A Man's Gotta Eat - Agroecology and Food Security

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > A Man's Gotta Eat - Agroecology and Food Security

Ghost of Mussolini: Jun 26, 2011

Hi, food security is what I do for a job, so I'm glad people made this thread.

whitey delenda est posted:

The phenomenon by which an increased standard of living exponentially increases energy demand in the form of higher order foodstuffs is balanced quite nicely by plummeting birthrates in developing countries. There's an inverse correlation between the wealth or GDI of a population and birthrate, mainly as women can A) afford to control their own reproduction and B) exist within a system of laws that supports the practice of birth control and provides economically feasible alternatives to makin' babies.

Your points about Women are very right, but the effect of Women on rural economies and societies is much more than that. Women are the ones that do an incredible amount of the work for minimal reward. Women are often denied the tools and education that would make them better farmers, and they are discriminated in legal terms. Women also take advantage of aid money, microcredit, and are much more likely to look after the children and make sure that they go to school than their male counterparts.

I suggest you take a look at this for a brief overview: http://www.farmingfirst.org/women_infographic/

Baudolino posted:

There is so much food being wasted today that a lot can be done to stave off starvation by just not tossing poo poo away before you have to.

The amount of food lost through the entirety of the agricultural economic chain is staggering. It is no less than 1/3rd than all food produced for human consumption (1.3 billion tons wasted a year). Obviously that is an average, and people in Europe or the USA/Canada are expected to waste anywhere between 90 to 120kg per person, while someone in Togo probably wastes 7kg a year. Anyone interested in further reading should check out the Global Food Losses and Food Waste 2011 report: http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/mb060e/mb060e.pdf

Another important point to keep in mind when discussing agriculture is that in the developed and the richer end (Southern Cone, Eastern Europe) of developing economies people who work in agriculture are old as gently caress. I'm talking about averages that are constantly getting closer to the retirement age, I believe in the USA the figure is 59 years old. Obviously this isn't an issue in a place like Niger, but as economies develop and more efficient agricultural techniques are introduced, people stop having to depend on subsistence agriculture and are free to move elsewhere. They move to towns, and discover that they can make a lot more money with a less strenuous work-day, and people still associate agricultural work with being poor and hungry. Overall, the richer a country gets, the more unappealing that agriculture gets and you have more people that are born in urban areas and have no connection to agriculture. This is an issue, since agriculture is primarily something you do if your parents did it (90% of farming worldwide is run by a single individual or a family and depend on family labour). This is why talent development and youth in agriculture (beyond just trying to get people to stop 8 year old children as extra farm hands) are themes that are gaining traction as people start to realise the need to attract younger workers that have no previous connection to rural living as an important tenet in developing agriculture.

I also didn't see it mentioned elsewhere on the thread, so I'll point it out. The official FAO figures for hunger are: 805 million hungry on a daily basis and 2 billion people in a situation of undernutrition.

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