“ Humanity”

Question of the century:

Q: - Can we feed the planet without destroying it?
Ans: - Although it's not often addressed in the larger business world, food is a
hot-button issue for everyone on the planet, but perhaps much more so than
almost anyone knows. In fact, according to Jon Foley, director of the University of
Minnesota's Institute of the Environment, making agriculture more
productive and more sustainable is probably the single biggest environmental
challenge of the 21st century. There are several ways that we can feed the planet
without destroying it those ways are:
1) Stop deforestation: Grow more food, but not at the expense of rainforests,
savannahs, and peatlands. Let's stop growing agriculture, let's freeze the
footprint of agriculture to where we have it today. The expansion of
agriculture is the single biggest driver of species extinction in the world.
Preserving tropical forests helps protect the millions of plant and animal
species—many of which have been invaluable to human medicine—that
are indigenous to tropical forests and in danger of extinction. Keeping
forests intact also helps prevent floods and drought by regulating regional
rainfall. There are further reasons to reduce tropical Deforestation:-
 Global warming solutions protect our citizens.
 Tropical forests are necessary for stabilizing our climate.
 Reducing deforestation is cost-effective.
 Ignoring deforestation is unfair to good businesses.
 Reducing deforestation is inexpensive for the United States.
 Solutions exist today for reducing deforestation.
 Stopping deforestation addresses multiple challenges.
 Addressing deforestation shows we are serious about our future.

2) Improve productivity: If we can't expand agriculture's reach, we will have to

improve how much food we grow on the land we have. Most of the
research and development funding that goes to agriculture is working on
making the world's best farms more productive, rather than improving
 things at the bottom of the pyramid. Across the world, there are
tremendous opportunities to significantly boost food production without
using more land and harming the environment.
3) Improve resource efficiency: Much of those improvements can come by
being smarter with the water, energy, and chemicals we use to grow food
today. Between the most and the least efficient producers in the world,
there's a 200 to 300-fold difference in efficiency, and there are huge
opportunities to save water, and energy, and reduce pollution while
growing the same amount of food.
4) Change diets: In the United States, only about 10 percent of the food grown
is for human consumption. The rest is for the industry -- biofuels and
livestock feed, primarily. 60 % of our crops are for humans and 40% are not
we could change that and feed many more people with less environmental
impact than we do today.
5) Stop food waste: Beyond growing lots of food for non-human use, we
waste a truly staggering amount of food. Approximately 30-40% of the
world’s food is wasted. These five steps - ambitious and world-changing to
say the very least - would together make it possible to double the world's
food production and cut the environmental impacts of agriculture by at
least half.
I think we need to move an entirely new paradigm about feeling the world, and doing it at a
global scale with global strategies, instead of calling it agriculture, which we’ve had for
10,000 years, maybe it’s time for something new, what I like to call permaculture, or farming
for the whole plane.