food scarcity?

[mcfarms]

..A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.

"For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices," said Bongaarts.

"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning," said Casterline.
...

[FarmRanger]

What utter nonsense. When I see a bushel of
wheat costing an ounce of gold, then I'll believe
we can't sustain our population.

Africa's problem is politics. Remember Rhodesia,
the food exporting nation.....now known as
starving Zimbabwe.

[boarderbloke]

Some years ago, a agriculture foriegn exchange student flew into Regina from SE Asia to attend the College of Agriculture in Saskatoon. His hosts picked him up in Regina, and on his drive to Saskatoon he spent most of his time starring to the side, at the ditch between the divided highway. His hosts thought he was impressed with the divided highway infrastucture, and ask him whether they didn't have roads like that back in his country? He replied that they had many nice roads, lots of them even wider and smoother than the highway they were on. So the hosts asked, then what are you looking at? He replied, he was thinking about all the wasted land between the two roads, and about all the vegatables he could be growing in that ditch between Regina and Saskatoon, given a chance. When they got to the city, he couldn't understand why every house had lawns of grass both front and back, yet no livestock to make use of the grass. When it was explained to him that you couldn't keep livestock in the city, he asked why then aren't they planting potatoes, or carrots, or peas or beans. How could you have all this land and not be planting some kind of crop for food on it!
Just a different perspective on land use and how, we, in North America are comfortable and confident with the amount of food on our store shelves, and the price we'll have to pay for it. Most people say it's not worth their TIME or expense to raise a garden in their back yard as you can just go to the store and pick up what you want, rather than spending all that time watering and weeding.
The globe can grow a lot more food than it currently is, it just might cost more.

[food4u]

I have always said North America needs a good food shortage to wake us up to the real world.We have always been able to buy food if you had the dollars.

[Braveheart]

The "Bilderberg Group" is working to make sure the world population shrinks rather than grows.

[TOM4CWB]

All of a sudden the 'cheap food policy' starts to backfire... and as in the 2nd world war (when we told them we needed more than $1.45/bu for milling wheat)... King George told my Grandfather... "You SHANT HAVE IT"!

Just like KING Oberg just wrote in the CWB 09-10 Report...

"In 2009-10, farmers received $4.6 billion
in returns for the sale of their grain,
one of the highest overall returns in
history..."

RIGHT:

1CWRS 13.5 = $4.98/bu
1CWRW = $3.43/bu
Feed WHeat that just got sold/swapped back to the CWB as milling for this crop year: $2.25/bu.

I do not know what the air conditioner is doing at the CWB 423 Main ... but they must put some real crazy gas into the ventilation system... to make a statement like Chairman Oberg just made.

25bu/ac because of drought... $3.42/bu didn't even cover the cost of just the fertiliser in the fall of 2008 when we seeded the crop!!!

[burnt]

Well mcfarms, it looks like your alarmism went to waste here . . . maybe try it in a city paper or forum where consumers go to get their daily fix of fear.

If the "world" cannot feed itself, it is its own fault - too many Hosin' Mubarak(SP) or Bobbi Mugabe types that are more interested in feathering their nests rather than creating a self-reliant populace.

Not that our western governments are much better or different . . .

[ColevilleH2S]

Everyone I have talked to, or have heard presentations from, that has visited the former Soviet Union states of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, talk endlessly about the under utilization or absolute non-use of the deep rich farmland in those areas.

If they are to ever develop a proper agricultural infrastructure and the motivation to use it, we in Canada may have a bit of a problem competing. So don't tell us farmers that there is a food production crisis. It is a political/organizational crisis. Nothing more.

[mcfarms]

Burn't
I didn't write it and
Wasn't trying to be alarmist, I saw it as positive for our industry glass half full kinda thing. thought it was an interesting article that would provoke some production or marketing discussion, Which it kind of did, you must not get the furrow magazine as it was discussing a very similiar thought , 7 billion now 9 in x number of years. Interesting things to consider when making long term planning decisions in a business such
as agriculture.
Now that being the middle east is changing everyday as I type what effects will that have on us?

, If Africa and the FSU can ever develop strong stable good governments that encourage land ownership and investment in infrastructure they could produce a wack of food, will they?

Notice no one picked up on the solution one person offered it wasn't higher production in lower production areas but in fact lower production of people in higher population areas.

( I was kinda hopin someone would reference soylent green )

[mcfarms]

How about this fellows thoughts.

