Hannah Moore
speaker
384 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2014
last heard May 2015
Hannah Moore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But...
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My investigations led me to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
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Now, what the number crunches there don't know about what food we're growing and eating isn't worth knowing.
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They've been producing yearly data on the world's food consumption for the past 50 years.
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They also make projections on how much food will be available to us in the future, surveying 185 countries and doing some clever mathematical modelling to fill in the gaps.
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So what do they think about how much food we're going to have to produce over the next 40 years?
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Well, they've observed that as countries develop, become richer and improve farming methods, people eat more and they eat better food.
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Better to have the willpower in the shop in the first place.
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True, but back to the UN's food experts.
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They say that between 1961 and 2009, the world's population doubled, but food production tripled.
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Here's statistician Joseph Schmidhuber.
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But as well as eating more, when we get richer, we waste more.
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They take that into their calculations at the UN and it's for that reason they refer to the number of calories available rather than the number of calories needed.
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Yes, but Joseph's saying that we'll end up producing more than we need.
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If you crunch the numbers the UN way, which, official as it is, does involve some heroic assumptions, it seems The Economist's claim could actually be not far off the truth.
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A rough, very rough calculation based on UN projections suggests there'll be over 1,000 trillion calories available from all the food in the world over the next 40 years.
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That's about 90% of the calories that were available over the past 10,000.
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Yes, the UN expects us to produce 60% more calories over the next 40 years or so than we do today.
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So they don't think we'll struggle to feed 9 billion people?
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No.
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Showing 261–280 of 384 · page 14 of 20
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