People are dying across the world from malnutrition – not from the lack of food, but from the lack of the availability of food due to poverty, politics and personal greed.Every year the world’s population increases by circa 90 million people. On this basis, the planet will be required to produce more food over the next fifty years than it has done over the last 10,000 years.
Bad governments and greedy dictators are the cause of much of the world’s malnutrition – the removal of despots like Mugabe by whatever means will be a good start.
IMPACT OF POPULATION GROWTH ON FOOD SUPPLIES AND ENVIRONMENT
by David Pimentel, Xuewen Huang, Ana Cordova, and Marcia Pimentel
Presented at AAAS Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD, 9 February 1996Submitted for publication to Population and Development Review, New York, NY, USA
As the world population continues to grow geometrically, great pressure is being placed on arable land, water, energy, and biological resources to provide an adequate supply of food while maintaining the integrity of our ecosystem.
According to the World Bank and the United Nations, from 1 to 2 billion humans are now malnourished, indicating a combination of insufficient food, low incomes, and inadequate distribution of food. This is the largest number of hungry humans ever recorded in history.
In China about 80 million are now malnourished and hungry. Based on current rates of increase, the world population is projected to double from roughly 6 billion to more than 12 billion in less than 50 years (Pimentel et al., 1994).
As the world population expands, the food problem will become increasingly severe, conceivably with the numbers of malnourished reaching 3 billion.
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