Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.
As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.
Frank Rijsberman, head of the world’s 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: “Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.”The Raw Story
Experts: Millions will starve to death as climate change accelerates
John Vidal, The Observer
Humanity may be exhausting its ecological niche, apparently related to fouling the nest, and the result will be a culling. Ironically, many of the culled will not have contributed to the problem.
6 comments:
Right.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bob_roddis/8651294314/in/photostream
Thanks for posting Bob!
We should be thankful that we are not getting colder because then we would be really screwed with respect to farming.
I thought that the unlimited oodles of funny money had cured the problem of scarcity.
I thought that the unlimited oodles of funny money had cured the problem of scarcity.
The problem is scarcity thinking that leads to excessive saving and hoarding of resources. Scarcity thinking disrupts circular flow, no matter how much the pump is primed, unless there is a disincentive to hoard, like a tax.
You can lead people to knowledge but you can't make them think.
I get it! Poverty is caused by saving and prosperity is caused by artificially stimulated spending out the wazoo. But that causes Global Warming.
I get it! Poverty is caused by saving and prosperity is caused by artificially stimulated spending out the wazoo. But that causes Global Warming.
Welcome to the economics, politics and sociology of complexity. As social groups become larger and more intricately constructed due to shifting cultural rituals and institutional arrangements, was well as growing knowledge and its power through application, the opportunities that these groupings and sub-groupings seize and the challenges they meet result in emerging challenges and opportunities in the future. There is no "steady state," goal, or stopping point in open-ended dynamical system such as modern information-based systems that result in learning and where learning affects future context. Constant adaptation to feedback from changing conditions through continual learning and innovation based on it is required, as Roger Erickson has been emphasizing.
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