Today I read an interesting article about the amount of food that the world needs and sadly about it's disparity. One of the world's concern is 'With the increasing number of people, will the earth manage to produce as much food to feed it's people, especially since global warming is causing a stir in crops production?'
It seems that the world is growing enough, actually more than enough for everybody to have a satisfying meal everyday even when global warming is lessening the crop production.
If crops yielding are more than what people can eat, it means supply is more than demand, which means, food prices should be low, which means, even the poor should be able to buy food and not die of starvation.
The question then is, why do so many people still die of hunger?
The main reason is of course: People
1) Rich people are on the lookout for money. They buy land, and scoot away the poor farmers (often with the permission of government, which is sad) and plant whatever they want to plant which will bring them money. Even when they plant food, the food is not meant to feed the own poor people, but rather sold outside at a higher price. As said, 'whatever which will bring them money'
2) The price of food is not decreasing but increasing even when supply exceeds demand because of lobbying by these rich people. So poor people can't afford food and starve till death.
3) A whole lot of the world's crop that can be used to feed human are used to feed animals instead. It takes 7kg of crops to produce 1 kg of meat (or so the newspaper states). That means, people are eating so much meat that so much crop is being used to feed animals so that we can eat them. If we were to eat less meat, more crops could be used to feed humans.
4) A lot of corn are being used as fuel rather than feeding people. So there you go, feeding the machine, but not people. Why? Because it makes more economic sense.
What is done by certain people, made other people suffer all the more. So what can be done? Awareness is one. Another thing would be to eat less meat. I guess I would try to eat less meat.
Of course, if the poor gets education, they would earn enough to buy food and not starve to death, but this would need measures from government. Let's pray for the best
Oh, before signing off, there is a phrase which caught my attention while reading the newspapers. Remember it was said that people worry that the world's population would outgrow the availability of food? One person commented saying
"Why can't the heaving masses of black, brown and yellow-skinned peoples have fewer babies and eat less so that more corn can be burnt as biofuel in big 4WDs or to feed cows to produce fillet mignon steaks?"
This is of course a very bad remark at so many levels, but let's take a look at why such a comment would come to be.
It’s no coincidence, wrote Monbiot, that most of those obsessed that population growth is a “problem” are post-reproductive wealthy white men – “It’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed"
While the developed countries are fighting against obesity, third world countries are fighting to stay alive.
God Bless~
Reference:
No comments:
Post a Comment