Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for all of us on this planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty.
However, unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world's farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that's not going away anytime soon.
Simply put: For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record.
"Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year," warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. "This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand."
Author and University of California, Berkeley, Professor Michael Pollan calls the Achilles heel of current green revolution methods: a dependence on fossil fuels. Natural gas, for example, is a raw material for nitrogen fertilizers. "The only way you can have one farmer feed 140 Americans is with monocultures. And monocultures need lots of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and lots of fossil-fuel-based pesticides," Pollan says. "That only works in an era of cheap fossil fuels, and that era is coming to an end. Moving anyone to a dependence on fossil fuels seems the height of irresponsibility."
Regardless of which farming model prevails—agriculture as a diverse ecological art, as a high-tech industry, or some combination of the two—the challenge of putting enough food in nine billion mouths by 2050 is daunting. Two billion people already live in the driest parts of the globe, and climate change is projected to slash yields in these regions even further. No matter how great their yield potential, plants still need water to grow. And in the not too distant future, every year could be a drought year for much of the globe.
New climate studies show that extreme heat waves, such as the one that withered crops and killed thousands in western Europe in 2003, are very likely to become common in the tropics and subtropics by century's end. Himalayan glaciers that now provide water for hundreds of millions of people, livestock, and farmland in China and India are melting faster and could vanish completely by 2035. In the worst-case scenario, yields for some grains could decline by 10 to 15 percent in South Asia by 2030.
Projections for southern Africa are even more dire. In a region already racked by water scarcity and food insecurity, the all-important corn harvest could drop by 30 percent—47 percent in the worst-case scenario. All the while the population clock keeps ticking, with a net of 2.5 more mouths to feed born every second. That amounts to 4,500 more mouths in the time it takes you to read this article.
Which leads us, inevitably, back to Thomas Robert Malthus who was a British scholar that did influential work in political economy and demography. Malthus came to prominence for drawing attention to the potential dangers of population growth: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man".
Malthus also saw that societies through history had experienced at one time or another epidemics, famines, or wars: events that masked the fundamental problem of populations overstretching their resource limitations:
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation.
They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands.
Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks at our rear and with one mighty blow will level the population with the food of the world.
Something to think about in the years to come?
Take care of you and yours:)
Sunday morning & a long weekend, have to love public holidays!
This was the first sight that greeted me very early this morning. I walked out to grab some wood for the fire and could hear the unmistakable "whooshing" sound of the gas.
Between such a lovely image and the magpies singing I couldn't resist just sitting for a few and taking it all in!
And the work continues! Here we are removing the old clothes line and most of the paving. Hubby has put a new extendable line under the patio for me and this area will be gradually sloped down to the back yard when the earth works people arrive. You can also see the roof of the car cover that was removed from the side drive, we will reuse that in the chook pen when cleaning up their housing etc.
The girls just love being here, so much room, so many places to scratch and play in!
Since the rain last week there are a ton of weeds coming up, allowing the girls to roam free every day will keep down the amount of weeding I am going to have to do!
Remember I brought in those 4 strawberry guavas? Well here's a yellow cherry guava to go with them. This is the mildest and probably the sweetest guava of all. Fruits are 3cm in diameter yellow skinned with a sweet, aromatic, creamy flesh and numerous small seeds. Begins bearing when less than 1 meter high and is generally a very prolific bearer.
To get the best from guavas, make sure you enrich soil with well rotted compost and mulch well to retain soil moisture. Best sited to avoid strong winds which may damage fruit laden trees. Prune to encourage woody stems close to the main framework which will bear fruit.
I also bought another 4 of the yesterday, today and tomorrows, thats the front fence line completed!
