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A Look At the World's Dwindling Food Supply
An anonymous reader writes "The UK's Government Office of Science has released a report titled 'The Future of Food and Farming' which takes a look at, among other related concerns, how to continue to feed a global population that is on pace to reach 9 billion by the year 2050. 'The report calls for more innovation to increase production. That means using the potential benefits of GM crops and other biotech approaches, although these won't be a cure-all. There's room for improvement on the consumption end, too, as 30 percent of food never makes it into a human stomach; in the developed world, we let produce slowly rot in the backs of our fridges, and the in developing world, farm wastage causes a similar problem. ... Rising energy prices influence food security, with a correlation between food price and oil price that has become stronger over time, first increasing food production costs, and later by encouraging the diversion of food stocks into biofuel production.'"
When 30% of our food doesn't even get eaten?
desalination..
All the problems are political. There are no technical obstacles that haven't been overcome.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Malthusian scaremongering.
...the hydrocarbons for use in plastics and fertilizer...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
You willing to kill yourself and your family?
If not then why would you expect anyone else to? If so then then there's little point in my replying since you aren't here anymore, right?
Particularly since there is no problem in the industrial world. Countries with a stable political system, modern infrastructure and so on do not have problems producing enough food. I'm not saying every nation stands as an island and produces everything it consumes, but collectively they can produce not just enough food, but far more than is needed. No problem at all.
The problem is in less developed nations. Particularly it is a problem in ones with unstable and/or inefficient governments. Zimbabwe is a wonderful example. Used to produce plenty for export, now requires food aid. There was no ecological disaster, just a dictator who doesn't care or understand.
So if you are talking about food problems where they actually exist on a global scale, which is what this seems to be talking about, the the problem is not one of "How can we grow enough food?" it is "How can we get people to stop killing each other and destroying the infrastructure used to grow food?"
If we had a world where all nations were doing a reasonably efficient job of this, and we still had shortages, or were coming up on shortages, then it would be a different problem. But that is not the case at all.
So unless this report is talking about coming problems for developed countries, if it is saying that in the US and Europe shortages are going to start developing unless there's new technology, then I'm calling BS and like you thinking there is an ulterior motive.
Now none of that is to say that more efficiency is a bad thing. Use less, have more, it is a basic principle of life. However let's be real about what the problem is we are talking about and thus what would need to be done to solve it.
If more people cooked their own food they'd have not only a better appreciation of it and be more likely to eat everything they made (and eat healthier), but would save money and stop the wasteful practices of many prefab food companies. I know a lot of these companies sell their excess food to one another (or use it in other products), but I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of the "30% waste" is on the developer's end, not the consumers.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Ten years ago critics were worried that EU's agricultural support forced African farmers to give up on farming. Now we are worried that the rising food prices force African farmers to buy food from abroad. That confuses me.
Perhaps the problem is price fluctuations. A poor farmer cannot afford to invest in better production methods, because he cannot afford to risk bankrupcy. If the prices were more stable then the risks would be lower.
A quick search would've provided you with links to back up your data, or to refute it. For example:
Mentioned elsewhere in the article, ideal efficiency is 3% loss, with averages "closer to" 10% (implying the range is probably more like 5-15% loss rather than 10-20% loss). And don't think farmers aren't keenly aware of this and will do just about anything to increase their yields. These are machines that cost the equivalent of a nice house in most places ($250,000 on average) and if there's a newer model with higher efficiency then most farmers will trade up to the latest and greatest. Even a small increase in efficiency over several years could cover the cost of the equipment.
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- farming is one of the most advanced areas for technology, biology, chemistry, etc. These are not slack-jawed yokels trotting behind horses. Even the average family farmer works > 1000 acres with only 1 or 2 people and has technology the rest of us have only dreamed of. GPS when it was otherwise only available to military and government applications, satellite maps, sophisticated data collection sensors to track yields, self-driving vehicles, market tracking tools that rival anything wall street brokers can think up, etc. Of course it's also a metric pantload of physical labor, long hours, and a livelihood that is directly affected and threatened by "acts of god" the rest of us would completely ignore (a hail shower might dent your car and cost you $500 in repairs, but it could ruin a farmer's entire crop and cost him $100,000 or more).
