MIT press published the revolutionary book The Limits of Growth, that reminded us of the urgent and fundamental need to manage our unparalleled growth and our often unreasonable demands. The Scarcity to Ecological Security presented us another point of view in different aspects of what are the damages happening to our society, to our world. Let’s take a look at some pointers what the author would like us to understand and analyze.
Chapter 5 topic is focused on food policy. With our population that has dramatically changed over the years, and it’s been increasing big time. A lot of problems have risen that are accompanied by over population. Some issues to look upon are poverty, malnutrition, and food scarcity. The imbalance between demand and supply that is becoming mainly evident in relation to food and water security. In this chapter, the author described the ecological and sociopolitical drivers that influence the condition of clean water and adequate food supplies. Their analysis argued against overly simplistic interpretations of the resource problems confronting many societies.
A large numbers of people remained underfed because of poverty; people failed to anticipate the current situation of shortages in the face of surpluses. On the other hand, there’s an increasing numbers of people in the wealthier countries who are overfed, who are suffering from different difficulties because of too much food consumption. It was also discussed that it is expected that the same economic inconsistency and trade barriers that have given rise to malnutrition in the past to persist into the future.
The big problem of poor countries is that they have not enough knowledge and help coming from their governments or outside institution in order for them to deal with food shortages. While on industrialized countries, it’s not easy to develop domestic farming. Why? Because agricultural production in industrial countries are still heavily funded and many barriers remain to agricultural imports from less developed countries. As a result, the poor and deeply indebted agrarian countries have limited capital with which to expand food production, little access to markets in the industrialized countries, and few sources of income with which to finance any essential food imports.
The goal of making globalization for the world’s poor is to open up agricultural markets and reducing subsidies to agriculture in industrial countries. This in return will have the greatest impact in fighting future starvation and malnutrition. The author described that hunger is not directly linked with overpopulation; rather the problem lies with the accessibility of food. It was pointed out that there’s an adequate food supply but people weren’t able to afford or have access to it because of poverty. Poor people often lack access to land and other resources, thus they can’t produce and provide food for themselves.
Limited access to essential resources is not only an environmental issue, but there’s also a political and socioeconomic that is associated to it; it involves trade barriers, farm subsidies, debt, and other problems that keep poor people impoverished and hungry even when there’s enough supply of food on a global basis.
Poor people who doesn’t have an access to food supply becomes malnourished, especially children, who are greatly affected by it. This issue is not only a primary concern of America, rather the whole world. It was discussed that food insecurity is not only seen to under developed countries but as well those higher income countries. Vast majority of food insecure people live in South Asia.
The chapter 5 also discussed what the Green Revolution is. It is a movement to increase yields by using, new crop cultivars, Irrigation, Fertilizers, Pesticides and Mechanization. It was founded to end hunger by improving crop performance, and to end serious food shortages. It changed the agriculture significantly, making it dependent both on environmentally destructive practices because of the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation and on fossil fuels. The future of human food supplies is now closely linked to the future of energy supplies.
It presented that the world population will likely continue to rise, but the population decline in many industrialized countries will create new socioeconomic and political problems. Although world food production is likely to increase at a rate that keeps up with population growth, greater demand in China as well as distributional issues will keep significant numbers of people malnourished. Aside from these continuing scarcity issues, ecological insecurity may increase because of new threats that include global warming, loss of biodiversity, bioinvasion, and the rapid worldwide spread of new diseases. As a whole, the book Scarcity to Ecological Security not only analyzes the nature of these impending problems but also suggests ways how to solve them.
CONCLUSION
The issue of food policy concerns the whole world, and little does the government or other institutions prioritize such problems. Few organizations, such as UNICEF or other non – government agencies make waves in order for them to aid countries who were underfed.
Underfed refers to malnutrition especially with kids and lack of agricultural education to those who have abundant access to land. They don’t have sufficient funds for them to utilize their resources to the fullest and export them to into industrialized countries. The authors made an effort to correlate his research with previous studies to present the past problems are still haunting us and will continue to hinder us from developing. Drastic changes should be observed and make an action now.
