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Food & Agriculture

Global food crisis is developing

It's many years that scientists, journalists, politicians and economists discuss and quarrel about what's happening in the food production system of all the world, based on agriculture, breeding and fishing.
I will treat this topic regarding agriculture and breeding, the main food sources in the largest part of the world.

Many populations of the Third World have known frequent famine periods in the last decades, starting from Ethiopia in the 1970's, while many others survive little beyond the minimum, fighting every day for every crumb of bread or for a cup of rice.

This is particularly due to the increased extension of desert areas caused by dryness, either natural and caused by wrong interventions of man on the territory and the most vulnerable continent is Africa, the poorest of the world, today.

Like in Africa, also in Latin America and Asia the half of the cultivated soil is destined to produce cereals and soy for animal breeding farms in the Third World or in the Western Countries to produce meat, eggs and milk; so, not for the direct nutrition of local populations, but for the rich markets of the rich Countries of the world.
Also most of pastures, in the Third World, are used to produce food for the export and this is turning into desert the 70% of the 3.3 billions of hectares destined to pasture in the world, often subtracted to woods, savannas and wetlands only few years ago, as showed by the esteems of the U.N.E.P. (United Nations Environment Program).

This loss of fertile soil, while the worldly population keeps on growing, is the most dramatic global trend today and is also eased by the greenhouse effect started in the last decades and summing up to the reduction of forests, cut everywhere in the tropical regions.
This, to get new soil to cultivate and for pasture, but this is a very primitive technique, not more sustainable today in such an overcrowded world; in this way, the soil keeps its fertility for few years, without an adequate fertilization and, eventually, it becomes sterile.
All these farmers are not stupid, but nobody still teach them simple and more modern and sustainable cultivation systems, firstly, the organic and bio-dynamic agriculture.
Also the artificial fertilizers are nor efficient to keep soil fertility stable for long times, given what is occurring also in the U.S. and China today.

In Brazil, the land surface cultivated with soy has reached about 60 millions of hectares and half of the crops are exported


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Global food crisis is developing

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