Can The Planet Feed Us?

The proportion of hungry people is coming down
More of us are eating more and better than ever before.

World cereal consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has tripled since 1961.

The global fish catch grew more than six times from 1950 to 1997.

None of this happened by magic, though, but only by giving Nature a massive helping hand.

The World Resources Institute said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertiliser ever produced had been applied since 1984.

So one question is whether the world can go on increasing its harvests at this rate - or even faster, to cater as well for the extra 75 million people born annually

Our recent achievements are impressive - while global population doubled to 6 billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more than kept up.

Facts and figures on the challenge of feeding the world

The proportion of malnourished people fell in the three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able to go on at this rate.

For a start, much of the world's best cropland is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering - soil degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13% in the last half-century.

Biotechnology, in principle, may offer the world a second Green Revolution, for example by producing drought-resistant plants or varieties that withstand pest attacks.



But it arouses deep unease, not least because of fears it may erode the genetic resources in thousands of traditional varieties grown in small communities across the world.

Nobody knows what the probable impacts of climate change will be on food supplies.

Too little space

Another question concerns the huge cost to other forms of life of all the progress we've made in securing our own food supply.

The amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants is much higher than the natural level, and has more than doubled since the 1940s.



Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.

Another 0.5 billion ha has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction.

Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy.

Increasing hunger

In the 1990s global poverty fell by 20%, but the number of hungry people rose by 18 million. In 2003, 842 million people did not have enough to eat, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Food production has more than kept up with population growth
Hunger and malnutrition killed 10 million people a year, 25,000 a day - one life extinguished every five seconds.



The world does produce enough to feed everyone. But the food is often in the wrong place, or unaffordable, or can't be stored long enough. So making sure everyone has enough to eat is more about politics than science.

The developed countries have to take care of climate change, that is caused huge enrgy demand in developed countries, so many food lands reduce and change build factory, conservation, exploitation over the limit.

source: BBC NEWS