CAPÍTULO II: PROPUESTA
2.3. Validación de la propuesta
According to UN predictions the next decades will see continued rapid population growth. The projected figures are seven billion by 2015 and nine billion by 2050. The twentieth century, despite triple population growth from 2.2 billion in 1950 to more than 6.5 billion today, managed to increase per capita production of food. This was mainly due to increased productivity per acre. But owing to great regional vari- ations and unequal efforts by different countries, there has been very little change in the numbers of people starving since 1970.
Reducing hunger despite steadily growing population figures requires increased productivity as well as improved methods of distribution. This can only be achieved through effectively fighting poverty. The world community has not gotten anywhere near the goals set by the World Food Summit in 1996 which stipulated that by 2015 the number of starving people will have to be halved from 800 million to 400 million, as today’s estimates put the number of people worldwide who go hungry every day at around 924 million. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set
F.-T. Gottwald (B)
CEO Schweisfurth Foundation, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
137 F.-T. Gottwald et al. (eds.), Food Ethics, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-5765-8_9,
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in 2000 indirectly lowered the target figure: The target is no longer set at half of the total world population, but at half of their share in total world population figures. This means that with an increased rate of population growth, more people may be hungry without endangering the Millennium Development Goals.
The Global Monitoring Report 2008 published recently expressed yet another dire warning that the Millennium Development Goals 2015 will not be reached due to the financial crisis of 2008 and that between 200,000 and 400,000 children may be in mortal danger. Food is becoming even scarcer in the world’s poorest regions. According to researchers, incomes of 390 million of the poorest Africans will be reduced by 20%. This far exceeds the most negative predictions for the western world. The main reasons are declining prices for raw materials as well as massive reductions in investments in developing and emerging countries (http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTGLOMONREP2008/Resources/4737994- 1207342962709/8944_Web_PDF.pdf).
Hunger and poverty are predominantly concentrated in rural regions of the globe. There is a very real danger that small subsistence farmers who sell their pro- duce locally will be squeezed out of the market, while rising prices for basic food items will increase hunger among the urban poor and indigent populations. Climate change will exacerbate exigencies of hunger and poverty.
Politically, economically, and morally, man-made global climate change has been recognized as the central challenge of the twenty-first century. The latest report issued by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) removed the last remaining doubts still entertained by science, concerning the fact that man- made greenhouse gas emissions actually have been the cause of global warming. The report gives clear indications that the global average temperature increases and its expected ecological consequences might happen a lot sooner and will be much more serious than suspected until a few years ago. It will not be our grandchildren and great-grandchildren as thought until recently, but our children who will be faced with a totally different world. Whether these changes will remain within a manage- able frame, will be determined by our present-day climate protection policies and implementation.
This quickened pace of change has been due to various processes happening a great deal faster than expected. The Greenland and western Antarctica ice shelves for example are thawing a lot faster than predicted in all existing climate models.
Agriculture being especially close to nature will keenly feel the impact of cli- mate changes. Frequent extreme weather events like droughts or storms will lead to erratic harvests and crop failures in all industrialized states. The extensive melting of alpine glaciers and possibly the much larger glaciers of the Himalayan region expected for this century, would catastrophically impact normally dependable water supplies and consequently annual harvest yields. Hundreds of millions of people in China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Bhutan would have to fear for their water sup- plies. A reduction in glacier size would also contribute more to the warming of the earth, as large light-reflecting masses of ice would have disappeared. The increasing unpredictability of the Indian sub-continent’s monsoon rains is an equally omi- nous sign. Monsoon timing, length, precipitation amounts and distribution decide
agricultural yields as well as industrial production levels and social well-being in India and other South Asian and Southeast Asian countries. Recently two man- made developments have started to impact monsoon rains: Huge clouds made up of exhaust fumes from power plants and traffic reflect the sun’s rays back into outer space. This leads to a reduction of temperature differences between land and sea – and thus impacts monsoon circulation – and in a worst-case scenario may result in a total cessation. Conversely, heightened evaporation due to increased tempera- tures will lead to a tendency toward heavier monsoon downpours. This results in increased unpredictability and regional differences: While some regions are totally rain-starved, others experience ever more destructive inundations. This move toward less predictable monsoon rains has been observed for the past 30 years. How agri- culture in the Indian sub-continent will be able to adjust to these changes cannot be predicted with any certainty.
Extensive changes in precipitation are also expected for Latin America and Africa. There will be a drastic reduction in precipitation in the Amazon region. It is foreseeable that due to clear cutting of tropical rain forests for soy production and pasture lands, 40% of the Amazonian region will have been converted to dry steppes by 2050. This would release almost as much carbon dioxide as the burn- ing of coal, oil, and gas in the twentieth century. The warming trend of the Indian Ocean threatens an ever-increasing lack of water in southern Africa, thus worsening the periodically occurring drought crises of the past decades. The experts are still undecided if the Sahel region will suffer a similar fate – or if increased precipitation might be the result. These changes will have far-reaching consequences for food security – and they will happen a lot faster than predicted a few years ago. While up till quite recently, permanent changes were expected to take place within several decades, some have become reality much sooner. The Australian Meteorological Association for instance, has begun to classify the persistent drought conditions in some of the most important producing regions as the probable future “normal case” scenario.