Feed the hungry... and save the planet

THE challenge of meeting food demands of a growing world population while respecting environmental concerns — in particular, climate change concerns — were discussed at a meeting in Dublin last week of agricultural economists from Ireland and Britain.

Chief executive of Concern Tom Arnold said hundreds of millions had escaped poverty and hunger, even when the world population was growing from three billion to six billion, in the past 30 years. A combination of globalisation, economic growth and new agricultural technologies enabled rising living standards.

The proportion of the world’s population classified as hungry had halved. But this trend still left the “bottom billion” living in poverty, with 850 million classified as hungry, a figure which had increased by another 100m in 2008 because of the sharp rise in food prices in 2007 and the first half of 2008, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN.