BROOKLIN, Canada, January 24, 2007 (IPS) - The world is now eating
more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their
lowest level in 30 years.
Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing
costs of fossil fuel-based fertilisers point to a calamitous shortfall
in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to
Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU).
Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more
people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says
Stewart Wells, NFU's president.
In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly
more grains than farmers produced.
And with the world's farmers unable to increase food production,
policymakers must address the "massive challenges to the ability of
humanity to continue to feed its growing numbers", Wells said in a
statement.
There isn't much land left on the planet that can be converted into
new food-producing areas, notes Lester Brown, president of the Earth
Policy Institute, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation.
And what is left is of generally poor quality or likely to turn into
dust bowls if heavily exploited, Brown told IPS.
Unlike the Green Revolution in the 1960s, when improved strains of
wheat, rice, maize and other cereals dramatically boosted global food
production, there are no technological magic bullets waiting in the
wings.
"Biotechnology has made little difference so far," he said.
Even if the long-promised biotech advances in drought, cold, and
disease-resistance come about in the next decade, they will boost
yields little more than five percent globally, Brown said.
"There's not nearly enough discussion about how people will be fed 20
years from now," he said.
Hunger is already a stark and painful reality for more than 850
million people, including 300 million children. How can the number of
hungry not explode when one, two and possibly three billion more
people are added to the global population?
The global food system needs fixing and fast, says Darrin Qualman,
NFU's research director.
"Many Canadian and U.S. farmers are going out of business because crop
prices are at their lowest in nearly 100 years," Qualman said in an
interview. "Farmers are told overproduction is to blame for the low
prices they've been forced to accept in recent years."
However, most North American agribusiness corporations posted record
profits in 2004. With only five major companies controlling the global
grain market, there is a massive imbalance of power, he said.
"The food production system is designed to generate profits, not
produce food or nutrition for people," Qualman told IPS.
He says there are enormous amounts of food stored in central Canada's
farming heartland, but thousands of people there, including some farm
families, are forced to rely on food banks.
"It's a system that's perfectly happy to leave hundreds of millions of
people unfed," he said.
Inequity and poverty are at the heart of the hunger problem, according
to experts, including the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Economic inequity is becoming more widespread, with hunger and
malnutrition a chronic problem for the poor in both the South and the
North, says Brown.
And the present situation is likely to worsen with climate change.
An estimated 184 million people in Africa alone could die from floods,
famine, drought and conflict resulting from climate change before the
end of the century, according to a new report by Christian Aid, a
British-based charity.
Millions more in other parts of the world will also perish, and recent
gains in reducing poverty could be thrown into reverse in coming
decades, said the report, "Climate of Poverty: Facts, Fears and Hopes".
"This is a grave crisis for global society and we need global
solutions," said Andrew Pendleton, climate and development analyst at
Christian Aid.
In the "Hope" section of the report, the group envisions poor regions
using renewable energy to power a new, and clean, era of prosperity.
Another vision is already making a difference in villages in 10
African countries. With some money to buy better seeds, fertiliser, a
share in a protected water source, and a bed net to fend off malarial
mosquitoes, hundreds of thousands of villagers in the Millennium
Villages project are now able to grow enough food and sell the surplus.
Developed by Jeffrey Sachs and others at Columbia University's Earth
Institute and the U.N. Millennium Project, each project is led by
local community members using proven, practical, low-cost technologies.
Making a substantial difference in Africa's food security and poverty
issues means development assistance to spread the project to the more
than 100,000 villages in Africa, organisers have said.
That kind of frontal assault on poverty, along with population
stabilisation and sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that
are causing climate change, top Brown's list of what needs to be done
immediately.
Shifting from a global food production system to local food for local
people would go a long way towards addressing inequity, Qualman
believes.
"The 100-mile diet, where people obtain their food from within a
100-mile radius of their homes, makes good sense for most of the
world," he said.
The whole fabric of the food production system needs to change, or
hunger and malnutrition will only get much worse.
"North America's industrial-style agricultural system is a really bad
idea and maybe the worst on the planet," Qualman concluded. (FIN/2006)
SOURCES:
1. TruNews
c/o Rick Wiles
P.O. Box 23624
Chattanooga, Tennessee 37422 USA
Website:
http://www.trunews.com
2. World Food Programme
Via C.G. Viola 68
Parco dei Medici
00148, Rome, Italy, EUROPEAN UNION
Website:
http://www.wfp.org
3. Club or Rome
Steckelhoern 9
D-20457, Hamburg, Germany, EUROPEAN UNION
Website:
http://www.clubofrome.org
4. World Food Summit
Website:
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsummit
5. Food First
Institute for Food and Development Policy
398 60th St
Oakland, California 94618 USA
Website:
http://www.foodfirst.org
6. Genetically Modified Food
Website:
http://cing.20m.com
7. World Social Forum
P.O Box 63125
00619, Nairobi, Kenya, AFRICA
Website:
http://www.wsf2007.org
8. Plans to Depopulate the Earth
Website:
http://depop.20m.com
9. Earth Policy Institute
c/o Lester Brown
1350 Connecticut Ave- NW
Suite #403
Washington, DC 20036 USA
Website:
http://www.earth-policy.org
10. Resource Wars
Website:
http://geocities.com/archangelshout
11. World Hunger, Global Starvation, Planetary Famine
Website:
http://prophetslinks.20m.com/famine.html
12. International Food Policy Research Institute
2033 'K' St- NW
Washington, DC 20006 USA
Website:
http://www.ifpri.org
13. Master Plan of the Globalists
Website:
http://geocities.com/ancientofdayz
14. Prophet's Master Linx
Website:
http://geocities.com/prophetslinks