Food, Food Glourious Food !!!

Well most of T.Y in my school is participating in a blog action day where we all have to post a blog about FOOD as this blog Action day coincides with 'World Food Day'. This year the day is Sunday so here I go....

Malnutrition: Malnutrition is the condition that results from taking an unbalanced diet in which certain nutrients are lacking, in excess (too high an intake), or in the wrong proportions
Did you know

• ...almost 1 in 7 people are hungry.
• Climate change is increasingly viewed as a current and future cause of hunger and poverty. Increasing drought, flooding, and changing climatic patterns requiring a shift in crops and farming practices that may not be easily accomplished are three key issues.
• 8 million people die from lack of food and nutrition every year - about 24,000 deaths each day.
• Every year, 5.8 million children die from hunger related-causes. Every day, that’s 16,000 young lives lost.
• For the first time in history, over 1.02 billion people do not have enough to eat. That’s one sixth of humanity - more than the population of the United States, Canada and the European Union combined.
• There are around one billion hungry people in the world: 642 million live in Asia and the Pacific, 265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 in the Near East and North Africa. Fifteen million people in developed countries go hungry, around 1.5 percent of the total.
• The number of undernourished people in the world increased by 75 million in 2007 and 40 million in 2008, largely due to higher food prices.

Fair trade: Does it really help the growers or are we just told it does to ease our guilt??: The Fair trade badge on a product means that the product was made by a supplier who got the fair amount of pay. You hear all about people and even kids working in Africa and not getting paid... Sweat shops?!?!

To feed 9 million people by 2050 we will have to grow something like 35% more food. Very importantly, we have to do so by being more productive on the cropland we have, rather than removing more natural habitat. I think we will find this very difficult without newer and more modern technology and machinery.

Less hamburgers!!: Can't imagine this one will go over well, but the authors do suggest that people will probably have to reduce their meat consumption slightly to feed nine billion people. This doesn't mean going vegetarian. A recent study from Germany's Potsdam Institute found that if everyone had a diet equivalent to eating meat three times a week, it'd be perfectly doable to feed nine billion people and rein in some of the gruesome excesses of factory farming. But if the whole world adopted a Western meat diet, we'd need to start razing forests for additional land—three million square kilometers all told, an area about two-thirds the size of the current Amazon rain forest.

Thank you for reading and I hope you are going to consider helping the hungry people in the world now,
Eimear x