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Universal Dring
World huger mitigation -other options other than cereals
WORLD HUGER MITIGATION -OTHER OPTIONS
BY PROF GHULAM MONHYUDDIN WANI
Email fastwani@in.com
Introduction
In a series of articles we have discussed the prospects of mitigating wolrd hunger .The aim of this paper is to initiate discussions on the other options of animal and fish resources to mitigate and substitute calorie hunger.Some web nors of consumption have been reproduced for comparison and better understanding of the topic.
Food crisis.
Many countries in the worked suffer from hunger. The Haiti crisis and reports of people eating mud and dart called as pic kookie are published, The digestive disease as a result of these low nutritive food have attracted the attention of all of us in the recent pasta reporter tasting it described it vey pungent and harmful to the intestines. The hunger is going to remain even after our best efforts .It would be the non capacity to purchase the food rather than the cost of the food. The transportation cost and the earning capacity shall be the prohibitive factors .The cereals alone are not the sources of future old to fight hunger but as usual the sea and aquatic food or the fishes will have a supply a substantial amount of food and nutrition to the populace. Let us review the fish resource for food.
FISH CONSUNPTION AND AVAILIBILITY
Fish as usual shall continue to be the important source of food and livelihood for poor and needy living near the sea shores or even on the banks of lake, canals or water reservoirs. Of late fish pond has been a source of inland water source of fish production. Many swamps of the world are being tried to yield fish and rice or now exclusive fish pond are more remunerative than the integrated one.
Thus the future strategy will not be on the catch but on aquaculture. The total world fish resources have been growing at the annual growth rate of 3-6%.The population of the world is growing at half its pace i.e. 1.8% since 1961.The proteins derived from crustaceans and molluscs range between 14-16 % of the total animal proteins .This sector is expanding at a faster speed and the resources are going to be adequate as in the preceding decade.
Here too the poverty ridden populate may not find access to it due to prohibitive cost, increasing more in catching, preserving and transport than the sale price at the source. The recently innovative models of fisheries farms and pond across the globe gives a hope to utilize the sea water more efficiently for the production of the fish if not for the production of the cereals.
The world sweet water resources are dring up but the saltish water resource along with the sea water resources are at large to be expolieted.Therefore, this sector has more promising prospects of combating world hunger.
- I have heard a story of a fisherman who after a catch used to sleep till he fell hunger and then he used to catch again. When asked why are you sleeping and becoming lazy when your rivals are making much profits by catching more. The wise the replied, my need are only few ,I catch them sell or eat them and leave others to breed for me to provide me more catch next day near my shore. My rivals have always suffered and are caught in the deep waters.
I pray to the GOD let world of tomorrow remember the wise saying and catch as per need and leave other to breed so to have better catch tomorrow.
HUNGER THREATS.
The present pessimistic threat of world food shortage and famines in future shall prove wrong as in the past .In1798 the prediction of Thomas R,Malthus that future generations shall suffer of hunger, The 1960 proved him wrong when around 1960 most of the nations had enough food and no famine or global food shortage was registered ,Yes the famous famine of Bengal and many others occurred due the shipment and not the production of availability. Until the population growth does not exceed the food production growth world does not technically have to bother about the food crisis.
This why in the preceding Para I discussed ,we may have hunger but not food crisis and gave a potential distribution plan. At the current level of agricultural growth around 2-3 % in the world it is nearly double of the world Population growth of 1.8 %.
We are 6 billion today, We anticipate to be 9 billion in next few decade, Our present groth rate if continues we have no danger of the food shortage, Yes the reducing natural resource of water,soil fertility is a problem, but we have a cushion of technology gaps between today and future productivity scenario to overcome these fears too. The stomata constriction research to have less transpiration loss and water conservation,salty and sea water use are the open options yet to yield their upward greening of the grey arrears.
GREEN REVOLUTION EFFECTS
The Green Revolution (high-yielding crops and energy intensive agriculture) brought about remarkable increases in crop production. World grain output expanded by a factor of 2.6 from the 1950s to the 1980s. Today, per capita production has now slowed and appears to be declining. We have many weapon up in the sleeves which if tried can help us prove these prediction false too. Let me cite an example of kashmir(INDIA).
Our rice production at the farmers field on an average in 1947 was 40-50 kgs per kanal i.e. 1/8 of an acre. In 1970s we hiked it to around to 75kgs and at present a farmer gets about 150-200 kgs per kanal. We have varieties and technologies up our sleeve to increase it further to 300 kgs. This we proved under miniskits during my tenure as director extension .Similarly the 3600 maize ISOPAM demonstration and harvest figure calculated and published by us showed a potential of doubling the yield at the farmers fields in all the 6 districts of the valley through KVKS.
Thus the food production is not a problem, it may be either its price or cost of production which needs a debate. Our next series in these pages will be on food grain prices and subsidies.,[Insha’Allah-IF GOD WISHED.]
