Ethical issues concerning potential global climate change on food production

Burning fossil fuel in the North American continent contributes more to the CO₂ global warming problem than in any other continent. The resulting climate changes are expected to alter food production. The overall changes in temperature, moisture, carbon dioxide, insect pests, plant pathogens, and weeds associated with global warming are projected to reduce food production in North America. However, in Africa, the projected slight rise in rainfall is encouraging, especially since Africa already suffers from severe shortages of rainfall. For all regions, a reduction in fossil fuel burning is vital. Adoption of sound ecological resource management, especially soil and water conservation and the prevention of deforestation, is important. Together, these steps will benefit agriculture, the environment, farmers, and society as a whole.     

Energy inputs in agricultural systems of China

An analysis of the energy inputs in corn, rice, sorghum, wheat, soybean, and millet in northeastern China indicates that most of the crops are produced with about one half the fossil energy inputs compared with those in the United States. The inputs of labor, however, are 10–100-fold greater than those in the United States. China also uses 85 to more than 500 h of horse power per hectare in producing its crop and this helps reduce the fossil energy inputs in crop production. A small increase in the use of machinery energy (3%) at appropriate times in the cropping systems could reduce labor inputs by about one third.     

Population crash: prospects for famine in the twenty-first century

For centuries famine arose as a seemingly endless series of acute, regional and unanticipated events; it has transformed into a phenomenon, global in scale and continuous in nature. Half the world’s human population perpetually suffers some form of malnourishment, from either a scarcity of calories, protein or micronutrients or from a combination of these. Sheer population size has rendered the scale of suffering unprecedented. Perpetual famine has emerged during an era of abundant and relatively inexpensive soil, water and energy resources, improving crop yields, and a benign climate. However, the twentieth century trends of resource degradation, diminishing growth in crop yields and a warming atmosphere will likely continue, latently and perhaps synergistically impacting agricultural production, and therefore, threatening food security in the twenty-first century. Assuming some proportional relationship between food security and these resources, famine is here projected to greatly increase in the coming decades, severely impacting billions of people.     

Economic viability study of a separate household waste collection in a developing country

This article reports a study of the economic viability of a separate household waste collection project, and considers its social and environmental benefits. The study was developed from the database obtained through the pilot project on separate collections in João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba, in the northeast region of Brazil. The pilot project had been supported by the local municipal council since September 2000. The methodology applied to this study of economic viability is based on the economic quantification of the benefits and costs involved in the process of a separate collection of household waste. The benefits to the environment, owing to the reduction of the final disposal of household waste, were also evaluated. The results of this research are encouraging for the benefit cost relation (B/C) of both the quantified economic components and the environmental aspects. The values found for the relation B/C ranged from 1.27 to 1.77 depending on the economic quantification of the direct and indirect benefits to the components involved in the project, i.e., the waste collectors, the municipal council, the sellers of recycled material, and the recycling industry.     

Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply

Human population growth has typically been seen as the primary causative factor of other ecologically destructive phenomena. Current human disease epidemics are explored as a function of population size. That human population growth is itself a phenomenon with clearly identifiable ecological/biological causes has been overlooked. Here, human population growth is discussed as being subject to the same dynamic processes as the population growth of other species. Contrary to the widely held belief that food production must be increased to feed the growing population, experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability. By increasing food production for humans, at the expense of other species, the biologically determined effect has been, and continues to be, an increase in the human population. Understanding the relationship between food increases and population increases is proposed as a necessary first step in addressing this global problem. Resistance to this perspective is briefly discussed in terms of cultural bias in science.     

Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat

Soil erosion is one of the most serious environmental and public health problems facing human society. Humans obtain more than 99.7% of their food (calories) from the land and less than 0.3% from the oceans and other aquatic ecosystems. Each year about 10 million ha of cropland are lost due to soil erosion, thus reducing the cropland available for food production. The loss of cropland is a serious problem because the World Health Organization reports that more than 3.7 billion people are malnourished in the world. Overall soil is being lost from land areas 10 to 40 times faster than the rate of soil renewal imperiling future human food security and environmental quality.