Saturday, February 23, 2013

World Food Supply and It's Implications

There is enough food in the world, it is just very grossly distributed.

Dr. Murano and Dr. Richardson offered some very good food for thought at this weeks seminar. We are very lucky to live in a country where we don't have to give a second thought to going out and buying whatever we are craving at the moment.

There is such a large disparity between the amounts of food people have and don't have. I think that the core of this problem falls back to economics and politics. Economics and politics play such a big role in determining how food gets distributed to the global population. As Matthew mentioned during class, food should be a right and not a privilege. This seems like something that should be the natural way of things, but as Dr. Murano mentioned, it inevitably would become someone else's responsibility to provide for others happiness. What's your opinion on how food should be distributed and should it be a right to have food?

The world population is constantly increasing and the disparity in food distribution will continue to increase. What can we do to solve this problem? Will the global population ever be willing to accept GMOs? Norman Borlaug's used GMOs to save 3 billion lives. There is a very large disconnect in information about what goes into making a genetically modified organism, and I think this discontent will always exist so the question is how do we get people to accept something that has the potential to save billions of lives?

Are you willing to change your habits to help provide food for others?
Any other thoughts or questions?  

5 comments:

  1. You guys should go check out www.freerice.com

    It's an interactive way to help combat this issue head-on -- and it's fun!

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  2. I thought it was interesting that both speakers mentioned that the greatest population growth is in countries which struggle the most with poverty. Considering that there is already difficulty distributing food to these areas, I guess this growth is going to even further increase the gap between areas with food supply and wealth and areas with food demand but few resources to procure it.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. I found this after our global food policy and supply seminar, and I thought that y'all might find the simplicity of this almost 100-year-old PSA interesting in contrast to the discussion we had. I am not familiar with how complex the dialogue surrounding global food supply has been over the years. Would any of our ag-oriented members be able to shed some light on the historical context for me? Thanks!

    http://stanleykubrickinterviews.tumblr.com/post/45332137561/good-us-food-administration-psa-from-nearly-100

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  5. Economics and politics play zombie survival warehouse such a big role in determining how food gets distributed to the global population.

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