The world is heading towards a food crisis of its own making |
Climate change, war and fragile supply chains are driving a growing global food crisis, with hunger rising and the world’s food systems under increasing strain.
Hunger, the ‘Second Horseman of the Apocalypse’, is riding down modern humanity in ever-increasing swathes as world leaders compete to see who can make matters worse.
While famine spreads through the developing world – Africa especially – the thunder of his iron hooves is echoing even in the supermarket aisles of the affluent West as world food prices ratchet to their second-highest point in history, driven by fears of disruption to the global grain trade caused by a searing climate and savage politics.
Driving the emerging global food insecurity are vast, intractable factors:
A world climate heating four times faster than it was a decade or so ago, threatening harvests in all continents and regions. The stable climate in which agriculture, cities and modern civilisation arose has now ended.
A global water crisis, in which humans have outrun the Earth’s ability to supply fresh, clean water – and farmers no longer have sufficient water to irrigate their crops.
A global soils crisis, in which humans are destroying the very soils that grow our food and spreading deserts at unprecedented rates.
An agro-ecological disaster, slowly killing the world’s food-producing regions, through hundreds of millions of tonnes of highly toxic chemicals spread over many decades, accompanied by the rising spread of microplastics, ‘forever chemicals’ and endocrine disruptors, all of which attack our children and their brains.
A pandemic of food ignorance among an urban populace of 4.75 billion, heedless of the fact that it now costs 12 kilos of topsoil, 950 litres of water, 1.6 litres of fuel, 1g of pesticide and 4.9 kilos of carbon emissions to feed one person for one day.
A human population four times larger than the planet can carry, which is the chief engine of the above.
Pointless wars in West Asia, Eastern Europe and........