News tagged with food supply

Orange peels, newspapers may lead to cheaper, cleaner ethanol fuel

Scientists may have just made the breakthrough of a lifetime, turning discarded fruit peels and other throwaways into cheap, clean fuel to power the world's vehicles.

Technology / Energy & Green Tech

created Feb 18, 2010 | popularity 4.2 / 5 (20) | comments 9 | with audio podcast

Scientists turn stem cells into pork

(AP) -- Call it pork in a petri dish - a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, ...

Biology / Biotechnology

created Jan 15, 2010 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (17) | comments 10

Behavior breakthrough: Like animals, plants demonstrate complex ability to integrate information

A University of Alberta research team has discovered that a plant's strategy to capture nutrients in the soil is the result of integration of different types of information.

Biology / Plants & Animals

created Jun 24, 2010 | popularity 5 / 5 (10) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Spiders in space -- live!

Ever since they were announced, the spiders in space have been living in the limelight. This is, of course, the point -- to watch and learn as the pair of golden orb spiders, or Nephila clavipes, adapt to ...

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Jun 10, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (10) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Don't worry so much about limiting sodium, researchers say

University of California-Davis nutrition researchers are challenging the decades-old conventional wisdom that we should watch our salt.

Medicine & Health / Health

created Oct 20, 2009 | popularity 3.6 / 5 (12) | comments 3

Study: Shrinking glaciers to spark food shortages

(AP) -- Nearly 60 million people living around the Himalayas will suffer food shortages in the coming decades as glaciers shrink and the water sources for crops dry up, a study said Thursday.

Space & Earth / Environment

created Jun 10, 2010 | popularity 3.8 / 5 (10) | comments 9

Researchers study potential effects of geoengineering on global food supply

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Jan 22, 2012 | popularity 4.2 / 5 (9) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Groundwater depletion in semiarid regions of Texas and California threatens US food security

The nation's food supply may be vulnerable to rapid groundwater depletion from irrigated agriculture, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere.

Space & Earth / Environment

created May 28, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (7) | comments 18 | with audio podcast

Catastrophic Darkness: How Life Survives an Asteroid Impact

A dinosaur-killing asteroid may have wiped out much of life on Earth 65 million years ago, but now scientists have discovered how smaller organisms might have survived in the darkness following such a catastrophic ...

Space & Earth / Space Exploration

created Sep 10, 2009 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (7) | comments 0

Plant and animal in direct competition for food

(PhysOrg.com) -- Animals often compete aggressively with each other for food or other resources, and plants often compete with each other for light, water, or other resources. Now scientists in the U.S. have ...

Biology / Plants & Animals

created May 13, 2010 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (6) | comments 0 | with audio podcast report

Bugs may be resistant to genetically modified corn

(AP) -- One of the nation's most widely planted crops - a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide - may be losing its effectiveness because a major pest appears to be developing resistance ...

Biology / Biotechnology

created Dec 29, 2011 | popularity 5 / 5 (4) | comments 4

Eat your greens: they can prevent the ill-effects of toxins in foods

(PhysOrg.com) -- LLNL researchers have found that a small dose of chlorophyll or chlorophyllin, found in green leafy vegetables, could reverse the effects of aflatoxin poisoning, a potent, naturally occurring ...

Medicine & Health / Cancer

created Jan 25, 2010 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 1 | with audio podcast

Study: SE Asia will be hit hard by climate change

(AP) -- Southeast Asia will be hit particularly hard by climate change, causing the region's agriculture-dependent economies to contract by as much as 6.7 percent annually by the end of the century, according ...

Space & Earth / Environment

created Apr 27, 2009 | popularity 3 / 5 (6) | comments 1

GM food solutions at risk from lobbyists, research suggests

Powerful lobby groups opposed to genetically modified (GM) food are threatening public acceptance of the technology in Europe, research suggests.

Biology / Other

created Sep 24, 2011 | popularity 3 / 5 (6) | comments 39

Researchers find possible environmental causes for Alzheimer's, diabetes

A new study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital have found a substantial link between increased levels of nitrates in our environment and food with increased deaths from diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes mellitus ...

Medicine & Health / Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

created Jul 06, 2009 | popularity 4 / 5 (4) | comments 2

Food security

Food security refers to the availability of food and one's access to it. A household is considered food secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. According to the World Resources Institute, global per capita food production has been increasing substantially for the past several decades. In 2006, MSNBC reported that globally, the number of people who are overweight has surpassed the number who are undernourished - the world had more than one billion people who were overweight, and an estimated 800 million who were undernourished. According to a 2004 article from the BBC, China, the world's most populous country, is suffering from an obesity epidemic.

Worldwide around 852 million people are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty, while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty (source: FAO, 2003). As of late 2007, increased farming for use in biofuels, world oil prices at more than $100 a barrel, global population growth, climate change, loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development, and growing consumer demand in China and India have pushed up the price of grain. Food riots have recently taken place in many countries across the world.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain food security in a world beset by a confluence of "peak" phenomena, namely peak oil, peak water, peak grain and peak fish. More than half of the planet's population, numbering approximately 3.3 billion people, live in urban areas as of November 2007. Any disruption to farm supplies may precipitate a uniquely urban food crisis in a relatively short time. The ongoing global credit crisis has affected farm credits, despite a boom in commodity prices. Food security is a complex topic, standing at the intersection of many disciplines.

A new peer-reviewed journal of Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food is to be published from 2009. In developing countries, often 70% or more of the population lives in rural areas. In that context, agricultural development among smallholder farmers and landless people provides a livelihood for people allowing them the opportunity to stay in their communities. In many areas of the world, land ownership is not available, thus, people who want or need to farm to make a living have little incentive to improve the land.

In the US, there are approximately 2,000,000 farmers, less than 1% of the population. A direct relationship exists between food consumption levels and poverty. Families with the financial resources to escape extreme poverty rarely suffer from chronic hunger; while poor families not only suffer the most from chronic hunger, but are also the segment of the population most at risk during food shortages and famines.

Two commonly used definitions of food security come from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA):

The stages of food insecurity range from food secure situations to full-scale famine. "Famine and hunger are both rooted in food insecurity. Food insecurity can be categorized as either chronic or transitory. Chronic food insecurity translates into a high degree of vulnerability to famine and hunger; ensuring food security presupposes elimination of that vulnerability. [Chronic] hunger is not famine. It is similar to undernourishment and is related to poverty, existing mainly in poor countries."

For more information about Food security, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Related topics: climate change