Saturday, October 18, 2014

Can We Feed A Growing World?

Can The World Produce Enough Food For 2 Billion More People? -- Reuters

ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With the world population rising, demographers are grappling with one of the most pressing issues of the century - will there be enough food for an extra two to four billion people?

Projections of global population growth vary widely with the United Nations last month forecasting numbers rising to 9.6 billion in 2050 and around 10.9 billion by the end of the century from 7.2 billion currently.

That is about 1.5 billion more people than another estimate calculated by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a Vienna-based research organization, which predicts a world population peak of 9.4 billion in 2070.

Read more ....

Update: 800 million undernourished people worldwide -- NRC

My Comment: Climate and conflicts will always influence global food production .... but there are more than enough resources to feed the world's population. Unfortunately .... food .... like energy products (oil, gas, etc.) .... are usually influenced and dictated by government policies that create shortages and high prices. My father learned about that while growing up in the middle of the Ukraine famine, and in my case I learned about it while growing up in the old Soviet Union and spending part of my day standing in a line for some stupid basic food item. In short .... when government policy is driven by ideology instead of market forces .... expect the worse. Today .... I give that trophy to Zimbabwe .... a country that was once Africa's bread basket, and is today not even able to meet it's own basic needs.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Don't have to feed them, Ebola is going to get them.

Unknown said...

I have given up caring about feeding the hungry, the poor or Sally Struthers.

You do famine relief several times through NGOs, the UN or your government and it keeps happening because countries are ruled by dictators, oligarchs or juntas.

It is just rinse and repeat.

What is the point?