Custom essays on Food Crisis and Biotechnology

Today the world is trying to combat the global problems, and it turns into a paradox that in the world that is abundant of food, more than 700 million people are chronically undernourished. The world’s population will double by the year 2033 that is a challenge for all agricultural systems. Food shortage and skyrocketing prices are the indication of the need of urgent and efficient measures to be taken in the field and research conducted. Scientists have already started the battle against hunger and food shortage but the way “the silent tsunami” of world hunger that takes millions of lives is actually a matter of debate.
The controversy over biotechnology is considered a solution for a food supply issue in the developing countries the analogue of which is already known to us. Food technology started thousands of years ago, plant breeders spent centuries to select and harvest seeds that could provide enough food with better taste and color and less vulnerable to weather and climatic conditions.
In 1940s the food technology made a big step forward and increased the amounts of food produced by farmers. In the 60s and 70s the farmers abandoned traditional farming methods and used input-responsive seeds that provided heavy harvests and undeniably saved lives. The changes that occurred in the 1940s bettered the farming methods and were so radical that the administrator for the US Agency for International Development called the improvement it caused in Pakistan and India “a Green Revolution”. Today it came to be regarded so all over the world. In the 1960s the Indian farmers were taught to cultivate the new wheat that resulted in Pakistan’s harvest of 8.4 million tons in 1970 (4.6 million in 1965)and India producing 20 million tons in 1970 (12.3 million tons in 1965).
Norman Borlaug, often referred to as father of the “Green Revolution”, received the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his successful attempt to combat world’s hunger. Bruce Alberts, president of the US National Academy of Sciences, characterized the scholar as “a man saving more human lives than any other person in history”. According to the interview with Borlaug, one more Green Revolution is on the way, he calculated that people will need one billion tons of grain by the year 2025 and that is why the yields are remarkably important (Borlaug). He claims that both conventional breeding and biotechnology are of great necessity to meet the challenges of the century (Borlaug).
Having analyzed the current periodicals overview of the problem, everything seems to be evident, scientists have the knowledge to feed the world with the application of conventional breeding as well as biotechnology implementation and to address worldwide hunger, but it is not happening and as Pedro Sanchez, Columbia University topical agricultural director, says, “It’s very frustrating, especially when you see children dying”. Commenting on the oncoming Green Revolution Kent Bradford, the director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at the University of California, says: “The fact is that the reason we have been able to have food and have to had these shortages for the last 40 years is in fact the green revolution and the technologies that went with it. If we are really going to make quantum leap, raise the yield thresholds significantly, then probably biotechnology is going to help”.
One cannot help mentioning that the food prices increase led to continuous suffering of the poor who are most affected by hunger in the countries like Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Uganda, Bosnia etc. In Lesotho for instance children are reported to faint from hunger, in Sri Lanka people reduced the number of meals per day by more than 50 per cent. In Bosnia the loaf of bred costs two times more than last summer and the number of people who use food dispensaries is increasing. According to the latest data on food crisis based on economic and financial analysis for 2010 there is an irrefutable evidence that the world will run out of food next year, with the crisis resulting from other economic, financial and political issues.