UN warns world must produce 60% more food by 2050 to avoid mass unrest
135 replies, posted
[QUOTE]Political turmoil, social unrest, civil war and terrorism could all be on the table unless the world boosts its food production by 60 percent come mid-century, the UN’s main hunger fighting agency has warned.
The world’s population is expected to hit 9 billion people by 2050, which, coupled with the higher caloric intake of increasingly wealthy people, is likely to drastically increase food demand over the coming decades said Hiroyuki Konuma, the assistant director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization Asia-Pacific.
Increased food demand comes at a time when the world is investing less in agricultural research, prompting fear among scientists that global food security could be imperiled.
"If we fail to meet our goal and a food shortage occurs, there will be a high risk of social and political unrest, civil wars and terrorism, and world security as a whole might be affected," Reuters cites Konuma as saying at a one-week regional food security conference in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
Several factors could exacerbate the potential for apocalyptic famines. In November, a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned that climate change could cause a 2 percent drop each decade of this century. In the past three years for example, Australia, Canada, China, Russia and the United States have all suffered big flood and drought induced harvest losses.
Exacerbating this problem is a convergence in diets worldwide, with reliance on an ever smaller group of crops leaving global food supplies increasingly vulnerable to inflationary pressure, insects and disease.
"As the global population rises and the pressure increases on our global food system, so does our dependence on the global crops and production system that feeds us,” Luigi Guarino, from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, told the BBC earlier this month.
"The price of failure of any of these crops will become very high."
Progress has been made in the battle against global hunger, with vegetable production in Asia and the Pacific, where more than three-quarters of the world’s vegetables are grown, increasing by 25 percent over the last decade.
The FAO estimates, however, that 842 million people in the world remain undernourished, with nearly two thirds of them living in the Asia-Pacific. One in four children under the age of five is stunted due to malnutrition.
To combat the problem, the UN body has outlined two primary options: increasing arable land areas as well as productivity rates. A lack of available arable land and more sluggish growth rates in staple crops have complicated efforts to bolster these two pillars of food security.
Over the past two years, productivity rates for rice and wheat have hovered around 0.6 to 0.8 percent. Those rates would have to stabilize around 1 percent in order to offset serious shortages, said Konuma.
Environmentalists have also urged better food distribution methods. In February, the FAO, World Bank and World Resources Institute estimated that the world is losing 25 to 33 percent of the food it produces – nearly 4 billion metric tons.
More efficient agricultural production, better means of storing food and biologically diverse, local food systems less susceptible to global changes have also been proposed as solutions to help tackle the growing threat of food insecurity.[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://rt.com/news/world-food-security-2050-846/"]http://rt.com/news/world-food-security-2050-846/[/URL]
I find that a nice cosy bed helps me with my unrest
[editline]11th March 2014[/editline]
dear UN please invest in more beds
xox maloof
People living in cities and areas where the infrastructure is generally better don't have anything to worry about though.
Or let less food go to waste.
Seriously. Working last night at a grocery store, I had to throw out several hundred dollars of strawberries because we received a poor quality order. Maybe around 96 1 lb boxes or so
Or make less babies?? Less hungry mouths to feed = less food to produce
[QUOTE=Zeemlapje;44189620]Or make less babies?? Less hungry mouths to feed = less food to produce[/QUOTE]
Or make more babies and introduce Soylent Green.
[QUOTE=Zeemlapje;44189620]Or make less babies?? Less hungry mouths to feed = less food to produce[/QUOTE]
That's easy to say.
[QUOTE=Swebonny;44189652]That's easy to say.[/QUOTE]
It is, you would think with all the money and food were sending to third world countries we would send some birth control too. If you can't afford to feed the mouths you already have, stop making more.
[QUOTE=Zeemlapje;44189620]Or make less babies?? Less hungry mouths to feed = less food to produce[/QUOTE]
Partially true but we gotta take in account that the poorer countries of the world often don't have condoms and that they basically need children to take care of them.
Gotta keep in mind that it isn't just as easy to say that and it may lead to things like in China where the girls get drowned cause they need a working man to earn money for them.
It would be easier to produce so much more food if people would accept GMO as our lord and savior
More GM food research so that we can farm in more places and have better outputs in shorter times?
Maybe even grow meat.
[QUOTE=Leestons;44189677]It is, you would think with all the money and food were sending to third world countries we would send some birth control too. If you can't afford to feed the mouths you already have, stop making more.[/QUOTE]
Or maybe help them develop, which is what the money and food are for in the first place, since it's proven parents in first world countries have less children.
We have [I]tons[/I] of food, half the problem is over-zealous quality control that says "This can is dented, toss it" and "This apple is shaped weird, toss it". Supermarkets throw out half their stock because it's damaged (but not contaminated), it expires (reasonable), or just doesn't look pretty (a total waste).
