Download or read book How to Feed the World written by Jessica Eise and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 2050, we will have ten billion mouths to feed in a world profoundly altered by environmental change. How will we meet this challenge? In How to Feed the World, a diverse group of experts from Purdue University break down this crucial question by tackling big issues one-by-one. Covering population, water, land, climate change, technology, food systems, trade, food waste and loss, health, social buy-in, communication, and equal access to food, the book reveals a complex web of challenges. Contributors unite from different perspectives and disciplines, ranging from agronomy and hydrology to economics. The resulting collection is an accessible but wide-ranging look at the modern food system.
Download or read book Feeding the World written by Vaclav Smil and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A realistic yet encouraging look at how society can change in ways that will allow us to feed an expanding global population. This book addresses the question of how we can best feed the ten billion or so people who will likely inhabit the Earth by the middle of the twenty-first century. He asks whether human ingenuity can produce enough food to support healthy and vigorous lives for all these people without irreparably damaging the integrity of the biosphere. What makes this book different from other books on the world food situation is its consideration of the complete food cycle, from agriculture to post-harvest losses and processing to eating and discarding. Taking a scientific approach, Smil espouses neither the catastrophic view that widespread starvation is imminent nor the cornucopian view that welcomes large population increases as the source of endless human inventiveness. He shows how we can make more effective use of current resources and suggests that if we increase farming efficiency, reduce waste, and transform our diets, future needs may not be as great as we anticipate. Smil's message is that the prospects may not be as bright as we would like, but the outlook is hardly disheartening. Although inaction, late action, or misplaced emphasis may bring future troubles, we have the tools to steer a more efficient course. There are no insurmountable biophysical reasons we cannot feed humanity in the decades to come while easing the burden that modern agriculture puts on the biosphere.
Download or read book Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It written by Eric Holt-Gimenez and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-25 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly a third of the world’s population suffers from hunger or malnutrition. Feeding them – and the projected population of 10 billion people by 2050 – has become a high-profile challenge for states, philanthropists, and even the Fortune 500. This has unleashed a steady march of initiatives to double food production within a generation. But will doing so tax the resources of our planet beyond its capacity? In this sobering essay, scholar-practitioner Eric Holt-Giménez argues that the ecological impact of doubling food production would be socially and environmentally catastrophic and would not feed the poor. We have the technology, resources, and expertise to feed everyone. What is needed is a thorough transformation of the global food regime – one that increases equity while producing food and reversing agriculture’s environmental impacts.
Download or read book One Billion Hungry written by Gordon Conway and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hunger is a daily reality for a billion people. More than six decades after the technological discoveries that led to the Green Revolution aimed at ending world hunger, regular food shortages, malnutrition, and poverty still plague vast swaths of the world. And with increasing food prices, climate change, resource inequality, and an ever-increasing global population, the future holds further challenges.In One Billion Hungry, Sir Gordon Conway, one of the world's foremost experts on global food needs, explains the many interrelated issues critical to our global food supply from the science of agricultural advances to the politics of food security. He expands the discussion begun in his influential The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century, emphasizing the essential combination of increased food production, environmental stability, and poverty reduction necessary to end endemic hunger on our planet. Conway addresses a series of urgent questions about global hunger: • How we will feed a growing global population in the face of a wide range of adverse factors, including climate change? • What contributions can the social and natural sciences make in finding solutions?• And how can we engage both government and the private sector to apply these solutions and achieve significant impact in the lives of the poor?Conway succeeds in sharing his informed optimism about our collective ability to address these fundamental challenges if we use technology paired with sustainable practices and strategic planning.Beginning with a definition of hunger and how it is calculated, and moving through issues topically both detailed and comprehensive, each chapter focuses on specific challenges and solutions, ranging in scope from the farmer's daily life to the global movement of food, money, and ideas. Drawing on the latest scientific research and the results of projects around the world, Conway addresses the concepts and realities of our global food needs: the legacy of the Green Revolution; the impact of market forces on food availability; the promise and perils of genetically modified foods; agricultural innovation in regard to crops, livestock, pest control, soil, and water; and the need to both adapt to and slow the rate of climate change. One Billion Hungry will be welcomed by all readers seeking a multifaceted understanding of our global food supply, food security, international agricultural development, and sustainability.
Download or read book The Agricultural Dilemma written by Glenn Davis Stone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Agricultural Dilemma questions everything we think we know about the current state of agriculture and how to, or perhaps more importantly how not to, feed a world with a growing population. This book is about the three fundamental forms of agriculture: Malthusian (expansion), industrialization (external-input-dependent), and intensification (labor-based). The best way to understand the three agricultures, and how we tend to get it wrong, is to consider what drives their growth. The book provides a thoughtful, critical analysis that upends entrenched misconceptions such as that we are running out of land for food production and that our only hope is the development of new agricultural technologies. The book contains engaging and enlightening vignettes and short histories, with case studies drawn from across the globe to bring to life this important debate and dilemma. The book concludes by arguing there is a viable alternative to industrial agriculture which will allow us to meet the world's needs and it ponders why such alternatives have been downplayed, obscured, or hidden from view. This important book is essential reading for all studying and researching food production and agriculture, and more broadly for all interested in ensuring we are able to feed our growing population.
