Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Asia, the situation remains critical (BBC News, 2009; World Bank, n.a.). More re-
cently, the FAO (2010) has reported that the price of sugar has surpassed 30-year
highs and that, in 2010 and 2011, prices will increase even more.
In a simplified form, the food crisis is the result of the imbalance between the
demand for and supply of food. It is beyond the scope of this hapter to exhaust-
ively identify all the factors that have caused food prices to skyroket. Nonetheless,
we can pinpoint some hanged and hanging realities whih have contributed to
the food crisis and whih have contributed more generally to the undernourishment
hallenge.
Some commentators aver the 2007-08 droughts in Australia and poor crops in
Vietnam, the EU and Ukraine, to be causes of the food crisis. Certainly, climate
hange and desertification is having its effect around the world. The World Bank
(2008) and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (de Shuter, 2008),
however, considered that, during the 2008 peak of the global food crisis, good crops
in other countries and increased exports offset these bad harvests, and hence this
conjectural factor is unlikely to have had, on its own, a significant impact on prices.
Instead, we can point to three broad and interdependent
structural
factors:
• hanging population haracteristics
• the hallenge of energy
• the decline in productivity growth of agriculture.
Changing population haracteristics
he globe's demographics have hanged considerably in recent years. In 2007, the
world population grew by 1.2 per cent: it is expected to reah 7 billion in 2012, and
9.3 billion in 2050 (Dorélien, 2008). Demand for food is estimated to double by 2030
with 20 per cent of this increase atributable to population growth. he fastest popu-
lation growth is occurring in the countries most plagued by food insecurity (United
Nations Population Fund, 2008).
Most reports focus on the direct impact that population growth has on the de-
mand for food. However, demographic expansion can also have consequences on the
supply side and access to food. In many developing countries, land fragmentation is
a direct result of rapid population growth. Land fragmentation contributes to ineffi-
cient and destructive farming practices, whih oten reduce food production and res-
ult in land degradation (Sadik, 1991; Dorelien, 2008). Meanwhile, land is increasingly
