How Will Global Food Demand Affect the Environment and Economy? Bill Gates (2010)

According to the World Resources Institute, global per capita food production has been increasing substantially for the past several decades. In 2006, MSNBC reported that globally, the number of people who are overweight has surpassed the number who are undernourished -- the world had more than one billion people who were overweight, and an estimated 800 million who were undernourished. According to a 2004 article from the BBC, China, the world's most populous country, is suffering from an obesity epidemic. In India, the second-most populous country in the world, 30 million people have been added to the ranks of the hungry since the mid-1990s and 46% of children are underweight. Worldwide, around 925 million people are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty, while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty (source: FAO, 2010). According to the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, failed agriculture market regulation and the lack of anti-dumping mechanisms engenders much of the world's food scarcity and malnutrition. As of late 2007, export restrictions and panic buying, US Dollar Depreciation, increased farming for use in biofuels,[8] world oil prices at more than $100 a barrel, global population growth,[10] climate change,[11] loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development,[12][13] and growing consumer demand in China and India[14] are claimed to have pushed up the price of grain.[15][16] However, the role of some of these factors is under debate. Some argue the role of biofuel has been overplayed[17] as grain prices have come down to the levels of 2006. Nonetheless, food riots have recently taken place in many countries across the world. The ongoing global credit crisis has affected farm credits, despite a boom in commodity prices.[21] Food security is a complex topic, standing at the intersection of many disciplines. A new peer-reviewed journal of Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food began publishing in 2009.[22] In developing countries, often 70% or more of the population lives in rural areas. In that context, agricultural development among smallholder farmers and landless people provides a livelihood for people allowing them the opportunity to stay in their communities. In many areas of the world, land ownership is not available, thus, people who want or need to farm to make a living have little incentive to improve the land. In the US, there are approximately 2,000,000 farmers, less than 1% of the population. A direct relationship exists between food consumption levels and poverty. Families with the financial resources to escape extreme poverty rarely suffer from chronic hunger, while poor families not only suffer the most from chronic hunger, but are also the segment of the population most at risk during food shortages and famines. Two commonly used definitions of food security come from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social[23] and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.[24] Food security for a household means access by all members at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. Food security includes at a minimum (1) the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, and (2) an assured ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways (that is, without resorting to emergency food supplies, scavenging, stealing, or other coping strategies). (USDA)[25] The stages of food insecurity range from food secure situations to full-scale famine. "Famine and hunger are both rooted in food insecurity. Food insecurity can be categorized as either chronic or transitory. Chronic food insecurity translates into a high degree of vulnerability to famine and hunger; ensuring food security presupposes elimination of that vulnerability. [Chronic] hunger is not famine. It is similar to undernourishment and is related to poverty, existing mainly in poor countries." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security Image by World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons