United Nations World Food Day: A Global Wake-up Call on Food Security   
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Halo concerned viewers. Food security has recently become a hot topic. In honor of the United Nations World Food Day, today’s program will explore the root causes of global food insecurity, possible consequences of inaction, and solutions.

The summer of 2010 in the northern hemisphere brought a series of extreme weather events linked to climate change, including a massive heat wave across all of Europe, Northern Africa, parts of Asia and North America. In Russia, the heat wave, along with a drought of proportions not seen in 5,000 years, sparked massive fires. During the same summer period, heavy rains from an intense monsoon created a flood disaster in Pakistan.

At one point, a full fifth of the nation was under water, including fertile crop lands. Meanwhile, crop losses and lower yields across the northern hemisphere this summer caused global grain prices to spike up to levels not seen since 2008, making food too expensive in many developing countries. The tensions created by such a situation can even lead to conflict.

It was not long before Mozambique saw food protests sadly resulting in fatalities in September 2010. Economics editor Sean O'Grady of “The Independent” in the United Kingdom noted in response to this problem as it unfolded:

“In developing and emerging economies… the challenge is in some cases a matter of life and death. In these countries food represents a much higher proportion of household budgets than in the West, and they are less able to withstand such shocks.”

Prior to 2007, spikes in prices were due to one-time events like a monsoon failure. The 2010 food price increases, however, were more alarming because they are part of longer term directions in which demand for food is outpacing the growth in food supply. As Britain’s “Telegraph” news stated, “The crises in Russia and Pakistan are a reminder that, for the last 20 years, the growth of the world's population has outstripped that of its agricultural output.”

The spread of modern agricultural practices referred to as the “Green Revolution” started in the 1960s and led to increased global grain production of 250% as measured between 1950 and 1984, and increased average calorie consumption per day in the developing world by 25%. Another key benefit was the gradual reduction of the number of people in the world suffering from hunger right up until the late 1990s.

According to Earth Policy Institute founder and author Lester Brown, the population suffering from hunger decreased to 775 million people by 1997, with 108 days of global grain reserves. Today, the number of hungry has soared above a billion people as both the absolute numbers and the percent of hungry have increased and grain reserves dropped to a record low of 62 days.

Even more disturbing, however, are the potential ramifications for the stability of civilization. Mr. Brown reported his own gradual realization that, as past major civilizations may have collapsed because they lost control of their food supply, our modern society is at risk, too. He stated,

“For a long time I had rejected the idea that food could be the weak link in our modern civilization, but as I began to reflect back a year or so ago, I realized that the trends that we had been tracking for decades now – things like soil erosion, aquifer depletion and falling water tables, the deterioration of grasslands, deforestation… – it occurred to me that these trends are undermining the world economy, and we have not turned around a single one. And that does not take into account at all some of the more recent trends associated with climate change.”

Mr. Lester Brown also explained that as demand for food increases at a pace greater than the growth in food supply, food prices inflate, putting pressure on many developing countries which are already on the edge of chaos as their citizens sometimes turn to desperate means to survive.

“Failing states,” he cautioned, “are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere.”

What are the main factors causing growing global food insecurity and how do we address them? Mr. Brown identifies three main demand and three main supply areas tendencies which we must address in order to reverse growing global food scarcity and general global insecurity. On the demand side, the three main factors are population growth; increased consumption of animal products, and the use of grains for fuel instead of food.

The global population has been growing at an exponential rate this last century, reaching around 6.8 billion today. The US Census Bureau anticipates the globe will hold 9.2 billion people by 2050, which will put a huge amount of pressure on the need for increased food supplies to meet demand.

The next demand area driving food scarcity is the heavy consumption of meat and dairy products, which use many times more grain than would be needed if the grain were fed directly to humans. As incomes increase, there has historically been an unhealthy increase in the consumption of animal products.

Using food crops for biofuel is the third identified demand area. British investigative journalist George Monbiot explains why this area is much less significant than the consumption of animal products, as he wrote in The Guardian:

“There is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100 million tons of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760 million tons will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals. This could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.”

