What did you learn about dietary choices from using the footprint calculator? Now imagine that you could translate what you learned into an effective societal policy on food- what would it be? And how would this policy effect the need to alleviate world hunger?
925 million people on earth do not have enough to eat according to the FAO [Food and Agricultural Organization]. That's almost 1 in 7 inhabitants of our planet!
Food & Hunger >
UN report says that it is a "myth" that pesticides are needed to address hunger
Intersting article just out in the Guardian
I actually agree with what the UN says on this issue. The number of pesticides that are used in foods that are grown globally are appalling and harms the people working in this fields. The people who also make these chemicals have been shown to have higher rates of illnesses attributed to them. In short, the use of pesticides is both bad for the environment, the people consuming the food, and the people who have to cultivate the fields and make the chemicals, As the article says, the problem is not about whether the food is being grown or not, it is the issue of actually getting distributed to the people, which is the largest problem at the moment.
Personally, to a certain extent, I disagree with this article. Although I think that people should have pesticides that are bee friendly and people friendly, I also think that we should still use pesticides- because about 10-16% of the crops in the world are destroyed by pests (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 … 154028.htm), and who knows how many more there will be if we discontinue the use of pesticides? Also, although the article does claim that a lot of these pesticides are used on non-food products, there are still a whole lot used on foods, which is why most things aren't organically grown. And about the main issue being food distribution- if the food gets so evenly distributed, people have a lot more babies, which need more food, which leads to more food being needed- it's a constant positive reinforcement loop. I'm not saying that this problem doesn't need to be fixed- what I'm saying is that we need to find an alternate solution to this problem; by distributing food when the population caps off, or when food can be distributed evenly to everyone so there isn't a sector that isn't getting the food it needs. Although fertilizer may be obtrusive and evil in our society, it's a necessary evil until we can find another way to support our around 7 billion (and growing!) population.
I also agree with what the UN says here. The amount of pesticides that we use is very unhealthy and causes illness in people. The article states that the issue is delivering the food to others which is a huge problem that needs to be solved.