{"id":10238,"date":"2011-02-02T12:03:44","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T18:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sustainablog.org\/?p=10238"},"modified":"2011-02-02T12:03:44","modified_gmt":"2011-02-02T18:03:44","slug":"restoring-food-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/restoring-food-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Restoring Food Security for All Takes Action on Many Fronts"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>By Lester R. Brown<\/strong><\/p>\n Today there are three sources of growing demand for food: population growth; rising affluence and the associated jump in meat, milk, and egg consumption; and the use of grain to produce fuel for cars.<\/p>\n Population growth is as old as agriculture itself. But the world is now adding close to 80 million people per year<\/a>. Even worse, the overwhelming majority of these people are being added in countries where cropland is scarce, soils are eroding, and irrigation wells are going dry.<\/p>\n Even as we are multiplying in number, some 3 billion of us are trying to move up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock products. As incomes rise, annual grain consumption per person climbs from less than 400 pounds, as in India today, to roughly 1,600 pounds, as among those living high on the food chain in the United States, where diets tend to be heavy with meat and dairy products.<\/p>\n When the United States attempted to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into ethanol, the growth in world grain demand, traditionally around 20 million tons per year, suddenly jumped to over 50 million tons in 2007. Roughly 119 million tons of the 2009 U.S. grain harvest of 416 million tons went to ethanol distilleries, an amount that exceeds the grain harvests of Canada and Australia combined. This massive ethanol distillery investment in the United States launched an epic competition between cars and people for grain<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the supply side of the food equation, several trends are making it more difficult to expand production rapidly enough to keep up with demand. These include soil erosion, aquifer depletion, more frequent crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, melting mountain glaciers, and the diversion of irrigation water to cities.<\/p>\n