Food for all?
8th July 2010 by Andrew Matheson, Manila | 3 Comments
How is the world going to feed 9 billion people only 40 years from now? If the current model of food production and distribution still leaves 1 billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people hungry, is doing more of the same likely to be the answer?
Those are the questions that the World Agricultural Forum is trying to address. The forum is a relatively new organisation, and is an independent body that gets business leaders together with people who make and influence agriculture and agribusiness policy, to crunch these meaty (no pun intended) questions.
The chair of the forum’s international advisory board is former New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger, and he’s in Manila this week to bring further attention to these challenges.
I hosted a discussion at the residence between Mr Bolger and people from the academic, research and policy communities. It was a stimulating conversation.
Making the rural poor self-sufficient won't feed the world
We didn’t solve the problems on the spot, naturally enough. But though we all had different backgrounds and perspectives, some common themes shone through:
- The answer cannot lie in making the world’s rural poor self-sufficient. This might improve the lot of peasant families, but won’t do anything to feed the 50% of the world’s population who live in urban areas. This figure is expected to rise to 60–70% in 20 years’ time.
- The highest return on investment in agriculture comes from spending on research and development. That spending should go up, not down as it is at present.
- Countries need to focus on producing the food they’re best suited to, and not pursue self-sufficiency in particular commodities unless that is their strength.
Mr Bolger was in Manila to give the keynote address to “Food for all: an investment forum for food security in Asia and the Pacific”. His talk was wide-ranging and thought-provoking.
At nearly an hour long I won’t attempt to summarise it here, but you’ll get the gist of it from two things:
- The title was “Food for all through innovative partnerships” (my emphasis).
- The current model of food production is broken, and does need fixing. Or as Mr Bolger put it in a quote attributed to Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.
Andrew, thank you for setting up this blog. It is a great idea and excellent way to engage fellow Kiwi expats residing here. I look forward to reading more of your future blog entries.
I also regularly watch John Key’s video journals which are a great way get a snapshot of what the big guy is up to (http://www.johnkey.co.nz/). Maybe down the track, you could do this too!
Thank you for sharing
Your blog is really interesting to read. It is especially good to think people are spending time thinking of ways to solve a problem that seems quite apparent to some and non existent to others. Great stuff Andrew
The proceedings of the forum, including Mr Bolger’s address, are now online.