Download or read book Down to Earth written by Nikki Tate and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kids all over the world help collect seeds, weed gardens, milk goats and herd ducks. From a balcony garden with pots of lettuce to a farm with hundreds of cows, kids can pitch in to bring the best and freshest products to their families' tables and t
Download or read book The Communication Scarcity in Agriculture written by Jessica Eise and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the general public craves information on food and agriculture with an unprecedented passion. But the agricultural sector, unaccustomed to an interested and inquisitive society, has largely failed to respond to the public’s demands for information. Instead, corporations, time-pressed journalists, bloggers, media celebrities, film-makers, authors and concerned consumers jumped in to fill the void. Food is emotional, and these players - some well-intentioned and others not - got a lot of traction playing off consumer fears of the unknown. This critical and timely book explains how changing demographics, cultural shifts, technological advances and agriculture’s silence all combined to create the perfect storm – a great chasm between those who know, and those who don’t know, agriculture. The ramifications of a poorly-informed consumer base are now becoming clear in our policy debates and consumer-driven business decisions. There is a lot of common ground between the agricultural sector and their consumer base, but each group largely fails to appreciate it, and the consequences of such a divide grow increasingly dire. Drawing on a wide-range of expertise, from leading agricultural researchers to major agribusiness leaders to consumer advocates, Eise and Hodde lay out exactly why communication is so urgently critical to our modern-day agricultural system. They outline the major themes affecting agricultural communication – perception, emotion, technology, science - and what we can do now to improve the debate and safeguard our future food supply for generations to come.This book is suitable for those who study agriculture, environmental economics and mass media and communication.
Download or read book The End of Plenty The Race to Feed a Crowded World written by Joel K. Bourne Jr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An urgent and at times terrifying dispatch from a distinguished reporter who has given heart and soul to his subject.”—Hampton Sides In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our fight against devastating world hunger in dramatic perspective. He travels the globe to introduce a new generation of farmers and scientists on the front lines of the next green revolution. He visits corporate farmers trying to restore Ukraine as Europe's breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist, the agronomist behind the world's largest organic sugarcane plantation, and many other extraordinary farmers, large and small, who are racing to stave off catastrophe as climate change disrupts food production worldwide. A Financial Times Best Book of the Year and a Finalist for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Download or read book Eating Tomorrow written by Timothy A. Wise and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful polemic against agricultural technology." —Nature A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise's Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests. Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.
Download or read book Miraculous Abundance written by Perrine Hervé-Gruyer and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Farmers like Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer [are] beacons of light. Their work allows the rest of the world to see that there is another life, there is another way."—Eliot Coleman What began as a simple dream has turned into one of the world’s most radical, innovative experiments in small-scale farming—using the Bec Hellouin model for growing food, sequestering carbon, creating jobs, and increasing biodiversity without using fossil fuels When Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer set out to create their farm in a historic Normandy village, they had no idea just how much their lives would change. Neither one had ever farmed before. Charles had been traveling the globe teaching students about ecology and indigenous cultures. Perrine had been an international lawyer in Japan. Their farm Bec Hellouin has since become an internationally celebrated model of innovation in ecological agriculture. Miraculous Abundance is the eloquent tale of the couple’s quest to build an agricultural model that can carry us into a post-carbon future. The authors dive deeper into the various farming methods across the globe that contributed towards the creation of the Bec Hellouin model, including: Permaculture and soil health principles Korean natural farming methods Managing a four-season farm Creating a productive agroecosystem that is resilient and durable Using no-dig methods for soil fertility Modelling an agrarian system that supports its community in totality; from craft, restaurants and shared work spaces to jobs, agritourism, energy and ecological biodiversity Perfect for aspiring and experienced farmers, gardeners, and homesteaders, Miraculous Abundance is a love letter to a future where ecological farming is at the centre of every community. "This book, more about philosophy than a how-to, describes how two inexperienced beginners succeeded in creating a gorgeous, productive, self-sustaining farm."—Marion Nestle
Download or read book Regenesis written by George Monbiot and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Journalism | A Sunday Times (London) Bestseller | Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation “George Monbiot is one of the most fearless and important voices in the global climate movement today.” —Greta Thunberg For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world. Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever. Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet. Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from plows and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.