I wish we had "surplus" markets that took in reject food and sold it at a discount. Although it'd probably end up competing with the supermarket itself, people love cheap food.
Pft, just send a few spear militias in the region and maybe send a priest or two to quell religious unrest.
[QUOTE=d00msdaydan;44189713]It would be easier to produce so much more food if people would accept GMO as our lord and savior[/QUOTE]
GMO is rarely the issue, at least directly. Companies trying to overprofit on GMO is. Take it this way, a lot of the western world doesn't require GMO at all, but it is widely employed in third world countries, were it does indeed provide massively higher yields.
The bigger issue is the use of terminator genes, non seeding, excessive cost of some cultivars and a slew of other things which does make it very hard to make any kind of profit for the farmer himself who is often locked in, into the GMO product.
Also its not just underproduction - we actually massively overproduce food, we merely dont' use it terribly effectively at times. The prevalance of white flour, which creates huge amounts of chaff which is usefull, bad sillaging, in some countries huge overfocus on prime meat at the expense of throwing out non-prime ones (talking about innards, trotters, tongues etc) and a lot of other issue.
If you essentially pushed the use of all parts of food, you would get a significant jump as well.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;44189729]We have [I]tons[/I] of food, half the problem is over-zealous quality control that says "This can is dented, toss it" and "This apple is shaped weird, toss it". Supermarkets throw out half their stock because it's damaged (but not contaminated), it expires (reasonable), or just doesn't look pretty (a total waste).
I wish we had "surplus" markets that took in reject food and sold it at a discount. Although it'd probably end up competing with the supermarket itself, people love cheap food.[/QUOTE]
That's kinda also tied to the fact that a lot of people don't want to buy it. And if they see merely one or two bad pieces they often believe the whole batch might be shitty. But yeah, a second tier surplus market would be cool
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;44189729]We have [I]tons[/I] of food, half the problem is over-zealous quality control that says "This can is dented, toss it" and "This apple is shaped weird, toss it". Supermarkets throw out half their stock because it's damaged (but not contaminated), it expires (reasonable), or just doesn't look pretty (a total waste).
I wish we had "surplus" markets that took in reject food and sold it at a discount. Although it'd probably end up competing with the supermarket itself, people love cheap food.[/QUOTE]
There's also the fact that tons of food goes into livestock, tons of corn and other feeds for a single cow's whole lifetime for just a couple beefs, now multiply this to hundreds of cows.
[QUOTE=Zeemlapje;44189620]Or make less babies?? Less hungry mouths to feed = less food to produce[/QUOTE]
Why is this being dumbed? I don't want to have kids.
Or we simply need to try not to be so wasteful? I mean in Germany alone each day nearly 1 ton of bread is going to the dump. It could have been used otherwise as well.
[QUOTE=ATribeCalledQ;44189763]Why is this being dumbed? I don't want to have kids.[/QUOTE]
We're already having to few children here in Europe - if it weren't for immigration we'd be dying off population wise. Someone needs to take care of the baby boomer-generation, and, well, us.
[QUOTE=Zeemlapje;44189620]Or make less babies?? Less hungry mouths to feed = less food to produce[/QUOTE]
Or make more babies and legalize cannibalism. This solution is provided to us by the survivors of the 1972 Andes flight disaster.
The whole food-waste thing is an effect of purchasing power and consumer discretion, mixed with good standards of health.
Don't get me wrong, day old bread will not kill you. However we probably shouldn't cling to every scrap of food that 'might be good to eat' for very valid health concerns in the mass market. We used to do that in the days of unregulated food sales, and while the moldering peach is unappatizing and won't be taken by anyone sane, the spoiled meat is deadly and easily overlooked.
Then you get the purchase and discretion bit. No one here wants to eat an apple that has brown bruises all over it because some jackass stockboy manhandled it onto the shelf, then it got stepped on. Oh sure we can wash it off, and it will still provide nutritionally valuable calories, but there's a certain quality we all demand of food. So every store is trying to bus in the healthiest, cleaniest, tastiest looking fucking apples they can. At the end of the day though, they're still perishable and you have more apples than folks will actually eat, so of course we will throw away "thousands of dollars worth" of apples. But that's how business works, unless you want to start seizing apples from farmers and handing them over to the hungry. Which is an entirely diffrent discussion all together.
[QUOTE=Crazy Ivan;44189800]The whole food-waste thing is an effect of purchasing power and consumer discretion, mixed with good standards of health.