The answer is not GM foods, as much as I love technology,we just haven't been able able to solve our other problems, like greedy ass, unethical corporations. Greed is the reason people don't get to eat, not any failing of technology or logistics. I haven't finished this article yet, but so far it pretty much seems like a scare tactic plea for the acceptance of GM foods and cloning so that mega-corp monopolies like Monsanto can can keep on raking in the dough. 10 pages in and it's basically only said, in a nutshell, that funding the research of new technology is the only answer to the growing problem of food shortages. Asking for money, asking for deregulation.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
So what you are going to get is billions of angry militant and completely desperate and fearless teenagers attacking us anyway they can. Well it is already happening in a small scale, just imagine the present terrorism problem times a million.
Of course, the elephant in the room is, if we raise to the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050, we'll have to feed 20 billion by 2100. If we continue like that, Earth will resemble some hellish place, overpopulated, over-harvested, polluted and war-torn. (There won't be any elephants left, for that matter, in our outside of rooms.)
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The problem is not whether we can feed nine billion humans, it is whether we can feed ten billion humans, then twenty billion, then fifty billion.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I'm willing to not breed.
We don't need to kill people to control population, you just have to stop making new people. I'm not sure why this is so hard for people to understand. Is it really that complicated of an equation? I'm serious. I don't get it.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
require license to procreate.
reduce situations like... parents on welfare +5kids.
You heartless swine! What about all the managers of the charities? Who will pay them and their expense accounts? What about the officials in the countries receiving aid? Without those donations to siphon off, how will they pay the service charges on their Swiss accounts?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
As others have mentioned, this is clearly GM propaganda advertising. Quite apart from curbing wastage there are also subsidies in most developed companies which pay farmers for not growing crops. If there were a problem feeding the population (and it may not be at 9 bil but it will come eventually) the solution will be in curbing population growth not in creating more food. Other resources even scarcer than food like energy and clean water will be a major problem before food is. There is a clear and obvious way to rein in population growth, and no white elitists, it is not to kill off all the poor brown people. Even ignoring the ethical side of this suggestion it is still merely a temporary drop in population. We are talking about a growth problem not a numbers problem and any solution that does not curb growth is not a solution at all. Statistically richer developed countries have little to no population growth outside of immigration, and even in those countries the impoverished contribute much more to the birth rate. The statistics clearly show a connection between poverty and population growth. The key then to bringing world population growth under control is eliminating poverty. The cost of eliminating poverty worldwide would run into the 100s of billions for a few years and would then be self sustaining. In terms of global spending for example defence spending, this is peanuts. Given the clear solutions available for the actual problem at hand, and the relative cheapness and massive cost effectiveness of those solutions, anyone who claims that this is an issue of food production is either failing to look at the big picture, or has another agenda. I can understand that the rich elites of the world don't want to give up their stranglehold on world economics, but I won't swallow this crap about it being a food problem. We have a population growth problem, which is caused by a poverty problem, prevented from solution by a greed problem.
Not true. Countries with stable food supplies and secure, healthy, well educated societies have very low birth rates. And besides, our entire raison d'etre is procreation, until we infest the entire universe, and beyond...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The point is to stop giving direct aid, which then makes them dependent on more aid. If you actually want any sort of long-term success, you have got to provide support for them to become independent. Sending food, and driving local farmers out of business is simply not useful.
Moreover, "aid" is big business. Look at the number of organizations that make good money, leeching off the never ending stream of money. If one dares to question how beneficial the "aid" actually is, then one is suddently "Hitler".
Thank you for proving Godwin's law yet again...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
That's overly simplistic, though. Animals eat plants that humans can't. Until you figure out a way for humans with their resolutely omnivorous digestive system to eat the kind of tough grasses and heathers that ruminants thrive on, we can't eat the kind of plants that animals do.
