Climate Change

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January 14, 2010

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation reckons livestock production will need to double by 2050. And that’s a different order of magnitude to the cereals problem

Posted by brugerard under Climate Change, Crop-Livestock, Food security, Intensification, News
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On-line article from ‘Farmers Weekly Interactive’, UK

OFC 2010: Business as usual will not feed the world

A “business as usual” approach to increasing food production would be useless against the challenge of feeding a growing world population, the conference heard.

John Parker, globalisation correspondent for The Economist, told delegates that agriculture needed to achieve the kind of technological breakthroughs in plant breeding and livestock development last seen in the 1960s and 70s.

“The UN predicts a world population of around 9bn by 2050 – that’s about 30% more people to feed. And for a 30% population increase, world wheat yields will need to increase by the same amount over the next 20 years.”

That was without accounting for the 1bn-odd undernourished people in the world today, he added. “So therefore we need about 40% more cereals by 2050.”

Read the entire article

 

December 17, 2009

Poor households (among which many are livestock keepers) contribute very little to greenhouse gas emissions

Posted by brugerard under Climate Change, News
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Big emitters: how growth in consumption drives climate change (IIED briefing, Dec 2009)

It seems obvious that the more people there are on the planet, the more the pressure on planetary resources and the larger the emissions of greenhouse gases. So it also seems obvious that population growth must be a major driver of global warming. But it is just as obvious that very poor households contribute very little to greenhouse gas emissions. So if most of the world’s population growth is among very poor households, population growth is not the culprit. The greatest human driver of global warming is the number of consumers on the planet and their consumption level. Individuals and households contribute to global warming by consuming goods and services that cause greenhouse gas emissions – for instance, by owning a refrigerator or a car. Through this they are responsible for all the fossil fuels that go into making, distributing, advertising, selling, using and disposing of it.

For the full brief, go to IIED webpage

 

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