Worldwide Food Shortage

These new factors are related to economic systems, political issues, alternative energies and fuels or global warming and climate change. As we can read in an article by Lester Brown published in Scientific American Magazine, “one of the toughest things for people to do Is to anticipate sudden change. ” (2009) This quote helps us understanding the crawls In countries affected by flooding or droughts. Other natural disasters hard to predict and having a substantial Impact on basic food production are earthquakes and tsunamis. These phenomenon’s have the power to paralyze any agricultural activity among others.

When these natural disasters affect countries with a poor economy, the situation is even worse as they do not have enough resources to recover and things are likely to become critical to the point where the population is affected by malnutrition and dies of hunger. Africa has been long known as the continent with the worst problems concerning food shortages In most of their countries, mainly due because of the hot temperatures causing severe uncontrollable droughts and water shortages. The situation in these countries has not only immediate implications on population, but also makes it very official for economies to develop.

Unfortunately, because of the lack of food many diseases would easily spread and be difficult to overcome, since the countries are poor. To Illustrate the state of some African countries we will be citing a shocking affirmation published In an article by Marc Gunter, senior writer for Fortune Magazine: “The average American pet will consume more resources than the average African and have better medical care as well. ” (2008) The same poor economical environment in countries of Central and South America had facilitated over the years, food shortages following either droughts or flooding.

In 2001 for instance, a severe drought has compromised the crops across Central America. Countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have been seriously affected. (Taylor, 2002) These countries are predominately rural and produce grains and coffee for export. This is the other aspect of local food shortages: it can extend to affect other importing countries as well, forcing the increase in prices for some essential foods. As we could see so far in this analysis, droughts are not the only factors having the power to severely affect food production, but their opposite, flooding has the same vegetating erect. Entries all around ten world , In Europe, Salsa, Australia, ten Americas, they all have experienced food shortages due to flooding. A healthy production depends thus on balanced weather conditions. This might be however difficult to achieve, thinking that for centuries nature has been unpredictable, and it’s getting worse due to global warming. An article published in Fortune Magazine presents the Pentagon’s weather nightmare, global warming, as a surging problem, and predicts that a cooling in the Northern Hemisphere will trigger longer and rasher winters in most European countries as well as in the United States.

The same conditions will also cause according to the same source, severe droughts which will turn “farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. ” (Strip,2004) Food shortages could arise from animal diseases, like the mad-cow disease, which caused a global meat shortage in 1996, and affected mainly the Great Britain, where people have died from consuming the meat coming from infected animals. Same situation has happened with chicken and pork later in the decade. A major issue nowadays is the price of oil.

In a global economy heavily relying on amerce, import and export, the price of oil could have a significant impact on the cost of production. Some countries are seriously affected and decide to drop the production for essential foods, since its cost could become higher than the selling price. While some countries, usually developing countries, are struggling to survive on a low food supply, dealing with starvation and diseases, others might as well have an overage in production of basic food. We can analyze these countries’ food overage from a humanitarian and ethical perspective, depending on what their decision is regarding the surplus.

How many countries decide to distribute their overage to unprivileged nations, and how many simply dispose of the extra production? Great Britain for instance, estimates that more than 30% of their food is thrown away and thus UK might be the worst in the world for waste. The cost of the wasted food is estimated to be between 8 and 16 billion pounds a year. (Vidal, 2005) This is Just an example of how food is wasted in some countries or Just individually in certain households. In the context of long time food crisis around the world, this waste is highly unethical and shows low commitment to the global welfare.