( know, Mother Earth is always in control~)
In a world that produces more food than ever before, far too many people still face getting through the day and ending the day…hungry.
According to the International Food Policy Research Institute . “Almost a billion people are suffering from undernourishment. They simply don’t have enough to eat.
“More than two billion people are suffering from nutritional deficiencies, the lack of things like iron, zinc, and vitamin A. This ‘hidden hunger’ can cause great damage to people’s health and to their productive lives because economic growth really suffers with undernourishment,”
Of course, the main sources of human food include farms and fisheries. But both of these sources are being exploited unsustainable.
More than 40 percent of the world’s population is employed in agriculture—more than in any other sector. In developing countries, tiny smallholder farms provide up to 80 percent of the total food supply. These rural, poor households are most vulnerable to variable weather and climate.
Since the 1900s, a staggering 75 percent of the world’s total crop diversity has disappeared from farmers’ fields. Restoring crop diversity can help small farmers achieve a more varied and nutritious diet, while getting greater productivity from the land with fewer inputs of water, fertilizer, and energy. This is partly because breaking up mono-culture tends to reduce concentration of pests, and certain plant combinations can even serve as “biological controls” by repelling pests. A diversity of crops also tends to make a farm better able to weather changes in rainfall or temperature.
New crop varieties like rice, corn, and sweet potatoes bred for the climates in which they’re grown that can better tolerate troublesome pests or resist heat and drought.
Fishing is another paramount source of human food; some three billion people count on marine species as their primary source of protein. Our oceans once seemed inexhaustible, but today the troubling impacts of over-fishing are already being felt around the globe. If the seas are to nourish future generations they must be managed far more sustainably and protected from destructive threats like pollution.
Earth’s surging population is likely to make our food problems even more acute. It’s projected that two billion more people will need to be fed by the year 2050, raising the specter of more food crises like the one that struck in 2007 and 2008. In those years, spiking demand led to rising grain prices, bad weather and poor harvests depleted supplies, and rising oil prices made it more expensive to grow food—and consequently to buy it.
Prices in some countries rose a staggering 75 percent from 2006 levels, and 115 million people joined the ranks of the chronically hungry. Developing nations bore the brunt of the disaster, particularly across Africa, and food riots and political unrest appeared around the world in places like Bangladesh, Haiti, Tajikistan, and Yemen. The poor, already the hungriest, are hardest hit by such events.
“Unfortunately, right now our way of using natural resources to feed the world and to promote the current living standards is not sustainable,” Fan said. “Because water will be limited, energy will be more expensive, and the climate will be hotter. If we don’t do something, I guarantee we’ll have more food crises and more severe food crises.”
For all the potential improvements in food production methods, Fan stressed, consumption patterns must also change.
In the United States and Europe we are eating too much meat, and the consumption of meat really exhausts natural resources,” he said. “Emerging economies like China and Brazil are picking up their meat consumption, and they account for perhaps 30 percent of the world’s population. We simply don’t have enough natural resources for them to follow our consumption patterns.”
All of the info above I’ve taken from the International Food Policy Research Institute. It sounds accurate and the promise that we are on the right track is implied…however, the thinking and practice of Bio-technology inside our food supply as we have it now, expecting a good and sustainable result is false…wishful thinking at best….from where I and others with far more access to real facts stand…this too is a far more dangerous route than any other option could produce.
There is much written for both sides….when all the information is processed and common sense is all that is left on the table…ask yourself…” does even more contamination injected into our food supply and the resources from whence it comes, sound like a positive way to go for more, better, and lasting results. ?
Below you’ll find a link to information pertaining to the other side of the story.
https://www.organicconsumers.
***Keep in mid also…once upon a time organic was a word/term that applied to natures position. According to Webster…related to or derived from living organisms.***
Enter USDA…it is now a term, owned and controlled by the highest bidder.
***Sustainable…according to Webster…to support true or legal or just…to support by adequate proof.
In Organic Agriculture…First, do no harm, giving back as much or more than we take from the earth***.
Enter USDA….and the new food czar…( Monsanto…largest chemical producer in the world turned food czar)
Sustainable is a method for the new world way of growing and producing almost everything…..full of iffy outcomes, lies, deceptions, and simply try it and see…( we, the masses are the test subjects.)
A plethora of documented information to the negatives already presenting evidence of harm….found in the Organic Consumers archives, above link.
