The Future of Food
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(Article ) The Future of Food
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The Future of Food Current global population is estimated at 7.6 billion people. There’s enough food to go around in the world currently (2019) but things are changing. Scientists estimate that the population will reach 11.2 billion people by the year 2100. The UN reports that half of that increase will come from just 9 countries (in order of importance): India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the United States, Uganda, and Indonesia. Population growth rates are far higher in low and middle income countries and falling in high income countries. Incomes are rising fast in many low and medium income countries, particularly India and China, who together comprise 37% of the current global population. If you add in Africa, with another 1.3 billion people, this is over half of the global population. Given the patterns of growth, in the future, Africa and Asia will hold far more than half the world’s people. This rise in income creates a rising demand for higher quality foods, including meat, dairy, and fresh fruit and vegetables . The constraints Our current food systems cannot handle the increase in demand overall. There are two main issues at work. The first is that we will need to produce more food in the same closed system in which we now feed 30% fewer people. The second is that agriculture and food production is mostly an extractive system, and is environmentally destructive. If we want to eat, we need to re-think what we mean by food, where we get it from, and how we eat. A third major issue is that the impacts from changing climate are already being felt, and mostly by the world’s poorest. One thing we don’t talk about enough is that the increased CO2 from climate change can have a fertilizing effect, producing larger grains, fruits, or vegetables. However, it can also dramatically reduce the nutrient content of the foods we grow, exchanging higher carbohydrate content for fewer micro-nutrients. Small fish for small people. Household aquaculture production in Bangladesh. Photo by the author. Food production has one of the most important environmental footprints there is, but we have to eat something. Some will say, eat less meat! But meat production can be completely sustainable, with grazed animals living on lands that are too poor for grain production. Most of the meat we eat in North America is grain fed and that is less sustainable. But in the other hemisphere, Australians and New Zealanders graze cattle and sheep because they have lots of land that is well suited to that type of production, and those animals are not displacing grain production. But despite the hype around moving away from beef, chicken production vastly outweighs all other types of livestock production, in the US at least. Field crops are hugely destructive. They require the complete razing of the existing ecosystem, whether it was a grassland, a forest, or a swamp, it must be completely destroyed in order to put in mono-cropping systems. Farmers take off the most nutrient- dense part of the plant, the seed (be it wheat, corn, barley) or the fruit (strawberries, apples) or the whole plant (broccoli, cabbages), the root (carrots, potatoes). Year over year, this extraction from the land leaves the soil depleted. About a third of global food is wasted. In wealthy nations, it happens at the consumer end, as we buy more food than we can eat. In poor nations, it happens at the farm where people lack facilities to store food, and are not well integrated into markets to be able to sell before foods spoil. We cannot increase food production without more land, more water, or better quality soils. Technologies that allow more efficient production are important are are a major focus of agricultural research (examples from the University of Guelph). Even with all these lines of inquiry, it is my opinion that our food choices will gradually drift away from what we are used to seeing in the wealthy nations of the west and more towards what poor people and Asians are eating now. Download 0.7 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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