10 Things to Know for World Food Day

The world should be united in ensuring food security. In an essay for TreeHugger, Lester Brown lists the multiple threats: increasing population, especially in the most impoverished nations; an expanding middle class in emerging economies consuming more meat; limits on farm expansion because of limited water supplies; groundwater over-pumped in China and India; fast rising food prices; loss of topsoil and unsustainable erosion; plateaus in yields of staples like rice, corn and wheat; the predictable threat for Asia due to melting glaciers; and greater weather volatility because of climate change. Brown concludes: “The world today desperately needs leadership on the food security issue to help the world understand both the enormity of the challenge we face and the extraordinary scope of a response, one that, among other things, requires a total restructuring of the energy economy…. We are looking at an abrupt disruption in the world food supply that could be just one poor harvest away.” – YaleGlobal