The Global Food Crisis: a calorie counting exercise

Do we have enough food in the world for all of us? Since the beginning of the 21st century, our society has started to be concerned about the global food deficit. With the constant growth of a population that is projected to reach 11 billion in 2100, more and more food is required, even though we are not yet able to supply it for our current population.

You may have heard how many tonnes or liters of food are still needed, but actually these are not the proper units to use in this case. According to the research, the world will be short by 214 trillion calories by 2027. Yes, we should use calories in this case - weight or volume are not always proportionate to the energetic value of a given product. To make it clearer, the world will be short equivalent to 379 trillion Big Macs (563 calories each), more than McDonalds has ever produced.

The world can be divided into two parts - importers and exporters of calories. Over the last 40 years, India and both North and South Americas have become the main food suppliers for the rest of the earth. Forty years ago, the whole of Asia, except China, were importers. Now, the situation has turned upside down, because the whole continent, except China, is an exporter. On the other hand, the whole of Africa has not developed enough to show any change in the last half century.

There are two probable scenarios that may happen in the close future. The first one is that more food is going to be needed and the nutrition differences across planet earth will be even more noticeable with the calculated increase of world’s population; 95% of this increase will happen in developing countries, mostly in Africa.

The second possibility is much more optimistic. As previously mentioned, the whole of Africa has not shown any bigger change in terms of calories production. While most countries were developing in their own way, Africa has remained unchanged. This leaves a field for improvement, if MEDCs will be able to support this continent, allowing it to develop, we may expect it to be self-sufficient in close future. It is in everybody’s interest to help this happen, reduce the inequality and defuse the food crisis.

Even though Africa is not going to become one big MacDonald’s farm, that produces Big Macs, we could hope that it will become one of the main producers of food in the world in the close future.