Review: Reading 15 Feeding the World

This reading was very informative but also created some concern for me. The first sentence states that in 1999 the world's population grew over six billion! Currently supply and demand are growing at the same rate but there is growing evidence that demand will soon grow higher than supply. This reading is broken into five sections that explain the concerns with this issue, Society's Four Transitional Stages, Evidence for Negative Poplulation Growth, Future Food Supply/Demand Balance, Protecting the Environment, and The Challenges Ahead.

Society's Four Transitional Stages
The four stages of society discussed are traditional, developing, developed, and mature. These stages are based on demographics, economics, agriculutrual productivity, and technical advancements. Each stage referrs to a society's upward movement toward higher food production and technological output, lower death rates, and investments in education and science.

Evidence for Negative Population and Growth
Issues such as declining marriage rates, high divorce rates, increasing career goals, more women in the business world, and growing desire for financial success leave some to beilieve that fewer people are making having childeren less of a priority. This section was a little confusing when it states the United Nations projections of populations. I think it is good to be aware of the different things that may affect the population around the world but I find it hard to narrow it down to a certin ratio as they do. The low/medium world populaiton the UN projects for 2050 is 7.9 billion people and then a decline to 6.4 billion by 2150 (Mckinney, 56). I am assuming that these numbers will change over the next few years but crazy to think that in about 40 years our world popluation is going to be raised by about 2 billion!

Future Food Supply/Demand Balance
This section describes that in the future the demand for food will pass our food supply. This is kind of a hard thing to think about, right now we can access food almost anywhere and with little effort. I wonder what it would be like if there was a shortage and we actually had to worry about where to find food. I think most of us living in the United States have been spoiled with our resources and it's time to start making sure we can preserve them for as long as possible.

Protecting the Environment
The benfits of becoming more "green" and what do for our world is looked at in this section. The more people we need to house the more land we need to clear of forests and natural habitat. This section explains that the more people we have with higher incomes the more stress is put on saving our environment. Higher income promotes lower population growth, better recyling and consuming practices, more environmental quality concern, and more educational research all can contribute to preserving our environment.

The Challenges Ahead
This section pretty much sums up the rest of the sections stating agian that if we want our resources to keep providing for us we need to keep an eye on our population growth, the products we use and how we dipose of them. We need to look at all the possoble outcomes and be ready for anything. It would be silly of us, as one of the most developed countires to put off this likely disaster.

I think this reading gave me another view of what is needed for us to sustain our way of living. While it is great that people recycle and try to reduce emissions, a lot more needs to be considered. The growing population really needs to be looked at. As our healthcare gets better and better the average life span is getting longer and its taking a toll on environment. Education along with getting all of the up to date information on these topics is key if we are going to be successful in keeping our supply and demand equal as long as possible.