Population and Food

NOTE: WE WILL NOT HAVE CLASS TOMORROW, 11/12/09.
NEXT CLASS WILL BE ON 11/19.
WE WILL DISCUSS POPULATION AND FOOD.

Grain production has not been keeping up with the increase in population, and since the 1980s there has been a gradual decline in the grain per person, worldwide. Worldwide, there are over a billion people close to starvation today, and the population keeps increasing. How will we feed everyone?

Now, biofuel is using a large fraction of the grain harvest, reducing food availability and driving up the cost of grain and meat. Actually, most corn is used to feed cattle, to make beef. It takes 16 kilos of vegetable protein (mostly grain) to make one kilo of meat protein. Meat eating by rich countries means less grain for the people of poor countries. So one obvious way to increase the food supply is to decrease worldwide meat consumption. This is something individual people can do to help ease world hunger, and it saves them money, too, because meat is one of the most expensive items on any food budget.

We could talk about the impact of rising oil prices on the production (and cost) of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, on the cost of food distribution (you probably buy fruit flown from Chile, juice from South Africa and cookies from America), and on the cost of running farm machinery. As resources -- such as metals, wood (and thus paper) and oil (and therefore plastics, medicines, electricity and many other necessary things) -- become scarce and more expensive, poor people have less to spend on food, and their diets suffer as a result. The availability of fresh water for farm irrigation is shrinking rapidly, as glaciers melt, rainfall becomes irregular and pollution makes much of the world's water unusable.

These are not just problems for the poor of distant countries. Food scarcity was known by the grandparents of today's Taiwan workers, and it could come again. In fact, unemployment is already having an impact on the food budgets of many Taiwanese. And even if you eat well, how does it feel to know that you are competing for grain with the "bottom billion", who may starve if they cannot afford to buy food? These our our problems, too.

When we meet on 11/19, I hope everyone will have a short report on some topic related to population and food. Here are some links to help you with your research:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2009/09/10/2003453153
US, UK waste enough to feed the world’s poor

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2009/09/05/2003452799
Millions face starvation in East African drought

http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006_data.htm#fig2
Two graphs on this page show increase in total grain production (to 2006) AND grain per person. Note that grain per person has declined since the 1980s. If you and your friends (like me and my friends) have continued to eat the same amount of grain as we did in the 1980s – or even more, that means the “bottom billion” are eating much less.

http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=834
Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that Europe would need to convert more than 70 per cent of its total arable land to raise the proportion of biofuel currently used in road transport to a mere 10 per cent.

…As we consider whether to fill our bellies or our motorways it’s worth considering this: the grain needed to fill a typical SUV’s 25-gallon tank with bioethanol would feed one person for a year.

http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/271
Adding to China's water concerns, scientists are now reporting that the glaciers of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in western China are melting at an alarming rate. Analyzing four decades of data from nearly 700 weather stations, experts estimate the glaciers are shrinking seven percent each year due to global warming.

...The loss of China's glaciers will exacerbate already severe water shortages throughout the country. The Yangtze, Yellow, Brahmaputra, Mekong and Salween Rivers all originate from these glaciers, and then go on to feed nearly half a billion people downstream. The Yangtze River Basin alone accounts for 40 percent of China's freshwater resources and over half of all rice, grain and fisheries production.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,639224,00.html
Foreign Investors Snap Up African Farmland
By Horand Knaup and Juliane von Mittelstaedt July 30, 2009

http://www.holmgren.com.au/html/Writings/essence.html
Permaculture, a new way of growing more food