Most of the world is not arable farmland. It's either too wet, too rocky, too precipitous or has the wrong type of soil to grow crops. Again, if you can figure out a way to grow your lettuce and carrots in an acidic peat bog slanted at 45 degrees then great, but right now it's really more suitable for grazing sheep on. You could drain it and slather it with all sorts of chemical fertilisers, but that would make a mess of other parts of the environment. When the oil runs out, those fertilisers will be really, really expensive, and without grazing livestock the PETA types are going to starve.
Greed is a retarded concept, and can be more accurately replaced by fear.
You fear losing a job, you fear being reliant on your neighbouring countries/states/etc, so you pressure your politicians.
Your politicians fear losing their job, politicians fear being seen negatively, so they enact measures which "protect" your jobs and food sources.
Then the price of food goes up for you, and your neighbour.
Here's where it gets tricky.
If you're in a poor country:
This price increase hurts, you yell louder at your politicians, they enact more policies, they appeal to the greater international community, and you get aide, subsidized food, etc.
These policies/subsidies/aide drive the price of food down, and reduces the local incentive to produce.
The result is a feedback loop, until you've destroyed your economy, and created immense famine.
If you're in a rich country:
This price increase annoys, you yell louder at your politicians, they enact more policies, and you get subsidies and tariffs.
These policies/subsidies/tariffs drive the price of food down, and reduces the local incentive to produce.
The result is a feedback loop, but since this is such a small sector of your economy, you likely won't feel it, you just watch the prices go up, and get annoyed at "big fat greedy corporations".
Your price rises, are more likely to have an affect on the poorer countries which rely on you.
The further you go, and the higher this pseudo equilibrium price becomes, the more sensitive your economy is to shocks in associated markets, so as the price of oil goes up, the price of food will also go up, and this relationship will become stronger over time.
While this is an extreme generalization, and of course there are other factors (global warming, disasters, etc) which could be solved technologically, we know that a large proportion of the "food shortage" is structural in nature. Every time I read a well researched paper on this, it always comes to the same conclusions, and shows that this simple axiomatic break down is correct.
I'm more than happy to pursue various food security strategies (including GM), but the first step has to be dealing with the structural problem (which I see as more of a nationalism problem), which literally could happen over night, before dealing with technical problems. Because if you don't address the structural problems, the technical solutions won't do shit.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
IMHO, yes, we do, because a large proportion of the growth in world population over the next few years will come not from increases in birth rates but from longer lifespans for those already in the world. You need enough younger, stronger people to look after your older, wiser people effectively. In short, the practical alternative to rising population over the next few years isn't birth control, it's euthanasia on a global scale. I suspect I'm not the only one who has a problem with that.
Fortunately, we can predict trends in global population quite far in advance, and just because the curve is on an upswing for various reasons today, that doesn't mean it will continue to be so indefinitely.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
When you build a new freeway, you will reduce traffic.
No, you will only increase traffic flow and road area. Which is a separate thing entirely from traffic - the integral of traffic flow over time and the road area. Traffic engineering is enineering and you have to understand what the terms mean if you're going to discuss it with any effectiveness.
In fact, the GP was correct - in general, increasing the numbers of freeways will tend to increase traffic because there is an increased flow over a wider area per unit time. However, your perception of traffic, will decrease for a while. This is what makes the notion of building roads so seductive (well that and the government contracts that can be given to politicians' friends). Yes, building more roads is very seductive but, in the long run, counterproductive.
That is all.
Proverbs 13:23 GNT "Unused fields could yield plenty of food for the poor, but unjust people keep them from being farmed."
The Bible says there is enough food for all, but because of greed and bad distribution of resources, that is why people go hungry.
We should be looking at all answers for this. It is my own personal goal in life to make money so I can redistribute it to investing at farming in poor places. It is a net loss, but I see the plight of the people dying because of malnutrition. When I went to Carnegie Mellon, my goal was to learn how to cure diseases by helping write software, but I never got a chance to. So since I can't be helping cure diseases on my life, I see people who die to malnutrition as a group of people who can benefit right now without discovering a new cure. At the rawest form, you can buy someone food directly so they don't die to malnutrition, but not many of us are wealthy enough to help them all. There are more advanced solutions to helping them in the long term such as buying fruit trees for them, or micro loans to start a farm,etc,etc. It is complex, but it should be everyone's fight.