Download or read book Who Really Feeds the World written by Vandana Shiva and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'One of the world's most prominent radical scientists.' The Guardian 'A star among environmental, activist, and anti-corporate circles.' Vice The world's food supply is in the grip of a profound crisis. Humanity's ability to feed itself is threatened by a wasteful, globalized agricultural industry, whose relentless pursuit of profit is stretching our planet's ecosystems to breaking point. Rising food prices have fuelled instability across the world, while industrialized agriculture has contributed to a health crisis of massive proportions, with effects ranging from obesity and diabetes to cancers caused by pesticides. In Who Really Feeds the World?, leading environmentalist Vandana Shiva rejects the dominant, greed-driven paradigm of industrial agriculture, arguing instead for a radical rethink of our relationship with food and with the environment. Industrial agriculture can never be truly sustainable, but it is within our power to create a food system that works for the health and well-being of the planet and all humanity, by developing ecologically friendly farming practices, nurturing biodiversity, and recognizing the invaluable role that small farmers can play in feeding a hungry world.
Download or read book Feeding Everyone No Matter What written by David Denkenberger and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-11-14 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feeding Everyone No Matter What presents a scientific approach to the practicalities of planning for long-term interruption to food production. The primary historic solution developed over the last several decades is increased food storage. However, storing up enough food to feed everyone would take a significant amount of time and would increase the price of food, killing additional people due to inadequate global access to affordable food. Humanity is far from doomed, however, in these situations - there are solutions. This book provides an order of magnitude technical analysis comparing caloric requirements of all humans for five years with conversion of existing vegetation and fossil fuels to edible food. It presents mechanisms for global-scale conversion including: natural gas-digesting bacteria, extracting food from leaves, and conversion of fiber by enzymes, mushroom or bacteria growth, or a two-step process involving partial decomposition of fiber by fungi and/or bacteria and feeding them to animals such as beetles, ruminants (cows, deer, etc), rats and chickens. It includes an analysis to determine the ramp rates for each option and the results show that careful planning and global cooperation could ensure the bulk of humanity and biodiversity could be maintained in even in the most extreme circumstances. - Summarizes the severity and probabilities of global catastrophe scenarios, which could lead to a complete loss of agricultural production - More than 10 detailed mechanisms for global-scale solutions to the food crisis and their evaluation to test their viability - Detailed roadmap for future R&D for human survival after global catastrophe
Download or read book The Man who Fed the World written by Leon F. Hesser and published by Leon Hesser. This book was released on 2006 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Man Who Fed the World provides a loving and respectful portrait of one of America's greatest heroes. Nobel Peace Prize recipient for averting hunger and famine, Dr. Norman Borlang is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives from starvation-more than any other person in history? Loved by millions around the world, Dr. Borlang is recognized as one of the most influential men of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Who Will Feed China written by Lester Russell Brown and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1995 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To feed its 1.2 billion people, China may soon have to import so much grain that this action could trigger unprecedented rises in world food prices. In Who Will Feed China: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown shows that even as water becomes more scarce in a land where 80 percent of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. When Japan, a nation of just 125 million, began to import food, world grain markets rejoiced. But when China, a market ten times bigger, starts importing, there may not be enough grain in the world to meet that need - and food prices will rise steeply for everyone. Analysts foresaw that the recent four-year doubling of income for China's 1.2 billion consumers would increase food demand, especially for meat, eggs, and beer. But these analysts assumed that food production would rise to meet those demands. Brown shows that cropland losses are heavy in countries that are densely populated before industrialization, and that these countries quickly become net grain importers. We can see that process now in newspaper accounts from China as the government struggles with this problem.
Download or read book Ecoagriculture written by Jeffrey A. McNeely and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: McNeely (chief scientist, IUCN-The World Conservation Union) and Scherr (advisor, Future Harvest-Washington, D.C.) argue that the maintenance of biological diversity can be compatible with increased agricultural yield. They detail 36 case studies that suggest farmers can gain economic benefits in farming systems that promote biodiversity. Technological innovation is a primary key to the promotion of "ecoagriculture." They provide separate recommendations for areas where the top priorities are maintaining biodiversity, improving agricultural productivity, or promoting poverty reduction.
Download or read book Hunger written by Martin Caparros and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nothing less than astonishing..."—Booklist (starred review) From a renowned international journalist comes a galvanizing international bestseller about mankind's oldest, most persistent, and most brutal problem—world hunger. There are now over 800 million starving people in the world. An average of 25,000 men and women, and in particular children, perish from hunger every day. Yet we produce enough food to feed the entire human population one-and-a-half times over. So why is it that world hunger remains such a deadly problem? In this crucial and inspiring work, award-winning author Martín Caparrós travels the globe in search of an answer. His investigation brings him to Africa and the Indian subcontinent where he witnesses starvation first-hand; to Chicago where he documents the greed of corporate food distributors; and to Buenos Aires where he accompanies trash scavengers in search of something to eat. An international bestseller when it first appeared, this first-ever English language edition has been updated by Caparrós to consider whether conditions that have improved or worsened since the book's European publication. With its deep reflections and courageous journalism, Caparrós has created a powerful and empathic work that remains committed to ending humankind's longest ongoing crisis.