Don't get me wrong, day old bread will not kill you. However we probably shouldn't cling to every scrap of food that 'might be good to eat' for very valid health concerns in the mass market. We used to do that in the days of unregulated food sales, and while the moldering peach is unappatizing and won't be taken by anyone sane, the spoiled meat is deadly and easily overlooked.[/QUOTE]
That's not the point though, nobody is arguing that you should sell expired food. The argument is that they'll toss out an apple that grew into an imperfect shape, or a can of food with a dent in it (even if there is no penetration).
Obviously the key is to harness electrolytes for use in EVERY single crop grown on planet earth.
It's the only possible way we can survive in this idiocracy.
How about distributing the food we already produce more effectively instead? A great many factors would be involved and it is a complex problem but surely we should try and improve.
It doesn't help how supermarkets just throw out perfectly good food that doesn't look right or is past it's sell by date but still technically safe for consumption even if it doesn't taste it's best.
Overpopulation is just a misconception or myth I think - if resources were distributed a lot more effectively than now we could support all living humans on the planet and more.
[QUOTE=ATribeCalledQ;44189763]Why is this being dumbed? I don't want to have kids.[/QUOTE]
I don't want kids either. Doesn't mean they're not necessary.
Fact is, some countries, notably some European ones, and especially Japan have very few kids, and a huge number of elderly. The elderly are also living longer. This means that the entire population is skewed towards the elderly. In the future, you'll be looking at huge healthcare costs, massive shortages of healthcare workers, massive shortages in the workforce in general, people having to work longer, people having to pay way more in taxes, and a huge strain on the entire economy. Then, once all the elderly die, you'll be down by a huge number of people worldwide. The only short term fix is to get in a huge amount of immigrants, and the only long term fix is to have more babies.
The number of kids needs to be toned down a little bit, but nowhere near as much as people think. If we put more effort into sustainability and efficiency, we could happily support the current number of people on the world. Would necessitate more efficient travelling and fewer throwaway electronics and such, but it is possible. We actually produce enough food to support the worlds population easily at the moment, it's just wasted at nearly every stage by us in the western world.
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8wdLWUEnzI]Here's an AJ documentary on it, I've seen 10 minutes of it and the comments are fucking retarded as usual, but I can't find the great documentary I saw before, so this will have to suffice. It's passable.[/url]
Have babies. Eat them. Hunger problem solved.
[QUOTE=Crazy Ivan;44189800]The whole food-waste thing is an effect of purchasing power and consumer discretion, mixed with good standards of health.
Don't get me wrong, day old bread will not kill you. However we probably shouldn't cling to every scrap of food that 'might be good to eat' for very valid health concerns in the mass market. We used to do that in the days of unregulated food sales, and while the moldering peach is unappatizing and won't be taken by anyone sane, the spoiled meat is deadly and easily overlooked.
Then you get the purchase and discretion bit. No one here wants to eat an apple that has brown bruises all over it because some jackass stockboy manhandled it onto the shelf, then it got stepped on. Oh sure we can wash it off, and it will still provide nutritionally valuable calories, but there's a certain quality we all demand of food. So every store is trying to bus in the healthiest, cleaniest, tastiest looking fucking apples they can. At the end of the day though, they're still perishable and you have more apples than folks will actually eat, so of course we will throw away "thousands of dollars worth" of apples. But that's how business works, unless you want to start seizing apples from farmers and handing them over to the hungry. Which is an entirely diffrent discussion all together.[/QUOTE]
The thing is that it usually isn't too difficult to differentiate between what is good to eat and what isn't. If meat is bad you can tell by the smell not being what it should. Anyone can do it, but we choose not to because we've put it in the hands of someone else for reasons relating to our culture of decadence and convenience. The disparity between the quality demands and the point where the food is actually a health hazard is much larger than it needs to be in many cases. This is something that can be changed.
Somebody call the Dagda and see if he loans us his cauldron, since anybody who eats what it produces can eat until they get satisfied.
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;44189729]We have [I]tons[/I] of food, half the problem is over-zealous quality control that says "This can is dented, toss it" and "This apple is shaped weird, toss it". Supermarkets throw out half their stock because it's damaged (but not contaminated), it expires (reasonable), or just doesn't look pretty (a total waste).
I wish we had "surplus" markets that took in reject food and sold it at a discount. Although it'd probably end up competing with the supermarket itself, people love cheap food.[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but at the supermarket chain I work with, we just mark down shit that is slightly damaged or about to expire. Actually, before my shift yesterday I noticed that they had marked down a batch of Apple Turnovers (the ones filled with whipped cream) from $3 down to 20 cents because they were on the point of expiring. I ate one and it was still absolutely perfect. But one of my co-workers seen that I bought two and she stole the other one :(
Closed circuit modular aquaponic systems could make enough grain/crop and fish to let everyone eat like kings. Unfortunately, it can't stop the actual kings from stealing all the food and eating like thieves.
So humanity has finally reached it's carrying capacity then?
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