The steadily increasing HUMAN POPULATION puts great pressure on the global food supply, especially because food is so unevenly distributed. The number of people on the planet has reached 7.7 billion (up from 2.5 billion in 1950) and the number is expected to rise to 11.2 billion by the end of the century. Population growth over the past century has been accompanied by enormous increases in food production. With steeply rising energy and fertilizer prices, some analysts now doubt that future production can keep pace if based on the same energy-hungry production model.
CONSUMPTION PATTERNS worsen the food crisis because higher-income consumers grab such a large share of the globe's food. They consume more volume and want products such as meat and dairy, which make heavy demands on feed grains and land for grazing. Beef cattle eat seven pounds of grain for every pound of beef produced. Meat consumption is increasing in many parts of the world. Joseph Poore, a researcher at the University of Oxford forecasts that by 2050 people would be consuming 60 per cent more meat and dairy, a staggering 1.2 trillion litres of dairy milk and 500 billion kilograms of meat per year which is unsustainable in the long-run contributing to world hunger.
CLIMATE CHANGE is one of the leading causes of global hunger, causing more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Over 80% of the world’s hungry people live in disaster-prone countries. Moreover, countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua are known as the Dry Corridor - has been affected by extreme rainfall and prolonged drought that have left 1.4M people in urgent need of food assistance. It is estimated that in these countries less than 25% of people have enough money to buy basic foods.
CONFLICT leads to world hunger. Conflicts and strife in countries like Sudan, Syria uproots families and prove detrimental to the country’s economies. During the conflict the infrastructure of a country is severely damaged and leads to stunted agricultural production, making food harder to produce and afford. When precious resources like food become scarce, competition grows, fuelling further unrest and violence. With 60% of the world’s hungriest people living in conflict zones and 68 million people currently displaced due to conflict, world hunger can get worse.
Another known issue of hunger is that it AFFECTS WOMEN THE WORST. In many countries that are facing famine, extreme conflict, and hunger – women often eat last and least. Women in many parts of the world are sacrificing themselves for their children. While they work the most and fulfil the responsibilities in the home, they only get a small amount of food to eat. It is estimated that of the 821 million people who are food insecure, 60 per cent are women and girls. Each cause of unequal treatment reinforces the others, trapping women in a cycle of disadvantage, poverty, and hunger. Moreover, due to hunger 1 in 3 women suffer from anaemia, a diet-related iron deficiency that can cause organ damage if left untreated.
BIOFUELS was once promoted by the environmentalists in the 1990s as a "green energy" alternative to oil and the agricultural lobby pushed hard for legislation to promote it. Recently, with strong government backing, production and use have increased many-fold. The biofuel boom is now removing crops and cropland from the food system and bidding up food prices dramatically. Biofuel production has increased in many countries. Countries like the United States and the United Kingdom have set targets to increase biofuel production. If these targets are met the amount of land used to create fuel rather than food will increase dramatically. This would eventually result in increased food prices that could rise by up to 76% by 2020, pushing 600 million people into hunger.
INEFFICIENT FARMING TECHNIQUES have also led to steady depletion of worldwide topsoils. An estimated 25 billion tons of topsoil are lost to erosion each year. Flooding and heavy rainfalls, due to climate change, worsen the process. The UN estimates that erosion has now seriously degraded about 40% of the world's agricultural land. Food production requires a lot of freshwaters. Worldwide about 70% of freshwater use is for agriculture. But water resources are getting scarcer in all world regions, as demand soars for drinking water, industry, recreation, and other uses, as well as more intensive farming methods. Heavy pumping of underground water has drained aquifers and lowered water tables. Large dams for irrigation and flood control have been built on many of the world's rivers, so there are now far fewer opportunities to use this approach. In fact, dam-based irrigation has caused salt leaching on farmlands, which lowers productivity dramatically or even ends fertility altogether.
