Red Cross Blogs

Food insecurity is a population issue, but it’s not an over-population issue

By Guest
October 26, 2011 at 12:40 pm

Mary Atkinson is our economic security advisor who specialises in food and livelihoods issues.

With the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) announcing this week that the world’s population may double by the year 2100, many are understandably worried about the strain on our natural resources.

This isn’t a new worry. In fact, when you tell people that almost a billion people in the world are hungry now, it’s not uncommon for them to say that families in developing countries shouldn’t have so many children if they can’t feed them.

While the global population is on the rise, the world’s current hunger problem isn’t due to the number of people on the planet. The world produces enough food to feed everyone – including large families in developing countries – and this is even after a third of it has it has been wasted or thrown away.

The real issue is poverty: through no  fault of their own, many people around the world can’t access the food they need – properly nutritious food – mostly because they cannot afford to buy it, particularly now that food prices have risen to record levels.

There are two main approaches to producing food. One is through large-scale industrial farming, which uses lots of pesticides, fertilisers and machinery that are all reliant on cheap and plentiful supplies of oil.

The other is by supporting small-scale farmers, who already produce most of the world’s food, so they can produce more. Evidence suggests that small farms can have as good, if not better, yields than industrialised farms, even when using more sustainable environmentally friendly farming methods.

Around 75 per cent of the developing world’s poor live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. By supporting their farms, we not only strengthen their livelihoods and tackle poverty, but also boost local food supply, keeping prices lower and protecting the environment. And we know that as communities rise out of poverty, family sizes get smaller.

The Red Cross is well-placed to support small-scale farmers, since we have local branches with many of our volunteers living in the communities they serve. Many Red Cross National Societies in Africa, for example, have volunteer gardeners who help people in their villages develop more productive home gardens using green farming practices adapted to local climatic conditions. They also encourage people to diversify their livelihoods because farming is risky, with good and bad years. This helps people become more resilient when crops fail.

A big part of the world’s food problem is that the western world is promoting our type of diets in developing countries, exporting a love of fast food, lots of meat and dairy, and high-fat and high sugar diets. This is leading to a different kind of environmental and health disaster than the one we’ve seen in the past, but a disaster all the same.

Right now nearly a billion people go to bed hungry, while about a billion others go to bed obese (with many of these in the burgeoning middle classes in developing countries). According to the World Health Organisation, coronary heart disease – for which obesity is a major cause – is already the leading cause of death in many poorer countries.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts that we will need to feed an additional 2 billion mouths by 2050, and so we will need to produce 70 per cent more food. But this figure is calculated on the assumption that we will continue down the disastrous path we’re currently on, with more and more people consuming a westernised diet high in fat and animal products that not only requires more land, water and energy to produce but leads to all the associated health consequences of overnutrition.

How we eat here in Britain, and in other wealthy countries is unsustainable. If everyone ate like we do in Britain, we’d need three planets to produce enough food. If everyone ate like the U.S., we’d need five planets.

Is this really what we want?  Producing more food also doesn’t solve the underlying cause of hunger: poverty and unequal access to food. It will not eradicate hunger.

We need more sustainable and equitable diets. The world’s hunger problem isn’t because families have “too many” children; the problem also rests with our own population and what we all eat , not over-population.

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Tags: disaster, food crisis, food insecurity, food security, International

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Emergencies, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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