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Solutions to food insecurity in the United States
The usefulness of food security in the current world
The usefulness of food security in the current world
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Rising Food Prices
Introduction:
Food prices have been on the rise and have become a global issue. Prices have soared over the past year and a half and threaten to go up further if issues are not addressed immediately. Below is a look at how prices have been over the past year.
Figure 1. FAO Food Price Index: February 2007 - January 2008
Source FAO, 2008
In this project, we attempt to find out the causes for this price rise, the trends of the rise and the effects that this rise has had on us.
Causes:
1. High demand for food in developing countries:
The growing world population is demanding more and different kinds of food. Rapid economic growth in many developing countries has pushed up consumers' purchasing power, generated rising demand for food, and shifted food demand away from traditional staples and toward higher-value foods like meat and milk.
Meat also consumes food resources in a shockingly inefficient way: it takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and 4kg for pork. But each kilo of grain may need a ton of water. And fuel oil is needed throughout the process, to fertilize the grain, pump water and to transport it.
Economic boom in India and China: India and China account for 1/3 of the world population and these countries have seen a great economic boom in the recent years and this partially is attributed to the rising costs. Around the world, people have eaten more as they grew richer. This phenomenon is called Nutritional transition. Hundreds of millions more people are now rich enough to eat meat compared with 10 years ago, with meat consumption in China more than doubling over the past 20 years.
2. Poor Weather in Various countries
There has been drought in various countries in the world whi...
... middle of paper ...
...earch and extension, rural infrastructure, and market access for small farmers. Rural investments have been sorely neglected in recent decades, and now is the time to reverse this trend. Farmers in many developing countries are operating in an environment of inadequate infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communications; poor soils; lack of storage and processing capacity; and little or no access to agricultural technologies that could increase their profits and improve their livelihoods. Recent unrest over food prices in a number of countries may tempt policymakers to put the interests of urban consumers over those of rural people, including farmers, but this approach would be shortsighted and counterproductive. Given the scale of investment needed, aid donors should also expand development assistance to agriculture, rural services, and science and technology.
Walsh, Bryan. “America’s Food Crisis.” NEXUS. Eds. Kim and Michael Flachmann. Boston: Pearson, 2012. 166 – 173. Print.
The book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food, by Wayne Roberts introduces us to the concept of “food system”, which has been neglected by many people in today’s fast-changing and fast-developing global food scene. Roberts points out that rather than food system, more people tend to recognize food as a problem or an opportunity. And he believes that instead of considering food as a “problem”, we should think first and foremost about food as an “opportunity”.
...struggling to earn any income at all and sometimes do not even get the opportunity to eat. Another issue that Raj Patel did not touch on is the lack of care consumers have for the farmers. It seems that consumers care about farmers about as much as the corporations do, which, in my opinion, is not a lot. When consumers only care about low prices and large corporations only care about making a profit, the farmers are left out to dry. Many consumers believe “food should be available at a bargain price, a belief that relies on labor exploitation and environmental exhaustion at multiple points along the commodity chain.” (Wright, 95) Corporations as well as consumers generally tend to be selfish and I think Raj Patel is afraid to mention this. If only these people cared a little bit more about each other I believe the hourglass of the food system will begin to even out.
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Few concerns have surfaced in economy that plays a vital role in agriculture and therefore in economic development. Developing countries and more even, LDC’s, are dependent on agriculture for income for the population. But achieving good agriculture means that many things have to change within these countries self. Good transportation is need in these countries and more often than not the infrastructure doesn’t allow this to happen and transporting agricultural goods are more expensive for these countries, thus these countries need capital and investments to further their outputs and inputs to gain bet...
In fact, the amount of resources that go into production of animals for consumption is somewhat startling. When factoring in transportation, grains for feeding, etc. and directly comparing them to the output of protein for consumption, a vegetarian diet seems much more appealing. David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist specializing in Agriculture and Life Science, stated beef production “requires a [fossil-fuel] energy output to protein output ratio of 54:1” and that 100,000 liters of water goes into just one kilogram of beef. Also, cows are notorious for producing large amounts of methane, totaling 500 liters per cow per day (Goffman 3). Methane traps heat in the environment, heating the surface of the earth causing problematic situations to occur all over the earth, including the ice caps melting and eliminating species. And when cattle, which are...
In order for us to maintain our lives, we need to consume food to supply nutrient-needs for our bodies. As the global population increased, the demand for food also increased. Increased population led to mass production of foods. However, even with this mass production, in under-developed countries, people are still undernourished. On other hand, in developed and developing countries, people are overfed and suffering from obesity. In addition, the current methods of industrial farming destroy the environment. These problems raised a question to our global food system. Will it be able to sustain our increasing global population and the earth? With this question in my mind, I decided to investigate the sustainability of our current global food system.
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