GLOBAL Land RESOUCES
The total land area of 150 million km2 is not all arable. The arable land comprises 10% of the total. Permanent crops grow on 1%; meadows and pastures, 24%; forest and woodland, 31%. The remaining 34% of the world land is deserts ,fallow or barn which supports little or no vegetation. Antarctica, deserts, urban and other area are inclusive.
In Asia (8o%population of the world), nearly 80% of potentially arable land is now under cultivation. The net productivity varies between ecosystems and within sub-eco clusters with an ecosystem too.
The fertile belts too are diverse and have been in use under cropping for long. The Indus valley civilization and the Nile valley civilizations were the oldest fertile land of the globe. Is this higher concentration of population the result of earlier food surplus which tempted migration.
Many kings and invaders to India at least never went back but made this place as their home land. Today many of us migrate to the greener pastures of the west for better living. Is this heavy concentration of the population the result of earlier migrations. I am not a historian but have heard from many historians this may be a possible reason. The Nalanda university, the mattan and remains of a university campus in Patten ,Kashmir, all point towards fertile belt migrations in the past. SHRINKING LAND FOR CROPS
- Some of it is coming under urbanization and industry. Some is de graded due chemical use. Some have low water tables and pollution problems. The horizontal expansion is not possible in Asia at least which is under threat of climate change and is under pressure to increase its area under forests. Its tropical rain forests have little potential to replace its fertile belt loss. THUS
FUTURE STRATEGY SHALL HAND ON INCRESING PER UNIT LAND PRODUCTIVITY.
The growth rates of the global cerebral and agricultural production have been swinging between 2-4 % in last three decades 1961-1992.Luckily the population growth has been less than the agricultural growth rate. It remain around 1.8%.It is this balance which proved the pundits of famines wrong.
. ASIAN REVOLUTION IN FOOD
The magic of the Asian food increase in the past decades has been the high yielding crop varieties and fertilizer use. The irrigation through tube wells ,canals and dams, disease control by chemicals and farm science awareness has been supportive and complementary to this process. The increase in rice and soybean during the past decades has been spectacular in the workd.Even the PRRI and all its collateral and mutilaterak associated have helped in this endeavour. The early Chinese varieties have
Proved paladins chi rag if temperate areas. A small rice research station at khudwani kashmir has more than 900 testing materials during my tenure as director of research and extension.A number of varieties were released during the period which helped the increase in the rice production .I have myself witnessed a yield at experimental farm around 13 t./he and 8 tons per he at farmers field .A well net mechanism facilitated under ZONAL AGRICULTURAL extension and research committee meeting. I was fortunate to head this meeting for 15 years. This committee used to decide the allotment of the miniskirts .The data was retrieved back from the fields and analyses by the scientists. PRIOR TO THIS MEETING THE VARIETAL RELEASES WERE NOT SO ACCURATELY documented as in this decade and half. The website of the skuast is a wideness to the new releases under the umbrella of this committeemen never compromised on the facts and in one of the released varieties we took a blood decision to with draw it due its poor performenance.I admit in this strict honest decisions in this part of the world we lose many of the friends, We never cared to lose friends but sustained values. I was awarded by farmers associations for such daring decisions .This helped us to increase the per unit land produvtivity.The next significant contribution of the committee during this period was the finalization of the production recommendations and their publication and revisions very 3—4 years. During the last phase of my tenure we had worked hard to translate these production recommendations in Urdu .I have drafted it and got language correction by a forester who demined higher charges which were found exuberant and the task remained unfinished. In our next agenda we propose to print them for the awareness of the agriculture graduates, diploma holders and even the state department of agriculture and allied branches. The success of the reading materials and demonstrations to the farmers were instrumental in the increase of food grain revolution in India. Thanks again to the innovative leadership of PROF .M,S.SWAMINATHAN.The system of the NARP/NARM UNDER THE LEADERSHIP Of PROF R.S.PARODA was a stimulus for infrastructural development and initiation of research extension linkages, we in Jammu and Kashmir salute his leadership for the help in many projects and kvks.His period coincided with the information and communication era and he fortified the system with his devotion and sincereity.Unfortunately he had not more time to accomplish the initiated tasks. This period 1999-2002 was one of the best periods of the agricultural system in Indian after the golden decade of PROF M S SWAMINATHAN.
The overall consequence is that per capita food production has contradicted the doom-Sayers of the 1960s: during the greatest episode of population growth in human history, food supply per capita grew. Note that Asia did better than the world average, while Africa did worse. The Green Revolution's great success with rice explains the former; lack of success with breeding new arid-land crop varieties, combined with a large dose of political instability, explain Africa's worsening condition. Per capita grain production in Africa is down 12% since 1981 and down 22% since 1967. Some 20 years ago, Africa produced food equal to what it consumed; today it produces only 80% of what it consumes.
Continued improvements in agricultural practices and land management, hopefully will allow us to both increase yields and minimize some of the negative effects of agriculture. Some areas that hold much promise include: better pest management, water-conserving irrigation, conservation tillage, and development of new crops through breeding or genetic modification.
