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50.0%ANMag Issue 25 Global Awareness
Food Production
By Earth-Humankind Society
Trinidad, West Indies −Part I − "A hungry man is an angry man." – Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
"Food is of paramount importance; everything else is secondary." – Chinese proverb.
Consider this scenario in, say, 2050: A future time when a sizeable and important proportion of the world’s land has yet to be covered by 23 feet of salt water caused by rising sea levels due to the melting of the Greenland ice shield or yet to be covered by even one millimeter of salt water but a time when sea water had not even appeared above the surface of the ground yet had already seeped underground and contaminated the water tables and aquifers of the vast, low-lying, coastal farm lands around the world and render all the trillions of gallons of fresh water in these places useless for agriculture (and drinking and cooking) – and these places are where 40% of the world’s food is grown (and an equal percentage of people live, which, at that time, has been predicted to be nine billion). The political, economic and social consequences will be mind boggling.
Ponder, too, our present world food situation, where, with only a 6.5 billion population, over one billion people – our spiritual brothers and sisters – suffer from chronic hunger and, every day, 35,000 children die from hunger- and water-related diseases (as this is written, in February, 2008, world food prices have risen by 30%).
The system of producing enough food for everyone on this planet at any time* described in this article can help to solve these present and future problems in just one year. However, some preparation must be done.
Enough food is most important for a nation to continue without social stress. As such, the following factors must be taken into consideration to ensure that there will always be an adequate supply of this essential commodity.
(1.) At the moment, using conventional methods of agricultural production, we have a problem that is very difficult to solve – that of adequately feeding six and a half billion people now; in the future, this problem will grow to a size that will be impossible to solve. Today, we have to increase agricultural production by at least 33%; by mid-century we will have to more than double the amount of food produced now. Taking all other vital factors into consideration, our planet does not have enough land or water to produce this extra amount of food;
(2.) Food in the first-world countries travels an average of 1,200 miles between farm and dining table. Diesel-powered ships and trucks transport this food, and, in the process, dump vast quantities of the global warming gas, carbon dioxide along with sulfur and nitrogen oxides, soot and other micro-particulates which cause health problems, such as chronic lung diseases and cancers. Many countries are now thinking of legislation to ban or severely limit the use of these vehicles;
(3.) Global warming which will cause glaciers to melt and, as a result, sea levels to rise and contaminate fresh water in water tables and aquifers in all low-lying, coastal food producing areas around the world and render it useless. (This will be long before it finally put these lands under seven metres of salt water.) The result will be a 40% drop in world agricultural output and this at a time when, as noted, the world population will be nine billion.
The system of agriculture we had been practicing for millennia – small-scale gardening as a profession to sell produce in local markets – and the new one for the past few decades – very large farms supported by satellite images, huge machinery, massive government subsidies, etc – have not solved our past or present global problem of famine or malnutrition. They certainly will not solve the future problem of feeding nine billion people adequately. The system of food production we describe in this article will solve this problem quite easily, now and in the future.
*Not counting the predicted extreme global catastrophe(s), natural and/or man-made, such as a large, heavenly body – an asteroid slamming into earth, a planet, Eris, aka Niburu and Marduk, passing close by, an 8.0 plus global earthquake, a complete melt of all Arctic and Antarctic ice shields, World War 3, when all 50,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons and all chemical and biological are hurled by and at the warring factions.