It goes without saying that no one should suffer nonconsensual malnutrition, or–more bleakly–starve to death. But despite world governments’ working to reduce world hunger through the U.N. with the support of global philanthropic charities, there are many still suffering from food shortage, and global climate change is only exacerbating the effects of this worldwide tragedy.
SOME FAVORED LOCALES OF WORLD HUNGER
This May alone, 23 of Tanzania’s 25 regions had enough food to viably survive the summer, said Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives Godfrey Zambi. He goes on to make the case to local media; “[i]t is only a small part of the country which faces shortage of food and the food we have is enough for all of them.”
Zambi continues, saying that until May 7th of 2015, the National Food Reserve Agency had 463,180.42 tons of maize, 5,710.27 tons of sorghum and 4,342.7 tons of rice reserved across the country.
A LITTLE LATE FOR WARNING
But Zambi made this announcement and implicit plea for help long before this year’s harvest season began. The present climate and food production levels of the nation make it obvious that many people are going to suffer from food shortage. The merciless weather has caused unusually long periods of droughts and equally long rainfall and floods that have forced the nation into a period of chronically reduced crop production.
These impoverished conditions are not limited to Zambia. Tanzania was projected to begin its own period of dangerous food shortage this June, and, globally, a report by FAO hypothesized that world hunger is presently affecting 805 million people, despite existent international efforts to reduce this great plight to humanity.
FORMERLY IMPOVERISHED NATIONS’ RECOVERIES ARE SOON TO BE TRAVESTIES
According to the Global Hunger Index 2014, 26 developing countries reduced their score by 50%. This means that Angola, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chad, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, Thailand and Vietnam have all made incredibly significant progress reducing their respective populations’ food needs.
However, the threat of future food shortage is growing stronger and closer in time than we as a global community previously thought because of the accelerating progress of global climate change.
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EXACERBATES EXTREME WEATHER
In a recent report made by Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO), humanity is coming precariously close to suffering a total breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding and precipitation, which, if you haven’t kept track of extreme weather phenomena over the past twenty-five years (or even the past decade), are becoming more of a variable every single year.
The GMO report cites the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and goes on to say that global climate change doesn’t just cause short-term food shortages, but actually alters the way food is produced worldwide, pushing food prices even higher, which only exacerbates the social antagonism of world hunger.
The Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) of Angilia Ruskin University published a report in June predicting that by the year 2040 the price of food will be four times higher than they were in 2000. The GMO report noted that this is twice today’s price to eat.
“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots,” warned Aled Jones, the institute’s director, in an article recently published by Business Insider. “In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption,” Jones laments.
IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP
In case you’re wondering if this is simply leftist fear-mongering, or the result of uncritical, picayune reporting; food production is reduced by rising temperatures because global climate change forces farmers to change their most fundamental farming methods. This is because they are always planning for subsequent seasons, and not simply holding on to past traditions for kinship’s sake, or whatever. In fact, according to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report from 2014, every single decade of general warming that occurs decreases the total quantity of food the world is able to produce by 2%, which is roughly 4.86 million tons.
This is just the tip of the poverty-laden apocalyptic iceberg we’re facing as a global community. For more projected statistics of how global climate change will threaten our ability to eat, please consider the IPCC’s report linked here.
