FORTUNE MAGAZINE: Why WW3 will be fought over food access
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The world has a massive food crisis on its hands. The crisis is so big that organizations like the World Bank and theUnited Nations say there won’t be enough food to feed the global population when it jumps from the current seven billion people to nine billion by 2050.
Some research even suggests a food scarcity crunch as early as 2030 – just 15 years from now. The reasons? Severe weather events like droughts and floods, economic hardships, and political unrest in underdeveloped countries, as well as agribusiness expansion.
While many experts say that producing more food will make the crisis go away, others contend it’s not that simple.
“To address food security, we need a shift in the way we address poverty and inequality in the world,” Stephen Scanlan, a professor of sociology at Ohio University. “There should be a reframing of food as a fundamental human right in a way that governments actually stand by.”
Global food prices increased by four percent between January and April of this year, according to the World Bank, stopping a decline in food prices starting in August 2012. While those figures may please company shareholders, that kind of consolidation and profit puts too much control over food supplies into too few places, according to critics like Scanlan. Beyond the perceived threats from the business world, global food supplies, one analyst argued, are at the mercy of some nations seeking to feed their own populations at the expense of others.