Global Sustainable Development News

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE - INCLUDING A THIRD OF THE WORLDS UNDER FIVES – UNDERNOURISHED

By David Haugh, BEM, BA

The risk to the world’s food security - ensuring the right foods, in sufficient quantity get to the world’s population - is facing an increased threat, and we’re in danger of a booming world population (9.7 billion by 2050) outstripping our ability to feed ourselves. This stark prospect was explained to the Stratford-upon-Avon Rotary Club by Dr Alastair Smith, Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick, at their 28th January meeting.

In giving his enthusiastic and interactive talk, Dr Smith surveyed the situation at both a global and a local level and emphasized the crisis the world is now facing. Nearly half of the world’s countries face issues of malnourishment: a growing percentage of the global population are over-nourished while under-nourishment is again on the rise. Indeed, the problem of food is not to ‘the third world’; in the UK 1.3 million people have used food banks to provide a part of their daily food requirements, and 30% of these are people in work but whose wages are insufficient to provide nourishment to an acceptable level! More locally, here in Stratford-upon-Avon, a fairly prosperous town in the fifth richest country in the world, about 10% of our children - by government definition- live in a household so poor that they do not receive sufficient food, and over a thousand of our fellow citizens had to make use of the local food bank in 2017 alone. These are surprising, unpleasant and worrying statistics on their own, but it is not only undernourishment that is causing concern around the world.

Contributing to the risk caused by global warming is the reverse problem of over-nourishment. So while nearly one half of the world’s population is suffering food shortage, a good part of the rest is experiencing the problems of obesity. Not only does obesity create a strain on medical services and health, the increased production of food to meet growing demands creates its own problems in increased greenhouse gasses, destruction of the natural environment including rain forests, with the consequent adverse impact on the environment. Again, to bring the problem down to a more local level, between 20% to 29% of the population of the UK are dangerously obese, the second highest rate in Europe causing further problems for an already severely overstretched NHS, whilst here in Stratford-upon-Avon some 15.4% of our children of infant school age are overweight, with a further 7% being obese, a level of over-weight harmful to their health now and into the future.

As if these worrying statistics weren’t enough, Alastair went on to describe the nine areas considered by environmental scientists to be having a major impact on the world. Included in these nine are some well-known problems such as climate change, loss of land bio-diversity and perhaps one not so well known - bio-chemical floats - resulting from the increased use of fertilizers in farming, which accumulates on the land, eventually seeping into streams and rivers and severely impacting on aquatic populations in an adverse way and from which it will be very difficult to recover.

These problems lead to an exceptionally complicated situation not least with the concerns of climate change. Indeed in October 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change warned that we had perhaps 12 years to seriously structurally change the amount of greenhouse gases and carbon we emit. Not at all good news for those primary school aged children for which this prospect is their future. Climate change adversely impacts on food production adding to an already fraught situation of the complexity of food production and its inter-connectivity with greenhouse gases.

All the research has not only quantified the problems, but it has also identified areas where action can be taken to provide positive solutions and there are management actions and techniques which can be introduced to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These results allowed Alastair to finish his talk on a more positive note, as assuredly we have to take an approach which will address these problems, and move us towards actions which will alleviate the situation. These include more efficient food production, including meat production, and reducing food waste, which is an increasing problem. Efficient food production could include introducing more efficient irrigating systems in large parts of the world where food production presently relies on an annual rainy season. If this fails no food can be grown, but in many areas, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, better irrigation technology could largely alleviate this. Overall though nothing will work unless individuals make dietary changes. This means of course that we can all play a significant role as all our small individual efforts lead to a major impact. We could perhaps choose a meat free day, or even a meat free week. We could ensure we don’t waste food and don’t over buy and be then forced to throw away food past its ‘sell-by’ date. This message left the Club feeling positive and encouraged to make individual dietary choices that could contribute to the solution, so perhaps the final message so eloquently delivered by Dr Smith is that the future is in all of our hands, and we can all individually make a positive contribution to world food security.

Alastair received a resounding and very warm round of applause at the end of his enlightened and well received talk. All that’s left now is for each of us to do our bit!