On the supply side, the main threats to the global food supply include depletion of top soil, dwindling water supply, and climate change. Top soil is the top 6 inches of earth that contains nutrients essential to the healthy growth of plants. Professor John Crawford, a sustainable agriculture expert at Australia’s University of Sydney released a study finding that around 75 billion tons of top soil is lost annually and around 80% of the world’s farming lands have moderate to severe erosion.

He also estimates that topsoil could be gone in as little as 60 years, threatening global food security. The next major supply- side threat to global food security is water. The world’s water supply is affected by both the depletion of underground aquifers and changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change.

British scientist Dr. Jonathan Baillie, who is the director of environmental conservation at the Zoological Society of London, UK, stated, “At the present rate of use, by 2030 half the world’s population could be living with severe water stress. We cannot afford this.”

Much of the pumped water for irrigation comes from fossil aquifers that, like an oil reserve, don’t replenish. In India and China alone a combined total of 300 million people depend upon pumping water from rapidly diminishing fossil aquifers for crop irrigation. Many other places, including Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, and the US are also facing over-pumping and threatened aquifers.

From a climate change perspective, erratic weather patterns tend either to bring extreme drought, or to dump, for instance, a month’s worth of rain in one day, both of which damage crops and decrease food security. Climate change also brings increasing global temperatures, where each 1 degree Celsius rise in global average temperature is expected to decrease crop yields by 10%.

The warmer temperatures are also melting glaciers around the globe, which are used for irrigating crops during the dry season. The melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica could also bring about 10s of meters of sea level rise. Current projections estimate around two meters of sea level rise by 2100. To put this into perspective, the World Bank estimates that 1 meter of sea level rise will affect all of Asia’s productive rice growing regions to some degree.

So the question is, how do we improve global food security in these circumstances? Lester Brown points out that most of the productivity increases from the Green Revolution have already occurred, and biotechnology does not look as though it is likely to make up for the shortfall. Another current approach is for developed nations to help developing nations boost their food production; however, Lester Brown argues that this is too narrow of an approach.

We need to reverse the devastating threats in order to return to food security. Organic farming techniques, such as cover cropping and no-till agriculture, help preserve and build topsoil. The Rodale Institute of the US has developed organic farming techniques with yields similar to or better than using conventional agriculture, while also retaining more water and building topsoil.

But the most important aspect of ensuring food security is for the world to adopt an organic vegan diet. A plant-based diet is the best way to feed more people with fewer resources, while also helping to reverse climate change. Feeding grain to livestock rather than directly to humans is very wasteful, because most of the food is used up in the animal’s metabolic process.

George Monbiot highlighted research by British magazine editor Simon Fairlie, whose calculations demonstrate the efficiencies of a plant-based diet. Mr. Monbiot wrote,

“In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby’s book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet grown by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half the current total). A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.”

Vegan diets use the least water in production. Sweden’s Stockholm International Water Institute reports that 70% of water usage occurs in agriculture, with most of that used to produce animal products, including meat and dairy. University of California-Davis in the US found that one serving of beef raised in California used 1,238 gallons of water, one serving of chicken used 330, but one complete, nutritionally-balanced meal of a grain, a legume and two vegetables used only 98 gallons of water.

A vegan diet is also the best way to mitigate climate change, both because livestock raising contributes overwhelmingly to climate change emissions, but also because livestock emissions dissipate out of the atmosphere much more quickly.

In summary, the best and fastest approaches to preserve global food security and to do more with less and dwindling resources include: building top soil with organic farming methods; conserving dwindling water resources by eating a more water-efficient plant-based diet; and reversing climate change quickly and effectively by adopting an organic vegan diet.

May the day soon come when the planet is saved through humanity’s wise actions, so that all the world may live in happiness and abundance. We thank you for joining us on this program. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television for Words of Wisdom, coming up next after Noteworthy News. May your life be blessed with peace and protection.

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