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I don’t talk about food often here. However, with so many starving people around the world, I should talk more about agricultural advances as feeding nine billion people by 2050 will be the biggest challenge ever faced.
To Ecogeek : ” A new type of rice (from) the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore, India has many advantages over typical rice varieties. It requires less water to grow, it’s higher in protein and it emits less methane over its life cycle. ”
” This rice, which is not genetically modified but a hybrid crop, uses 60 percent less water than conventional rice crops. It only needs to be watered once a week even in arid climates.”
We saw that oil prices are now back above $100 a barrel. Most unfortunately, food prices are also increasing, and this is a problem for the poorest populations of the globe, and this includes Egypt, the world biggest wheat importer.
As the leading blog Climate Progress noted recently : ” Leading experts, reported in the media, have made the case that high food prices are one of the triggers of MidEast unrest. “
Among the causes are the increased demand – Mankind will comprise seven billion people by year end – rising oil prices and climate change as it damages or decreases the harvests…
At first I wasn’t sure even if I had huge doubts. But now this is a certainty as I came accross three articles on how biofuels production in the United States, Brazil and Europe is a threat to our societies and our environment.
In Brazil, biofuels production are a danger to the Amazon rainforest as farmers are willing to cut trees to plant more and thus earn more. In America, 25 percent of the cereals grown are fed to cars.
This is enough to feed no less than 350 million people. As over a billion people are still starving around the globe I don’t call that a sustainable solution. Continue »
This is the catchy title of an article GOOD recently published. It is not entirely new to me as I previously wrote about it, but the data provided there undoubtedly has to be shared. Here goes the beginning of the article :
” When it comes to food, Americans are the undisputed champions of one thing: trash. We waste food in volumes that it defies the imagination. New York City alone has an annual surplus of about 50 million pounds of food.“
Wasting, whether it is food, energy, water or else is truly unsustainable. We have to change quickly if we want to achieve a more sustainable development. Continue »
I am absolutely no fan of biofuels, and am even believing they are more a problem than a solution as still hundreds of millions people are starving. It seems that it could also pose problem in the richest nations.
Indeed, Green Inc. noted that the United Kingdom may have to resort to cereals imports in its long history if more biofuels were produced on British soil. This strongly reinforces my opinion on the topic.
Biofuels are totally unsustainable, let’s admit it. I hope more countries – like the European Union – will acknowledge this and stop their ambitious plans in this once promising solution. Continue »
For the sixth part of the series – see the previous articles on heating, electricity, water, transport and food – I would like to tackle waste in general. This is an important issue as still too much of the things we throw end up in the wild.
The concept known as three Rs is interesting in that regard. Indeed, reducing, recycling and reusing our stuff would provide many advantages societies to Nature, our societies and our economies.
As the economic crises multiply and people find themselves unemployed, a better waste management would prove to benefit us all. Continue »
Thanks to my good friend Daryl from Verda Vivo – a must read blog – I came accross another worrying fact: the amount of hungry people around the world is increasing and to the FAO will reach a historic level with a billion people in 2009.
I already blogged last year about this very topic and the situation has only worsened since then. This occurs as TreeHugger and the Financial Times are both thinking we are going toward another global food crisis.
This occurs as over a billion people are overfed and an additional 300 million people are literally obese. Could the food please go to the other tables ? This would make sense and social justice. Continue »
According to a new study carried out by the University of Washington half of world’s population could face a food crisis by 2100. This may occur as rising temperatures would decrease crops yields in the tropics and subtropics.
This is most worrying as the populations in these regions are growing at the fastest rate and are among the poorest as well. To make matter worse, possible water shortages weren’t taken into account by the study.
Around three billion people live in these regions nowadays, but as population is due to increase, tackling the population issue would enable us to avoid such a future situation as well. Continue »
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization – FAO, part of the United Nations – the amount of people undernourished rose by approximately 50 million in 2007.
Many factors contributed to such a dramatic increase, like the increasing population and demand, biofuels production (see cartoon on the left) and climate change related phenomena.
As world population increases and as food prices keep on soaring, I doubt this situation will reverse any time soon. This is a most scary prospect. Continue »
The prices of cereals keep on increasing in an important way and numerous riots of hungers already occured in many countries of South America, Africa and Asia.
Biofuels aren’t the only reason for such increases – we will see below that many other factors were also involved – but they contribute in an important way.
As you can imagine, such a situation is worrying the UN food and agriculture experts from the FAO as well as many specialists. Continue »
