Thanks to John Coulter for letting me know that the February 12, 2010 issue of Science is devoted to food security. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol327/issue5967/index.dtl where you can download copies of the various articles. According to John, “While every article mentions population, every one of them treats population as a given – how technologies in food production can assist in coping with a population of 9 billion by 2050. Not a single article on trying to curb demand by limiting population and no consideration as to what happens to population post 2050 if curbs are not put in place before then. It’s all very depressing. One article praises the efforts of one woman in Uganda for raising the productivity of her small farm but mentions ‘in passing’ that she has nine children.”

It would be good if you could send a letter to Science pointing to this glaring defect. Send your letter to science_letters@aaas.org.

Many thanks to John Tanton for this interesting, short set of letters between him, Norman Borlaug, and David Pimentel regarding soil conservation and the risk of using biomass for fuel.

John Tanton Robbing the Soil of its Future Tanton and Borlaug (PDF, 37 KB)

Thanks to Kent Welton for this article from Wired Magazine.
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As they queue to fill water jugs from a rusty communal tap, the women of Njoro can’t help but gawk at the odd scene across the road. In a wheat field ringed by barbed wire, a dozen men wearing white polyethylene jumpsuits stand in a tight huddle, eyes fixed on the green-and-amber stalks that graze their knees. They chat in foreign tongues — Urdu, Farsi, Chinese — that are rarely heard here amid the acacia trees and donkey carts of Kenya’s Rift Valley. The men’s hazmat-style safety gear suggests they might be hunting down one of the infamous viruses that flourish in this part of the world — Ebola, perhaps, or Marburg.

Then the leader of the huddle, Harbans Bariana, a rotund Australian in an undersize safari hat, begins reading aloud from his clipboard: “Wylah?” he asks.

For full article, visit:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_ug99_fungus/all/1

The world’s two most populous nations – India and China – are placing a high priority on reproductive health and poverty alleviation as part of their efforts to meet the U.N.’s much-touted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and its 2015 deadline.

Since 1978, China has accelerated development and reduced its population living in “absolute poverty” from 250 million to 15 million, according to a new report submitted by the Chinese government to the annual ministerial meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) through Jul. 31.

For full article, visit:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47652

Thanks to Dave Gardner for this article on food and population, where you can also see a comment by Frank Arundel.
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Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?

Is there such a thing as sustainable agriculture, or is “sustainable agriculture” a self-contradictory term? To keep a piece of land producing crops, it is necessary to maintain a high level of various minerals. The most critical are phosphorus (P), potassium (K), and especially nitrogen (N). These minerals might be abundant in the soil before any cultivation is done, but whenever crops are harvested a certain amount of the three critical elements is removed.

For full article, visit:
http://culturechange.org/cms/index

Thanks to Mike Nickerson for this article.
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In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.

The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

For full article, visit:
http://www.alternet.org/story/142293/

Thanks to Sonny Fox for this article.
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Sometime around 2050, there are going to be nine billion people roaming this planet—two billion more than there are today. It’s a safe bet that all those folks will want to eat. And that’s… an incredibly daunting prospect. Right now, an estimated one billion people go hungry each day. So add two billion more people, a limited supply of arable land, plus the fact that rising incomes will boost demand for meat and dairy products, plus the fact that many key natural resources (fisheries, say) are already being overexploited… and it’s hard to see the situation getting better. And that’s before we get into the fact that the planet’s heating up, which is expected to wreak havoc on agricultural yields.

Still, not everyone’s convinced that feeding nine billion people—and doing it in a sustainable fashion—is a totally impossible task. A new paper published this week in Science, written by Britain’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington along with nine other experts, outlines a way this could actually be done. The catch? Doing so would require “radical” changes to the current global food system. The paper’s a great synthesis of a wide range of different food issues, and I’ll just pull out the main ideas:

For full article, visit:
http://www.tnr.com/node/72936

Thanks to David Epstein for this article from the Washington Post.
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This column has focused on the effects of food production on climate change. But what about the effects of climate change on food production? After all, few things are as sensitive to changes in weather as agriculture. Farmers wait for warmer seasons to grow some crops and colder seasons to plant others. They pray for rain and, at times, hope the rain eases up. The relationship between a good yield and the weather that produces it is rather delicate.

Climate change, however, is going to be rudely indelicate. The basic story is simple: Greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. More heat causes more evaporation. That water has to come down somewhere. Where it comes down depends on atmospheric conditions, weather patterns and much else. It is, frankly, quite complicated.

For full article, visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content

Thanks to Kei Kianpoor for this article from the Economist.
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Every crisis has its winners. A group of them is sitting in the Stuyvesant Room at the Marriott Hotel in New York. The conference room, where the shades are drawn and the lights are dimmed, is filled with men from Iowa, Sao Paulo and Sydney—corn farmers, big landowners and fund managers. Each of them has paid $1,995 (€1,395) to attend Global AgInvesting 2009, the first investors’ conference on the emerging worldwide market in farmland.

A man from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) gives the first presentation. Colorful graphs travel up and down his PowerPoint charts. Some are headed downward as the year 2050 approaches. They represent the farmland that is disappearing as a result of climate change, soil desolation, urbanization and the shortage of water. The other lines, which point sharply upward, represent demand for meat and biofuel, food prices and population growth. There is a growing gap between these two sets of lines. It represents hunger.

For full article, visit:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/globalbiz

A healthy diet is more than just calories. Priya Shetty gets the figures on the cost of poor nutrition — and the scale of the challenge.

Hunger: it’s an emotive term for undernutrition. It conjures images of famine and starvation in the developing world.

Technically, undernutrition is the outcome of insufficient food and repeated infectious diseases. It includes being severely underweight or dangerously thin (wasted), too short (stunted), and deficient in vitamins and minerals.

But the world’s food problems are far more complex and widespread than just undernutrition.

For full article, visit:
http://www.scidev.net/en/health/the-challenge-of-improving-nutrition