The use of pesticides multiplied by a factor of 32 between 1950 and 1986, with developing countries now accounting for a quarter of the world's pesticide use. However, inappropriate and excessive use can cause contamination of both food and environment and, in some cases, damage the health of farmers. Pesticides also kill the natural enemies of pests, allowing them to multiply; meanwhile the number of pest species with resistance to pesticides has increased from a handful 50 years ago to over 700 now.
Crops and foods can produced using recombinant DNA techniques which enhance their agronomic potential, nutritional characteristics, or one or more features of pest protection (insect and viruses) and tolerance to herbicides. More than 40 such transgenic crop varieties have been cleared through the federal review process. New varieties of plants are being developed using genes from wild varieties with inbuilt disease resistance. Genes from the wild have been used to protect Brazil's coffee plantations; while Mexican wild maize confers resistance to seven major diseases. According to the American Medical Association, these foods are "substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts," and no long-term side effects have yet been detected.
While it is difficult to estimate the gains in food production that we may obtain from exploring new crop species, this could make a large contribution. Ninety percent of the world's food is derived from just 15 plant and 8 animal species. Wheat, rice, maize (corn), millet, and sorghum provide nearly all (70%) the food energy (calories) and up to 90% of all protein consumed by the world's people. Cereal grains are humankind's major food, contributing more than two-thirds of the world production of edible dry matter and half of the world's protein.
On land, one species, Homo sapiens, commands about 40% of the total terrestrial NPP. This has probably never occurred before in earth's history. Human "carrying capacity" on earth is hard to estimate, because it depends upon affluence of a population and the technology supporting that population. But at present levels of affluence and technology, a population 50 to 100% larger than we have today would push our use of terrestrial NPP to well over 50% of the available production, and the attending degradation of ecosystems on earth (e.g., air and water pollution) would be of major concern.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has published a study on the food production outlook through the year 2010. The FAO forecasts that production increases can, in fact, accommodate effective demand and rising world population, although malnutrition will become an increasing problem in developing countries. It is also assumed that continuing substantial investments in agricultural research are essential
- The expectation that population growth will outrun its food supply has a long history. Surprisingly, from the 1950s to the 1990s, which experienced the most dramatic increase in human population ever, per capita world food production increased.
- The Green Revolution - high-yield varieties of cereal crops - resulted in enormous increases in yield per hectare. However, environmental costs are high.
- Most arable land already is farmed, and the land area under agriculture had slightly declined. Improved agricultural methods that increase yields while minimizing environmental impacts hold the greatest promise for increasing world food supplies.
- At present, humans use or co-opt a substantial fraction of the world's terrestrial net primary production, raising doubts about our ability to greatly increase food supply to humans.
Production includes the quantities of a commodity sold in the market (marketed production) and the quantities consumed or used by producers (auto-consumption). Harvesting losses, threshing losses, and unharnessed portions of the crop are not included. The time reference on crop production is based on the calendar year; data for any particular crop are reported under the calendar year in which the entire harvest or the bulk of it took place. In a number of cases, crops assigned by countries to a particular split year may appear under two different calendar years.
Average production of cereals refer to the amount of cereals produced in a given country or region each year. Cereals include wheat, barley, maize, rye, oats, millet, sorghum, rice, buckwheat, apostle/canary seed, folio, quanta, triticale, wheat flour, and the cereal component of blended foods. Data relate to crops harvested for dry grain only. Mixed grains and buckwheat are included, although the following cereals are excluded: crops harvested for hay, crops used for grazing, and crops harvested green for food, feed or silage.
Per capita production of cereals is calculated using national population data for the year specified.
View full technical notes here.
global food invrease
In the three decades 1960-90 global food production increased and touched an increase of 1 billion tones. We need 3 million tons in 2050 i.e. in coming 40 years if the vertical progress continues we will achieve the target of 3 billion ton of the cereals. The factors to achieve this are use of all available information, production recommendations have to bra formulated .The research,extension,experts,farmers and kvk experiences have to be clubbed to formulate these production recommendations. The most direct way for a country to solve his problem is to know the problems. The problem cause analysis has to be made. The improved crop varieties have to be identified. TECHNOLOGIES and the methods are to be tested under farmers situations and a viable feedback from farmer, to private public research and distribution system need to be formulated .
price hik.
The price hikes ,fluctuations due climatic changes and bad wither conditions all have to be considered awhile drafting food for all strategies at global level. The swathes to diversifications either to bio fuel or any other cash or remunerative crop has to be compensated by fixing prior procurement prices as in India for wheat and rice procurement. This is still continuing as one of the initiatives for the continuation of paddy –wheat production. However with more profits in dairy farming a shift towards is seen in the Punjab,
About the Author
we request our readers to peruse our other articles before going through this article to understand its essence fully.May pl send your views as it is as a draft to our forth coming book on global huger mitigation options
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