God spoke to me.
In this supposedly non-growing population of richer people, not everybody will have 2 kids. Some will have none, and some will have a dozen.
If family size is even slightly inheritable, natural selection takes care of the rest. Let's consider why people might have huge families.
The mothering instinct is a big reason. It's clearly way stronger in some people than in others. It's entirely reasonable that this is an inheritable brain trait.
Religion is another reason. The inheritable thing here is spirituality, magic thinking, and so on. The choice of religion itself is subject to some sort of "meme inheritance", with choices that demand followers to "go forth and multiply" being more successful.
Stupidity is certainly inheritable. If you can't manage to properly use birth control...
See where this goes? Natural selection can trivially defeat birth control. All creatures naturally are in a state of squalor, barely able to survive. Consider yourself fortunate to live during an anomaly for your species.
We should voluntarily limit population growth and over time let numbers fall.
News flash for you : WE ARE.
Go look at North America and European birth rates. Compare to death rates. Notice the latter is larger than the former and has been since the 60s. The only thing that has kept population growth going is immigration, and even that isn't working in some place, like Germany (Also Japan and Russia, though the latter is more to do with a high death rate), which is having negative population growth.
Barring a massive spike in birth rates, world population growth will level off in about 40 years.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Fortunately, we will have nuclear winter before 2050.
Although much of the land will no longer be arable, the remaining few chosen ones who get to survive the apocalypse will have plenty of canned goods to go around.
As a side curiosity, when you have a can of beans that says: "EXP JUL 2016", what condition will it be in a year past that? 5 years past that? 10?
Perhaps we need to focus on the real issue here, developing more foods that are shelf stable for a century or two. Not feeding nine billion people.
Sent from my PDP-11
Poor underpaid biologists in Russia and other countries working to restore reproduction capabilities of GM grains.
Or, if you will, jailbreaking the grains, unlocking the genes, replacing them with the original version.
It should be much easier than research at Monsanto _adding_ new functions to genes.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
Malthus wanted to kill the poor so the rich could remain rich. Seriously.
The food we eat is oil.
Farming is hugely energy intensive, you think it's just the sun?
Fertilisers, machinery use large amounts of oil and gas. Never mind the amount of water that is required.
The reason Malthus was wrong, is cheap energy. It has allowed us to expand our agriculture in line with exponentially growing population. Well, oil peaked in 2005. Which means less energy in the future. It's possible that means fewer people.
Nuclear has the promise to provide large amounts of cheap energy, i.e. large energy return on energy invested, but...
Deleted
Seriously. Just stop. All too often I hear things such as people wanting to have kids (why not adopt?) or people who have kids in poorer countries because of their poor living conditions (which is no excuse). I don't see how their wants should somehow override the importance of keeping population growth in check. I'd say that education is the key. Even in 'developed' countries, there are many, many people who need to be educated in this subject (it's not something that takes years to learn, either).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Read this with a scientific and practical view, just as I did writing it.
- Soybeans can produce at least twice as much protein per acre as any other major vegetable or grain crop, [1]
- 5 to 10 times more protein per acre than land set aside for grazing animals to make milk, [1]
- and up to *15 times* more protein per acre than land set aside for meat production. [1]
- soy farms _has_ encouraged Amazon deforestation [3]
- Ninety-eight percent of soy grown in the U.S. is used for livestock feed. [2]
Although soy has encouraged deforestation, a sad fact, this may have been avoided if consideration was given to the fact that fifteen fold more food could have been produced, if processed for human consumption, and not for cattle.
This is a _huge_ ratio. For sake of our example, and in a most extreme case, producing meat for 9 billion people (estimated for 2050), we could be effectively be substituting that with plant protein at 9 billion mouths x 15 fold = 135 billion people fed.
Keep in mind, scientifically, what our bodies need and don't need. I don't want a debate of morality.
That's one extreme. For the other, even if we figure in a huge gap for the sake of example, that value halved to 67 million, is still huge. Heck, even a tenth of the possible output would able us to provide more consumable protein than we need in 2050.
