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12:30-Interdisciplinary
3/7/00
Critical Analysis on Chapter 7, State of the World 1999
Feeding Nine Billion While reading chapter 7 of State of the World I was very interested in the changing course because it made me think about the things that our world can do that can drastically benefit the future of our agricultural production and food prospect. We must be able to solve the two major food issues currently facing our world, which are malnutrition and price stability. All governments need to establish a population policy so that their country does not exceed the limitations of its carrying capacity. It is important that we can produce enough food for our country, which is estimated to increase by 74 million in the next fifty years.
A quote from the book, "The worst mistake political leaders can make entering the new millennium is to underestimate the dimensions of the food challenge". I certainly agree with this because most of the future food growth in the world is going to be croplands and we need to understand that we are going to need to be able to produce as much crop as possible for the land. I also agree with the fact that the governments that are experiencing rapid population growth must figure out their future population carrying capacity by calculating how much land is available for crops and how much water is available for irrigation.
It is estimated that 3.3 billion more people will be living on this world in the first half of the next century and unfortunately many of those people will be born into already over populated countries. For example, India with some of the highest poverty rates in the world will have an additional 600 million people inhabiting the country by the year 2050.
It was interesting to learn that educating young females would be a good way to control future population growth because "the more education that women have, the fewer children that women have". Another way to ensure food supply