Focus of The GHI 2012: Pressures On Land, Water and Energy Resources
Increasingly, Hunger is related to how we use land, water and energy. The growing scarcity of these resources puts more and more pressure on food security. Several factors contribute to an increasing shortage of natural resources:
- Demographic change: The world population is expected to be over 9 billion by 2050. Additionally, more and more people live in cities. Urban populations feed themselves differently than inhabitants of rural areas; they tend to consume less staple foods and more meat and dairy products.
- Higher income and non-sustainable use of resources: As the global economy grows, wealthy people consume more food and goods, which have to be produced with a lot of water and energy. They can afford not to be efficient and wasteful in their use of resources.
- Bad policies and weak institutions: When policies, for example energy policy, are not tested for the consequences they have on the availability of land and water it can lead to failures. An example are the biofuel policies of industrialized countries: As corn and sugar are increasingly used for the production of fuels, there is less land and water for the production of food.
Signs for an increasing scarcity of energy, land and water resources are for example: growing prices for food and energy, a massive increase of large-scale investment in arable land (so-called land grabbing), increasing degradation of arable land because of too intensive land use (for example, increasing desertification), increasing number of people, who live in regions with lowering ground water levels, and the loss of arable land as a consequence of climate change. The analysis of the global conditions lead the authors of the GHI 2012 to recommend several policy actions:
- Securing land and water rights
- Gradual lowering of subsidies
- Creation of a positive macroeconomic framework
- Investment in agriculture technology development to promote a more efficient use of land, water and energy
- Support for approaches, that lead to a more efficient use of land, water and energy along the whole value chain
- Preventing and overuse of natural resources through monitoring strategies for water, land and energy, and agricultural systems
- Improvement of the access to education for women and the strengthening of their reproductive rights to address demographic change
- Increase incomes, reduce social and economic inequality and promotion of sustainable lifestyles
- Climate change mitigation and adaptation through a reorientation of agriculture
Read more about this topic: Global Hunger Index
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