From a practical, scientific view, does this make sense?
Naturally there are issues like infrastructure, bureaucracy, fingers-in-pies and control over industry that won't make this possible yet, but I'd like to hear your thoughts!
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#cite_ref-NSRL_4-0
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#cite_ref-britannica_26-1
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#cite_ref-23
If you were to build advanced green houses out in the middle of nowhere with plentiful sunlight (Nevada) you could lose very little water (high efficiency) and grow some crops year round
Back to reality now: how much would it cost to cover Nevada with glass, or whatever material you use in your greenhouses?
Greenhouses are for luxury items, an alternative to transportation from distant lands. They will not solve mass starvation problems.
I'm willing to not breed.
Fun fact: According to surveys, the happiest marriages are childless.
And when you think about it, that makes sense, because all the time, energy, and money that parents spend on their children can instead be directed towards one's spouse.
I am officially gone from
Grazing meat: good, for all the reasons you mentioned.
Feedlot meat: Pretty stupid, and currently much more common in the US.
I am officially gone from
I am against the population reduction proposal, we should look ahead. It is time to send our colonies to outer space, history have proven, human are good at colonizing new world when resources run low back home.
That is unfeasible.
The population is going to grow by 2 BILLION in the next 40 years. We cannot send 2 billion people into space, even if we dedicated every resource we have to it. We would have to send 136,000 people into space every day, starting today.
No, I say we stick to plan A, and reduce population growth. Then we might look at space too, but for smaller groups of people.
Just wanted to point out the simplest argument against building new roads:
1) If you reduce the cost of using roads (congestion)
then
2) You increase usage of the roads
It's a simple argument and that part is correct. However, the problem comes from understanding the difference between traffic volume and traffic congestion. They're not the same and may be used incorrectly or interchangeably by people who don't understand the issue very well. Increasing road surface area tends to increase traffic volume and reduce traffic congestion. I expect you get a permanent reduction in congestion and a permanent increase in volume barring other factors just from building the road and people adjusting their behavior to the new situation. Thus saying new roads either increase or decreases traffic is wrong because it does both.
Now, there are other measures that do reduce both congestion and volume, taxes and tolls are probably the chief among them, and when combined with public transit may work well to reduce both congestion and volume, but that's a different discussion.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Just confiscating the millions of tonnes of grain that rot in the silos because the big players keep them away from the market to prevent grain price falling too low for their comfort would suffice to feed everyone, even now.
... the 'market' is free to oligopolize the supply and let people die for its profit. we call this freedom.
oh but why should we take the freedom of the big players away, even if it is at the expense of world hunger and accompanying death
Read radical news here
Here is one explanation I've heard.
Because not every country has pension system. If you don't get pension there's two choice for you: die miserably or have children who look up after you when you are old.
You don't know what you don't know.
I went to Ethiopia about a year and a half ago and was staggered by the poverty. There were people everywhere begging for food or money. Yet the ground was fertile... I come from Wisconsin and I know good farmland when I see it. What were they growing? Coffee... huge swaths of land dedicated to Coffee grown for export. Next to that, the largest greenhouses I've ever seen. I was told by our guide that they were owned by the dutch who grew flowers and exported them. Lastly Teff, which is a grain that they use to make a local bread. 1 out of 3 isn't bad. Or is it?
Some populations will always grow to their absolute limit, more food is not the solution. We already have way too many people.
Please remember that most people reporting something have something to gain. You, in other words, the commodity that they sell to advertisers. That's why most news stories tend towards the maudlin or sensational. It's how they get most people to watch the ads.
The point being made is that the prediction has been made many times, since at least the 19th century. The rate of population increase is decreasing, this means that if trends continue as they are and we don't run out of food and water before 2050, we should be ok.
Of course, we may actually soon facing falling crop yields due to two entwined factors:
I'm not sure how well we're going to adapt to those two challenges. Of course, recent history suggests it will not be very well at all, especially since we have vested interests who are lobbying hard on the side of doing nothing at all about it in the near future, just in case it might cut into their profits.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
In countries without America's socialist labor laws and social security, children are income earners, disability insurance, and retirement plan.