Food reasoning

Cambridge Resilience Forum, part of Cambridge Programme for Sustainable Leadership, are running an event in S Africa later this month. Their summary of reasons to attend is a good reminder of why the Growing Wales project to map out a nation-scale response to food security is so important:

"For the first time since the early 1970s, the prevalence of hunger in the world is climbing. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, 15% of the world’s population is hungry, up from 13% at the middle of this decade. FAO economists are predicting that the number of chronically hungry people will climb this year to 1.02 billion, up 11.5% from 2008.

The future of food is an area ripe with dilemmas and opportunities. Declining biodiversity, global climate change, infectious disease, and global food sourcing (with attendant food safety concerns) are all intervening in food webs in different ways at different levels. Current worldwide migration trends will create new burdens as rural to urban movement continues, and population growth soars over the next several decades. The use of arable land for food production will compete with demand for fuel crops, while our oceans face degradation and declines in consumable marine life."