Agricultural Research Key to Food Security
Professor Adel el-Beltagy, chair of the Global Form on Agricultural Research (GFAR)
Boosting agricultural research in the developing world is the key to ensuring food security for the world’s poorest, says Adel el-Beltagy, Chair of the Global Form on Agricultural Research (GFAR), writing in the latest issue of the TWAS Newsletter, published last week.
With nearly a billion people suffering from chronic hunger, global food security remains a major concern, despite being a key goal of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Extreme weather events due to climate change and the recent trend to convert croplands to biofuels both threaten to put even more people at risk. (more…)
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Without Significant Change, Global Food Production Headed for a Crisis
With the caloric needs of the planet expected to soar by 50 percent in the next 40 years, planning and investment in global agriculture will become critically important, according a new report released today (June 25).
The report, produced by Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s leading global investment banks, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, provides a framework for investing in sustainable agriculture against a backdrop of massive population growth and escalating demands for food, fiber and fuel. (more…)
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Frances Moore Lappé: Challenging Simple Concepts Can Save Planet
Going green doesn’t have to mean using less power or slower economic growth.
Author and democracy activist Frances Moore Lappé says we already know how to solve the pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and world hunger.
But she says our own pre-conceived ideas about how things should work – our mental map of the world – is actually preventing us from taking action.
In a speech at Ottawa’s Carleton University as part of the 78th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Lappé called for a wholesale revamping of the way we view government, the economy and democracy. If we manage to do it, she says, we can save ourselves from our own demise. (more…)
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Discovery Could Help Feed Millions
Loretta Mayer is working on research to speed up fertility in rats to decrease the number of rodents munching on crops intended for humans. (Photo by Jerry Foreman, Northern Arizona University)
When scientist Loretta Mayer set out to alleviate diseases associated with menopause, she didn’t realize her work could lead to addressing world hunger and feeding hundreds of millions of people.
The Northern Arizona University researcher and her colleagues at NAU and the University of Arizona identified a nontoxic chemical technology that when applied to rodents, caused infertility in rats, which feast on crops intended for human consumption.
“This environmentally neutral approach, that has never been available before, will reduce the damage rice-field rats cause in countries that depend on rice as a main food supply,” Mayer said.
Rodents consume or damage up to 50 percent of pre-harvest rice crops. Due to the large-scale cultivation of rice worldwide, if rice production were to increase by 10 percent, “this would feed about 380 million people a year,” Mayer said. “We can easily increase rice production by 10 percent by reducing rodent fertility in half.” (more…)
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Biofuels Ignite Food Crisis Debate
Taking up valuable land and growing edible crops for biofuels poses a dilemma: Is it ethical to produce inefficient renewable energies at the expense of an already malnourished population? David Pimentel and his colleagues from Cornell University in New York highlight the problems linked to converting a variety of crops into biofuels. Not only are these renewable energies inefficient, they are also economically and environmentally costly and nowhere near as productive as projected. Their findings1 are published online this week in Springer’s journal Human Ecology. (more…)
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