The GOLD of future is FOOD

Interesting article about The Coming Famine - The World Food Crisis.

Some of the highlights of the article:

Global demand for food will more than double over the coming half-century as we add another 4.7 billion people.

This challenge facing the coming generation of farmers is to double the global food supply:

• using half the water
• on far less land and with increasingly depleted soils,
• without fossil fuels,
• with increasingly scarce and costly fertiliser and chemicals
• under the hammer of climate change

Just some examples why it is so.

By 2050, 7-8 billion people will inhabit the world’s cities. They will use about 2800 cubic kilometres of fresh water – more than the whole of irrigation agriculture uses worldwide today.

Today almost a quarter of the world’s farm land is affected by serious degradation (FAO 2008), up from 15% two decades ago.

In 1900 every human had 8 hectares of land to sustain them – today the number is 1.63 and falling. Put another way, between 1990 and 2005, world demand for food grew 15 times faster than the area of land being farmed.

Lying in wait for us is a marine timebomb. 29 per cent of world fisheries are in a state of collapse according to Canadian scientist Boris Worm and colleagues (2007). The majority could be gone by the 2040s they warn. Plagues of jellyfish in the world’s oceans signal the impact of overfishing and nutrient pollution, while carbon emissions are turning them acidic, imperilling the entire marine food chain.

Farmers not only grow food. Our 1.8 billion farmers – mostly women – also manage half the world’s land, three quarters of its fresh water and a third of its atmosphere. They need our help to do so. And they need fair prices for their produce to do so sustainably.

Farmers, and the scientists who serve them, are today the most important human beings alive.

The world has forgotten this.

It needs to be reminded.

So, time to go back to agriculture. Anyone?