HANLEY: Feeding 10 billion chance to restore ecosphere
By Paul Hanley, for The StarPhoenix February 22, 2011 About three billion people — the equivalent of three Indias — will be added to the world’s population in the next 50 years. Last week, I discussed how it would be possible to feed these extra mouths by applying the high yielding farming methods typical for North America and Europe to under-producing countries such as Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan.

There is, however, a big problem with this approach: Intensive methods are unsustainable. Mechanized farming that makes use of heavy applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is highly dependent on fossil fuels. As Dale Allen Pfeiffer points out in his book Eating Fossil Fuels, modern farming is essentially the conversion of oil into food. Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive to produce, which is pushing food prices up, a trend that can only continue.

Meanwhile, intensive farming methods are causing erosion, polluting waterways, contributing to the loss of biodiversity, increasing the load of toxins in the environment and food, and contributing to climate change.

So what is the alternative? In State of the World 2011, Innovations that Nourish the Planet, the Worldwatch Institute (www.worlwatch.org) presents an alternative vision for food production. There is sufficient worldwide experience with agroecological farming — including practices such as organic farming, agroforestry, conservation agriculture and evergreen agriculture — to demonstrate a workable alternative. Using conservation tillage and crop rotations, for example, some 350,000 Zambian farmers have improved yields 30 to 100 per cent. In Malawi, farmers who substituted “fertilizer trees” for mineral fertilizers tripled their yields, from as little as 0.5 tonnes per acre to 3.5 tonnes above the world average.

One major study reported in the book looked at 286 agroecological projects covering 37 million hectares in 57 countries. The average yield gain over previous practices was 79 per cent. These methods also showed a measurable improvement in biodiversity.

There is a growing sense that the need to vastly expand agricultural production to feed our rising population, including a growing segment of affluent people who can buy more food, represents an opportunity as well as a crisis. By investing in agroecological methods on a large scale we could reduce energy consumption, improve soil sustainability and water quality, increase biodiversity and ameliorate climate change simultaneously.

Rattan Lal, the director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at the University of Ohio and former president of the Soil Science Society of America, contends that a different approach to the management of soils could have a big impact on climate.

“Global gross primary productivity by photosynthesis (of all vegetation) is 123 billion tons of carbon converted from the atmospheric carbon dioxide into biomass. Compare this with only 10 billion tons of emissions from fossil fuel combustion.”

Almost all of the carbon dioxide synthesized by plants is returned back to the atmosphere through plant and soil respiration. However, if 10 per cent of what plants photosynthesize annually can be retained back in the biosphere and incorporated in soils, it is possible to balance the global carbon budget and substantially improve agricultural production and sustainability. The question is how?

Lal says that improved agricultural practices must have a low carbon footprint by improving the use efficiency of fertilizers and pesticides and decreasing losses due to erosion and volatilization. They must also create a positive ecosystem carbon budget through soil carbon sequestration.

Farm residues such as straw and manure are often burned to produce energy in large parts of the world, or simply to deal with straw that is difficult to incorporate. Plant residues and animal manure along with other biosolids must be kept on the land, but poor farmers in many parts of the world cannot afford to do it because they need the income from selling fodder and manures.

This is where the world community can step in to pay farmers for ecosystem services. Unless farmers are paid to do this, there is no way it will be done. The money needed to pay farmers could be gained from carbon fees and taxes, or by converting funds from essentially useless activities such as military spending to constructive farming practices that could restore Earth’s ecological balance.


Read more: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/technology/HANLEY Feeding billion chance restore ecosphere/4321821/story.html#ixzz1EkMeaW8F

[hobbyfrmr]

MC Farms, I use the get the New Holland News sometime in the '90's . It was an article highlighting the progress and efficiency in crop production in North America. Zero till, one pass seeding, GMO herbicide resistant varieties to grow on more acres etc. I do remember the price of wheat was horribly low at the time and I cut out the article for one of the statements. NEVER HAVE SO FEW, FED SO MANY, FOR SO LITTLE. Its not a food issue, its a politics/power struggle as already mentioned.

[bucket]

With the current drop in price there should be a few less starving.

Its funny though, none of the hungry countries were buying grain when it was cheap last year.

Look at what Algeria did. Came in and bought durum at nearly twice the price as what it was for all of 2010. Although the cwb probably gave them a sweet deal. Should know after the PRO is released thursday how cheap they gave it away to algeria. 600,000 tonnes can affect the PRO/pooled price.