By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 30th, 2009
A billion people will live in famine as global food security breaks down in the coming decades, states a top U.S.scientist.
State Department chief scientist Nina Fedoroff warns that a lethal combination of global warming and a rise inworldwide population is sure to create vast food shortages.
Dr. Fedoroff last week told The London Times that an increasing rise in the earth’s temperature is damagingfood production, even as the growing human population approaches nine billion. If these two related trendscontinue, the inevitable result will be a world in which famines may easily strike up to a billion people, addedFedoroff.
Even such wealthy countries as the United States will struggle to keep many citizens fed. The poorest arealmost sure to suffer most.
“I think that’s what we are facing,” Fedoroff told the Times. She made a brief stop in London before appearingat an Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) conference in Paris last week,calling on governments to create serious plans for global food security.
The combined rise in temperatures and populations so far has barely been discussed by anyone in or out ofgovernment.
“We are asleep at the switch,” she told the Times.
The State Department’s chief scientist is not the only expert raising the specter of global food shortages.
John Beddington, Britain’s top scientist, echoed Fedoroff’s warnings two weeks ago, forecasting a “perfectstorm” of water, food, and energy scarcity by 2030.
The world’s population already is past six billion. Projections put that number at 9 billion by 2050 unless peopleact now to reduce both global warming and population increases, states The London Times.
Rising temperatures are expected to slash food productivity in huge areas of the earth’s most fertile lands.
Worldwide heatwaves will occur some years, thus putting a massive strain on food resources. But if suchheatwaves occur over two consecutive years, crop yields may be so drastically damaged that up to a billionpeople may suffer starvation.
Fedoroff pointed to the infamous 2003 European heatwave–when crop yields plummeted from 20 to 25 % inFrance alone–as a precursor of what eventually will happen around the world.
“Everybody knows the summer 2003 heatwave killed 30,000 to 50,000 people–but do you know it [also]decreased crop productions by 20 to 25 per cent? That’s huge. That summer was an anomaly, but theprojections are that’s going to be a typical summer. It could be by the mid-century, it could be by the end of thecentury,” Fedoroff told the Times.
Thanks to rising temperatures and populations, such a happening will soon routinely occur on a worldwidescale. Crop production already has decreased due to more frequent droughts in segments of Africa. Andexpert forecasts of worldwide rises in temperature state that vast areas of the U.S., Europe, Central America,Asia and Australia will be similarly struck in the future.
Fedoroff informed her Paris audience last week that scientists must search for new answers to reduce watershortages.
“Like Professor Beddington…Dr. Fedoroff believes genetic engineering must be expanded if the world is goingto be able to feed itself,” states The London Times.
Perhaps. But we at the American Spark believes that if scientists, politicians and businesspeople wish to putsuch absolute faith in mutated food, then they–along with their friends, family, and immediate associates–should be the ones who eat it for the rest of their lives. Leave the real food for the rest of us.
Seems a small price to pay for better living through science, especially since they’re the ones who trust in it somuch…
We may be out of our depth here, but most of this “doomsday scenario” has not yet happened–and it is notyet certain to occur. Wouldn’t it make at least as much sense to reduce global warming through laws whichactually punish Big Business polluters, and lower population levels with family planning programs?
These moves probably won’t solve all the problems we’re facing. But to us they seem a more rational start.
