November 9th 2008
How could farmers increase the food supply if the price of agricultural raw material is always high? Of course that there are other ways to increase production, as was mentioned on an article from OECD, but if we take a look at how we had increased production over the past years, we´ll realize that the picture is not so bad.
Plant technology, such as genetically modified organisms, was a big step to increase the food production, to reduce costs and to preserve nature. I mean, to preserve nature because, if we analyze it, specifically soybean crops, we could realize that we made a lot of positive changes. The way how we stopped using agrochemicals, mainly herbicides, reducing the constant need of going with a tractor to the field for soil compactation, thus reducing the use of water and the emissions of CO2 produced by the tractor engines. The GMO soybean has been a very sustainable technology.
Malthus was wrong when he mentioned the exponential increase of population in relation to food. The population growth wasn’t very exponential if we look from 100 years ago to now, and the food production wasn’t linear either, in other that some developed countries had doubled the food production in the last decades.
Today we know that is not about the shortage of food, it´s about how this food is available to all the people. There is one article from Van Cotten, a Belgiun researcher, who says that “how could the world population still be hungry if all the food that is produced could feed everyone? ”. So, we can see that it´s not really about the production, it´s more about the distribution of this food, and how we could make it available. to everyone. It’s a very delicate issue and it requires a lot of expertise to resolve that, from the private sector to government sectors.
How could farmers increase the food supply if the price of agricultural raw material is always high? Of course that there are other ways to increase production, as was mentioned on an article from OECD, but if we take a look at how we had increased production over the past years, we´ll realize that the picture is not so bad.
Plant technology, such as genetically modified organisms, was a big step to increase the food production, to reduce costs and to preserve nature. I mean, to preserve nature because, if we analyze it, specifically soybean crops, we could realize that we made a lot of positive changes. The way how we stopped using agrochemicals, mainly herbicides, reducing the constant need of going with a tractor to the field for soil compactation, thus reducing the use of water and the emissions of CO2 produced by the tractor engines. The GMO soybean has been a very sustainable technology.
Malthus was wrong when he mentioned the exponential increase of population in relation to food. The population growth wasn’t very exponential if we look from 100 years ago to now, and the food production wasn’t linear either, in other that some developed countries had doubled the food production in the last decades.
Today we know that is not about the shortage of food, it´s about how this food is available to all the people. There is one article from Van Cotten, a Belgiun researcher, who says that “how could the world population still be hungry if all the food that is produced could feed everyone? ”. So, we can see that it´s not really about the production, it´s more about the distribution of this food, and how we could make it available. to everyone. It’s a very delicate issue and it requires a lot of expertise to resolve that, from the private sector to government sectors.
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