PolitiCook.net

9.2 billion by 2050. Will We Have Enough Food & Water?

The answer is no. Since 1950, the earth’s population has risen by more than four billion people, to 6.6 billion and UN projections put world population at 9.2 billion by 2050. The world currently faces a food crisis before the full impact of climate change and a 42% rise in population. The Malthusian vision may yet be vindicated. Most economists today are lucky that their predictions don’t even have a shelf life. In this modern age of punditry, brass balls are a lot more important than prescience.

Food and water are essential elements that all human beings should have access to in order to live. Access to the minimum essential food & water are considered human rights. All else pales in significance. Read more »

Tackling World Food Crisis: Agricultural Reform

It took more than 400 scientists and three years of haggling, wrangling and heated arguments to come up with the report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) as dire warnings from the World Bank, the IMF and the UN’s World Food Programme splashed the front pages of the world press in the last few weeks (the Executive summary, the Global summary and all its regional summaries are here in both pdf & HTML forms, a great trove of information for those who are interested). I have read all summaries and will endeavor to read the regional pieces as well in the next few weeks.

The 2,500 pages report concluded that while advances over the last fifty years had resulted in the world’s food production increasing at a much faster rate than its population, the present system of production and trade meant the benefits were spread unevenly, and as we know, at intolerable price paid by the small farmers, workers and rural communities and of course, the environment.

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Subsidized Bread Staving Off Starvation & Uprisings.

You better get used to this sort of headline. It’s going to get a lot tougher for most of us on this planet. You heard about poor Haitians having to eat mudcakes as “food” of the last resort. Let me give you an account of another country on the brink of disaster: Egypt’s government is now struggling to contain a political crisis as violent clashes have broken out at long lines for subsidized bread, and the president, worried about unrest, has ordered the army to step in to provide more. The president himself had to intervene. You might say, that’s his job. Well, yes, but he is unable to control soaring food prices, none of us can. The Egyptian authorities are fearful that this could be a prelude to a chronic shortage of wheat worldwide and a return to lawlessness.

Nearly 40 percent Egypt’s 76 million people live below or near the poverty line of $2 a day and quite a few on less than a dollar a day. The prices of staples such as cooking oil and rice have nearly doubled in recent months forcing them to ban rice export for a period of six months.

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