By the end of October 2011, the Earth’s human population had reached 7 billion. It was half that in 1968 when Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. In the book’s opening pages he proclaimed that too many people in the planet’s underdeveloped countries made mass starvation inevitable, that a minimum of 10 million people — “most of them children” — would starve to death every year in the 1970s, and that it was too late to do anything about it. Plenty of experts agreed with Ehrlich; the press ran with the story, it was apocalypse now. Except he was wrong: ... Read More
Guidance From Above on Food Insecurity
October 17, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
When Kenya's twice-yearly rainy seasons failed to materialize in early 2007, the shortfall plunged a quarter of the country's 39 million inhabitants, some 10 million people, into food insecurity — the state when food, or access to it, isn't available. Beyond the drought, the world financial crisis has led to a doubling in basic market commodity prices — a big problem in a country that needs to import grain and livestock as it is. Compounding the crisis, said local meteorologist Gideon Galu, is a lack of quantifiable information. "In this area we have a very sparse observational network ... Read More
