While Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich decries President Obama as “the food stamp president,” author Raj Patel in this interview on Democracy Now says what is really needed is a conversation about poverty and why the need for food stamps is so high. “It’s true that disproportionately people of color are affected by food insecurity. But what Gingrich is doing, of course, is racially coding poverty by calling President Obama ‘the food stamp president,’” Patel said. “He’s invoking these ideas of racialized poverty. Of course, if you look at the people who are on the food stamp program, you see that the majority of them are white and poor.” Patel is author of the popular book, “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.”

See the video on Democracy Now

So the more worried people are about something, the less they read about it and the more they leave it to their government ot handle.

Read more here.

The report notes that the last 50 years witnessed an increase in food production, but in most instances, achievements come at the expense of degraded land and water systems. Between 1961 and 2009, the world’s cropland grew by 12 percent, but agricultural production rates have been slowing in many areas and are today only half of what they were during the peak of the Green revolution. Farmers must produce 70% more food by 2050 to meet the world’s food requirements. This amounts to 1bn tonnes more wheat, rice and other cereals, 200m more tonnes of beef and other livestock, the report says.
Climate change is also expected to change patterns of temperature, precipitation and river flows upon which the world’s food production systems depend. Agriculture now accounts for 13.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
SOLAW pioneered a global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources. A frightening quarter of the worlds land is reported as highly degraded, 8 percent are moderate, 36 percent stable or slightly degraded and 10 percent ranked as “improving”, 18 percent bare and inland water bodies (around 2%).High incidences of land degradation are reported west coast of the Americas, Southern Europe and North Africa and throughout Asia resulting in loss of soil quality, biodiversity and water resources depletion.
Large inland water bodies are experiencing reduced inflows, salinization, eutrophication and wetlands loss. Declining aquifer levels and continued abstraction in some regions, particularly i the Middle East, Northern Africa and Central Asia have reached critical thresholds whilst in Western, Central and South Asia and Northern Africa withdrawals for irrigation have exceed renewable levels, the report cautions.
Degradation is a risk across all income groups but the poor are mostly affected with 40 percent of the world’s degraded lands found in areas with high poverty rates, mostly developing countries, 30% in moderate poverty areas while 20% are in low poverty areas.
In trying to resolve the impeding crisis exacerbated by economic challenges, the report recommended sustainable intensification, improving the efficiency of water use; innovative farming practices, increasing investment in agricultural development and modernization of national policies and institutions.

Unless we address these challenges, food supply is threatened – and not only food to developing countries.

This video, THE OIL JOURNEY produced by the Post Carbon Institute and narrated by actor Peter Coyote, says it the clearest.

The site helps  you get perspective and you can see world population when you were born. Here is mine:

Click on the graph to explore where you are in the picture.

As we in the Award are quick to point out, we cannot feed just now one of the billions, and two of the billions are under-nourished. The challenges are discussed in a New United Nations report.

The system pulls economic resources through the system.  But nearly two billion are undernourished. If we not buy the system crashes, but if it continues we are in debt with a degraded environment. This is about  people being persuaded to spend  money they do not have, to buy things they do not need that create impressions that do not last on people they do not care about.

So people want to save. But it would be better if we spend. It is the system that creates these paradoxes.