Title: Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
Author: Lester R. Brown
A:
B:
As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8% since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997.The Philippines, no longer able to count on getting rice from the world market, recently negotiated a 3 yr deal with Vietnam for a guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted in Somalia and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in jeopardy.
C:
Not every poor person is hungry, but almost all hungry people are poor. Millions live with hunger and malnourished because they simply cannot afford to buy enough food, cannot afford nutritious foods or cannot afford the farming supplies they need to grow enough good food of their own. Hunger can be viewed as a dimension of extreme poverty. It is often called the most severe and critical manifestation of poverty. What we can do is promote sustainable farming practices which mean local agricultural experts teach THP partners hot to create and manage community farm. Villagers learn techniques to sustainable improve crop yields, providing entire communities with increased access to food.
So What?
In China the water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast.
What If?
The 3rd and perhaps most pervasive environmental threat to food security rising surface temperature can affect crop yields everywhere.
Say Who?
Lester R. Brown
This Remind Me Of?
Opinion paragraph: Nobody should be suffering any more. Solutions are to donate money to Africa so that hungry people can eat, and if hungry people eat, then there will be no civilization doom. If people don't suffer hunger, then they'll be happy, and will look for solutions to help civilization. That's why we should stand up, and do something!
Author: Lester R. Brown
A:
- sometimes it fails spectacularly, and people are simply blindsided by events such as today’s economic crisis
- our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid
- food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization
- Many of their problems stem from a failure to slow the growth of their populations.
- But if the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate
- States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security
- food security and basic social services such as education and health care
- Our global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nation- states to control the spread of infectious disease
- to manage the international monetary system, to control international terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals
- wheat prices elsewhere more than doubled, pulling rice and corn prices up with them
- the recent surge in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse without a reversal in the trends themselves
- People in low-income countries where grain supplies 60% of calories, such as India
- directly consume a bit more than a pound of grain a day
- affluent countries such as the U.S. and Canada, grain consumption per person is nearly 4time that much
- though perhaps 90% of it is consumed indirectly as meat, milk and eggs from grain-fed animals
- A fourth of this year’s U.S. grain harvest— enough to feed 125 million Americans
- half a billion Indians at current consumption levels— will go to fuel cars
- The biggest challenge here is irrigation, which consumes 70% of the world’s freshwater
- Between 1950 and 1990 the world’s farmers increased the grain yield per acre by more than 2% a year, exceeding the growth of population
- Net carbon dioxide emissions can be cut by systematically raising energy efficiency
- investing massively in the development of renewable sources of energy
- to ensure at least a primary school education for all children, girls as well as boys
B:
As water tables have fallen and irrigation wells have gone dry, China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest, has declined by 8% since it peaked at 123 million tons in 1997.The Philippines, no longer able to count on getting rice from the world market, recently negotiated a 3 yr deal with Vietnam for a guaranteed 1.5 million tons of rice each year. countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted in Somalia and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in jeopardy.
C:
Not every poor person is hungry, but almost all hungry people are poor. Millions live with hunger and malnourished because they simply cannot afford to buy enough food, cannot afford nutritious foods or cannot afford the farming supplies they need to grow enough good food of their own. Hunger can be viewed as a dimension of extreme poverty. It is often called the most severe and critical manifestation of poverty. What we can do is promote sustainable farming practices which mean local agricultural experts teach THP partners hot to create and manage community farm. Villagers learn techniques to sustainable improve crop yields, providing entire communities with increased access to food.
So What?
In China the water table under the North China Plain, an area that produces more than half of the country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling fast.
What If?
The 3rd and perhaps most pervasive environmental threat to food security rising surface temperature can affect crop yields everywhere.
Say Who?
Lester R. Brown
This Remind Me Of?
- us in the environmental field are well into our third decade of charting trends of environmental decline without seeing any significant effort to reverse a single one
- As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing
- the resulting food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries already teetering on the edge of chaos
Opinion paragraph: Nobody should be suffering any more. Solutions are to donate money to Africa so that hungry people can eat, and if hungry people eat, then there will be no civilization doom. If people don't suffer hunger, then they'll be happy, and will look for solutions to help civilization. That's why we should stand up, and do something!