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| Introduction | Geopolitics | Population | Development | Environment | Home |
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FOOD CHALLENGEThe World Food Summit held this November in Rome is an action prompted by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations to encourage global participation in combating world hunger and malnutrition. Take this Demography Challenge to test your knowledge of "World Food Facts."
1 How many people must the world feed?
2 Worldwide, how many people are chronically undernourished?
3 In the past few decades, food production has
4 World hunger exists because there is simply not enough food to feed the world's large population.
5 What is the chief cause of hunger?
6 Natural phenomena such as droughts and monsoons are the primary causes of land degradation.
7 In the United States, how much of the grain produced is used to feed livestock (pigs, poultry, and beef cattle)?
8 What are the world's staple foods?
9 The benefits of converting unused land for cropland outweigh the costs of degrading that land.
10 In developing countries, who is mostly responsible for food production?
1 The world's current population is 5.8 billion. This means that the world has to feed more people now than ever before. In 1800, the world fed a billion people; in 1930, about 2 billion; and in 1960, 3 billion. This number is increasing daily. According to UN projections, by the year 2035 there will be 9 billion people.
2 Currently, there are 800 million people who are chronically undernourished. There are also 200 million children under the age of five years who are deficient in protein and energy. If food production remains constant, 730 million people will remain undernourished by the year 2010.
3 Food production has more than doubled in the past forty years. In fact, global food supplies increased at a faster rate than population growth. This global trend reveals that the food crisis is not so much a stress of world food production than specifically a problem of food security in certain regions. For example, despite the increase in global food production, Africa has been unable to improve her food situation. In some countries, food production has declined.
4 False. While hunger is clearly a worldwide problem, food scarcity is not. The Green Revolution, with its agricultural technologies, helped the world to eliminate food scarcity but not hunger. The world actually produces enough food to provide an adequate diet for everyone. Other factors have created the food crisis: poor distribution of land, water and wealth; lack of access to the food produced or to the resources needed to grow it; and lack of income to purchace the food or the land to grow it.
5 Poverty. While population growth makes the problem of hunger worse and land degradation puts greater stress on the ability to produce, most people go hungry because they have an insufficient income needed to secure food. Poverty creates a barrier to achieving self-sufficiency, because an individual is unable to purchase land and other resources to grow and supply their own food.
6 False. Though a severe drought in the midwestern United States and a monsoon in China have destroyed land used to produce wheat and rice, human activities have had a greater impact on degrading the land. Over cropping and overgrazing make the land more vulnerable to damage when droughts and monsoons do occur. The clearing of forests for agriculture (deforestation) also degrades the land, causing soil erosion and decreasing ground water supply.
7 From the total of the United States' grain, 70 percent is fed to livestock, leaving little to efficiently feed the human population. Meat production is environmentally expensive. It takes 6.9 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of pork and 4.8 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. It also takes 2,464 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. Using land for grazing causes the land to lose its carrying capacity.
8 Staple foods refer to foods that are most basic to humanity's survival. They are cereals, particularly rice, wheat and maize. The global supply of staple foods is improving, but low-income food-deficit countries are still experiencing shortages due to civil strife, floods and local crop failures. The global stocks of these foods still remain below safe levels and would be insufficient to secure food in the even of production problems in 1997.
9 This is a difficult question and one that generates much debate. The benefit of creating more cropland is the obvious increase in potential food production. But half of the 90 million hectares that could be converted to cropland by 2010 in developing countries are currently forests. The conversion of these forests translates into high costs. The loss of forests means less biodiversity and less storage for destructive carbon. Trees serve as sinks for the carbon dioxide in the air; a vital function because too much carbon dioxide can create climate changes. Burning trees to clear land for agriculture releases even more carbon dioxide into the air. The world currently uses 6 million hectares of arid grasslands for grazing. If converted to cropland, there would be less forage for livestock.
10 Women have a greater responsibility for food production in the poorest of countries. Two-thirds of women workers are involved in agriculture. Even though their responsibility has been greater, women have less access to owning land and have recently been included in development assistant programs. Men have continually abandoned agricultural labor in the developing regions to work in urban areas. This movement has left the women to make up for the food deficit by working as hired labor and on large farms.