sustainability/sustainable development
No TL;DR found
Abstract
Over the past forty years food production has increased in many parts of the world. The doubling and tripling of yields of wheat, rice and other crops has been attributed to the Green Revolution, a package of inputs and practices that arose out of research in Mexico that was first introduced in the late1950s. New high yielding varieties and hybrids, use of chemical fertilizers and pest control methods along with a whole range of carefully-designed management practices form the core features of Green Revolution technology. With the present global annual food production being roughly sufficient to supply an adequate diet to every person in the world, some complacency and even optimism has developed concerning our ability to satisfy basic nutritional needs of the entire human population. But as we go from continent to continent and country to country, distribution of food is far from even. In some parts of the world, diets provide a surplus of high quality (and often high input) foods and there also, farmers are sometimes encouraged not to plant crops because the surplus supply is greater than that required. At the same time, in other places availability of an adequate, nutritious and attractive diet is far from the norm for a large fraction of the population. Periodically, droughts and other natural or human-made activities result in famine and starvation affecting hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. In some of these situations, for political and logistical reasons we seem unable to solve the distribution problem and surplus food from other parts of the world never reaches the people in need.