Food production

Population Chart

During the last 25 years, world agriculture successfully expanded food production faster than population growth. This can continue for the next 25 years and beyond it appropriate action is taken. Although world food stocks are currently low and grain price high, the world is not about to run out of food. We can produce enough food for future generations if we choose to do so.

    The widespread food insecurity, unhealthy living conditions, and abject and absolute poverty in many developing countries are already threatening global stability. Failure to assure sustainable food security will foster the very conditions that will further destabilize and polarize the world in the years to come with tremendous consequences for all people.

Farmer

The basic facts:

  

Poverty is widespread in developing countries with over 1.1 billion people living on a dollar a day or less per person. Human resource development in developing countries is lagging : 1 billion people lack access to health service, 1.3 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation systems , and one third of primary school enrolls drop out by grade 4. Natural resources, upon which future food production depends, are being degraded at alarming rates: almost 2 billion hectares of land have been degraded in the past 50 years: about 180 million hectares of forests have been converted to other uses during the 1980s, marine fisheries are collapsing around the world and seasonal water shortage afflict many developing countries. Improved appropriate technology is essential is to increase productivity. Yet low-income food deficit developing countries are grossly under investing in agricultural research and many are reducing their support.  

Water requirement for food production

Food

          It calls for sustained action in six priority areas. First, we must selectively strengthen the capacity of developing country governments to perform appropriate function such as establishing or clarifying property right’s promoting private-sector competition in agricultural markets and maintaining appropriate macro economic environments. Predictability, transparency and continuity in policy making and enforcement must be pursued.

Food First

Percentage of Population

By the time this day is over, about 40,000 human beings-mostly children-will have died from hunger, malnutrition and related causes. Today and every day the deaths will mount reaching an annual toll of thirteen to eighteen million. Few of these people will have been caught up in famine or other emergencies. Most will have suffered from a silent assault the kind that seldom makes the headlines, but which claims its victims just as relentlessly.

It is intolerable that such deprivation and suffering should be allowed to exist in a world of potential food plenty. Having enough food is fundamental to all else. At the most basic level, this may entail humanitarian relief to assist people in emergency situations. In the transition from relief to development however we must look at systems for ensuring that societies have the capacity to produce or purchase the food they need and that it is accessible to all. 

Poverty

Poor People

Sustainable food security fuses the goals of house hold food security and sustainable agriculture, it requires both. It requires looking not only at the aggregate supply of food but also at the distribution of income and land, and at other issues: do people have enough income to buy food? Enough land to grow their own food? Does the food distribution system deliver food where it is needed? How much food is wasted due to inadequate distribution system?

The challenges of sustainable food security are immense and it is growing. One billion people -20 percent of the global population are too poor to obtain enough food to sustain normal work. Half a billion are too poor to obtain the food needed for healthy growth of children and minimal activity of adults. Today’s failure to feed people however may be but a prologue to a much larger failure in the future. Given likely population increases, world food output must triple must over the next 50 years if the world’s people are to have a nutritionally adequate diet. It will be difficult enough to achieve this expansion under favorable circumstances, and conditions may be far from favorable.

Food Production

Viewed from this perspective, the goal of achieving sustainable food security in the decades ahead emerges as one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced agricultural output must be tripled, and people must have the income to buy food they need. The erosion of the resource base must be halted and then reversed. Failure on any of these fronts will yield unprecedented human suffering.

Third, we must forge a true global partnership, a compact for sustainable food security. All countries rich and poor have important roles and responsibilities. There must be reciprocal responsibilities among nations, not one way transfers.

Water Crisis

Cultivation

Fourth, we must see deterioration of the agricultural resource base terrestrial, aquatic and climatic for what it is: a major threat to development and a major source of economic logs. Farmers are the largest group of environmental decision makers in the world. We must ensure that they have the means to make sustainable development a reality where it counts in the fields and fisheries.

We know a good deal about how to rid the world of the scourge of hunger, and how to begin to move toward sustainable food security on a global basis. We know that economic growth and prosperity are necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for eradicating hunger. We also know that development efforts must encompass not only food production, but also socio economic factors, including sustainable livelihoods for poor families, the implications of population growth rates, the status of women and girls and so forth. We also know that good words are not enough now more than ever before it is crucial that we marshal the political will to achieve our goals.