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Can the earth provide enough food for 9 billion people?
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by Sanjay Jha | April 21, 2008 at 09:21 pm
450 views | 12 Recommendations | 5 comments
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Increasing food prices and its shortage have people worried all over the world and even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has warned that the food crisis could set off a disastrous chain of events worldwide.
The UN's World Food Program has also come out with a warning that increasing food prices will affect a large number of people and it will only be able to feed 60 percent of the number of people it had originally hoped. That could mean up to 100,000 people will now go without.
The world is an odd place. A tight global food situation with record-high grain prices presents the possibility of increasing malnutrition, perhaps famine, in parts of Africa and South Asia. Yet an estimated 1.6 billion adults, about a quarter of the world's 6.7 billion people, are overweight, some of them obese.
As a result, chubby Americans are spending roughly $1 billion a year to lose a few pounds with special diets, treadmills, etc., while hundreds of millions in poor nations are scrambling to buy enough food to add a little weight. "You couldn't write any stranger fiction," says Joseph Chamie, former head of the United Nation's Population Division.
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James Pate
Downtown Toronto (Kensington Market / Chinatown / Grange Park), Ontario, Canada
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (5)
at 21:42 on April 21st, 2008
Sanjay Jha, I like this story. It's good stuff. Certainly disturbing, Australia has suffered a 6 year drought resulting in Rice production decimated. A food source relied on in Asian Countries.
The World certainly has more than enough arable land to support food production, it is just that the People to farm it has fallen by the wayside as farms go out of business because farm wages have never ever kept up with inflation, as the middle man takes to bulk of the wealth. This has been going on since the Dirty 30's.
at 23:28 on April 21st, 2008
Sanjay Jha, I like this story. It's good stuff. This problem is not isolated to certain places in the world, it has the potential to affect everyone. There are many reasons for this problem including but not limited to droughts (as Barry mentioned), other environmental factors, and food diverted to make fuel.
at 23:43 on April 21st, 2008
As for using food for fuel when people are starving is genocide, but try telling that to Nobel Winner Al Gore and his followers who are pushing for Biofuels. How 's that for an "Inconvienent Truth"!
at 23:40 on April 21st, 2008
As James and I state Canada is pretty much empty, with tens of tens of millions of acres of arable land, same for the USA and Russia. All of Canadas Land is centred on about 20% of the country
Canada, with 3.3 people per square kilometre, has one of the lowest population densities in the world. In 2001, most of Canada's population of 30 million lived within 200 kilometres of the United States. In fact, the inhabitants of our three biggest cities — Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver — can drive to the border in less than two hours. Thousands of kilometres to the north, our polar region — the Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut — is relatively empty, embracing 41% of our land mass but only 0.3% of our population. Human habitation in the solitary north clings largely to scattered settlements: villages among vast expanses of virgin ice, snow, tundra and taiga.
Source: Adapted from Statistics Canada, Population and Dwelling Counts, for Census Divisions, Census Subdivisions (Municipalities) and Designated Places, 2001 and 1996 Censuses — 100% data, Catalogue number 93F0050XDB01003.
at 05:23 on April 22nd, 2008
Sanjay Jha, Food for 10 bn would be possible, but first missing sanitation with epidemic infections will make life to hell; India china southamerica has practically no waste water treatment, fresh water is pumped out of the same source. Many people are thick from birth and transmit diseases by air travel without knowing it.