Global food production and our population growth. Pt.2

We're already beginning to see the adverse effect of a rapidly changing global climate most notably with more violent weather the spread of disease and the destruction of crops it's estimated that by 2050

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the United States Midwest will see at least a 20% decline in corn yields as will Indonesia and Brazil will see a 16% reduction some colder regions will become too warm to support cold weather crops warmer areas will become too hot and coastal regions will

experience too much rain of course there will be some parts of the world that actually become more hospitable to some crops but these will not be enough to offset the loss of production in other regions now we see the real heart of the problem we already

produce enough food to feed the entire world population but if we don't safeguard and update our existing methods of food production and the population continues to grow as projected the same old problems of waste distribution and climate

change will make it even more difficult to keep everyone fed so what kind of solutions do we have for starters we could transition to a less environmentally damaging source of protein meat animals especially cows are a major contributor to climate change

add to this the fact that they require large amounts of land and food themselves not to mention the inhumane nature of the animal agriculture industry and you've got a strong argument to transition to more efficient and humane sources of protein

or at least replace red meat with poultry which is much less environmentally damaging another promising advancement in farming is the development of indoor vertical farms these highly productive farms

grow all sorts of nutritious foods in a climate controlled environment where they're protected from the elements and can be installed right in densely populated hubs like major cities making distribution a much simpler

process vertical farms also take up much less space than traditional outdoor farms because they're contained within buildings and plant upwards instead of outwards regarding waste and distribution well that depends

on the country places that lack refrigeration could obviously make an investment in that area but in wealthy countries like the u.s. it's a bit more difficult the u.s.

produces a huge amount of food and much of it is wasted simply because of our extravagant lifestyle we have a major obesity problem in America but we also have over 37 million people going hungry coincidentally that's

the same number as the amount of Americans living in poverty as we saw earlier poverty and hunger is a self-reinforcing cycle one easy step we could take is mandating that all large grocery chains donate their unsold

food to homeless shelters soup kitchens and other charitable groups there is no reason for tens of thousands of tons of food to end up in dumpsters behind the store one final method to help reduce local hunger and improve

community resiliency is to develop mutual aid programs mutual aid in a nutshell means looking out for those in your community every person being willing to help every other person when they need it take the seattle

nonprofit city fruit for example the city of seattle has tons of fruit trees and much of the fruit those trees produce ended up rotting on the ground not doing anyone any good a group of people saw a way to help

fulfill a need and started collecting fruit from around the city and distributing it to communities that lacked access to nutritional food every year city fruit collects and distributes tens of thousands of pounds

of nutritious local fruit and helps keep their community healthy and resilient this type of local

organizing can be done around the world identifying useful local resources and building systems of mutual aid to strengthen communities.