Essay on Famine and Global Food

Submitted By ictccc
Words: 664
Pages: 3

Topic: There are many threats to global food supplies. Explain the problem, identify possible solutions, and assess the implications of implementing these solutions.

Recently, the drought condition is severe in America, which is pushing up global grain price and thus intensifying the shortage of global food. Some irreversible facts such as growing population and climate change are pushing people to face a food crisis in the future. This essay will explain the reasons for this issue, discuss some solutions with detailed evaluations.

In many economically developed areas where people have enough food and never worried about food shortage, the fact of food crisis always being ignored. However, it is a very serious problem which can be illustrated by some aggregate data. H. Charles points out there are at least one from seven people in the world are suffering from hunger (H. Charles et.al. 2010, ll.7-9). An appalling data from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that there is one child dying from hunger or the disease caused by malnutrition every 6 second in the world. There are some major reasons for food deficiency. The main reason is the growing population pressure in which the global population is predicted to be 9 billion by 2050 (John, ll.9). Another pressure is from the natural calamities, such as drought and flood. Further causes, such as using grains as biofuels, lacking of technology and knowledge and food wasting are also relevant reasons for food crisis.

The discussion of solutions is mainly concentrating on two aspects, increasing the yield and reducing the food waste. For the first aspect, several methods are used to achieve its aim. Investment in improving the infrastructure in poorest countries is an efficient way to increase food production (5c, ll.191-196). A goof point to illustrate this is the example of Ethiopia, However, the method is not implemented very well in some poor areas, according to Godfray (2010), as the pay back of the investment seems not attractive in a short-term. A view of long-term developing is considered to be taken by governments in poor countries, as agriculture is the basic element to social development. An improved infrastructure, such as transport system and agricultural processing plants could not only benefits the farmers but also could support local employment by providing more jobs like drivers and workers. A further method to improve agriculture production is biotechnology. Disease-resistant and insect-resistant crop and wheat improved by biotechnology can boost the efficiency of agriculture production without using more land (5d, ll.13-35). But there seems to be a doubt of the security of these genetically modified foods as many people are still considering they will change human’s gene too.

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