The issue of world population has been of concern to economists, politicians, sociologists, and philosophers. How to increase the rate and amount of food production? We are not decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in many areas of the world. Nowhere is this more true than in sub-Saharan Africa, where 800 million people must subsist on local yields of one ton per hectare—one third of yields in the rest of the developing world and one ninth those of the U.S. and Europe. That means that a sub-Saharan African person eats nine times less than what we normally eat in America!
From Scientific American: Agriculture seems to be the main driver of most ecological problems on the planet. We are literally eating away the other species on the planet.
Agriculture—thanks to deforestation, nitrous oxide from fields, methane from cattle and rice paddies—is responsible for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, making emissions from transporting food, known as "food miles," a "rounding error," said ecologist Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota. Pasture has become the dominant ecosystem on the planet, he added, and humans directly employ some 40 percent of the surface of the planet. "Very little of that is urban." In addition, agriculture accounts for at least 85 percent of human water consumption—a growing concern as aquifers diminish and hydrology changes in the face of climate change. Humans now use some 171 million tons of nitrogen as fertilizer every year, much of which ends up polluting lakes, rivers, streams and even the ocean.
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All of the above is tied to the issue of UNDERDEVELOPMENT: poverty, lack of education, lack of infrastructure, poor or non-existent public health. Not an easy task to solve.
