Feeding a World of 9 Billion People

"The problem is not so much that we don’t have or can’t develop the technology to increase food and feed production, it’s that urbanization has rendered an ever increasing fraction of humanity unable to produce its own food — and more than that — totally unaware of what it takes. (What’s the problem? I just run over to the grocery store.)" - Nina Fedoroff, a life sciences professor at Pennsylvania State University. This quote was part of Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth Jan 10, 2011 blog titled "Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World" (title link).

What I find so interesting is that Bill McKibben in his excellent book, EAARTH, believes that a key means of increasing food supplies will be the return of backyard vegetable gardening, like the Victory Gardens of WWI & II. McKibben points out that this is already occurring in the U.S. to a significent degree, ".... serious people have begun to rethink small-scale agriculture" (p. 166). He further states that this is a far better and safer approach to a warming climate, because it permits a faster, more fine-tuned response to changes in temperature, rainfall, and pests, which accompany climate change. Bill Mckibben has convinced me, and I am currently planning a major expansion of my "edible garden". Bill is also the founder of 350.org, a web site dedicated to "building a global movement to solve the climate crisis", with a specific goal of getting CO2 levels back down to 350 ppm.

The world population will almost certainly reach 9 billion by 2050, AND, if the present growth rate continues unchanged, the world population will grow from a current 6.9 billion, to 11 billion in 2050. The source for this last alarming figure is  Population Connection, an organization which "works to ensure that every woman around the world who wants to limit her childbearing has access to the health services and contraceptive supplies she needs in order to do so. Typically, when woman have access to affordable birth control, they have fewer children, regardless of income or educational levels."Also see the FAQ's on the About Us page of their web site.