitable for them to do so. It’s not that they are a good or bad person; it’s just that the system doesn’t work that way.