By Lin Taylor
LONDON, May 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Swelling populations and demand for food combined with ever scarcer water and land resources could lead to a doubling of food prices and trigger civil unrest in some developing countries, a new report says.
Demand for food with a higher environmental impact, such as meat, has surged as emerging countries like China and India grow in size and in wealth, said Martin Halle, policy analyst at Global Footprint Network (GFN).
“A few things are very clear: the demand for food is going up tremendously because of population growth,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“[Food production] is becoming more unstable because climate change is affecting production, in the context of growing land and water scarcity. There’s very little leeway between supply and demand.”
In the past, countries were able to meet those demands by growing more food on more land. But this has come at a cost, Halle said, since the planet is now running out of water and arable land.
The last time the world saw a severe food crisis was in 2007 and 2008, the report said, when extreme weather events hit major grain producing regions the year earlier, causing spikes in the demand and cost of food.
The higher prices led to social and political unrest in North Africa, the Middle East and South East and South Asia.
The report published this week by GFN and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said most of the same countries, namely Morocco, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Indonesia, are again at risk if food prices were to increase in the next few years.
