Question

Describe the role of rdna technology in food security and human health.

Answer 1

WHILE the world has been changing over the last years both politically and economically in unexpected and remarkable ways, food security remains an unfulfilled dream for currently more than 800 million people, about 10% less than in 1970. What seems to be a small improvement, should not go unappreciated, however, as about 1.5 billion people were added to the population of the developing countries since then. There has been progress on a global scale – but not for all (Table 1).

There are good chances for continuing progress in the years to come – but, again, not for all and much more difficult to achieve: during the next 30 years, the increase in numbers of human beings will be in the same dimension as the total world population in 1950, i.e. about 2.4 billion people. In the same period of time the globe’s ecological carrying capacity is expected to shrink. The combination of these two trends will keep food security 200 years after Malthus on the agenda for human development.

World population continues to increase

Never before in human history has our planet been so densely populated as today: about 6 billion people now live on earth and, even though birth rates are decreasing in most countries, 70 to 80 million will be added to our numbers in 1999, 98% of them in developing countries1. Those of us born before 1950 are the first generation in human history to witness a doubling of world population.





While some of the developing countries are steadily moving towards lower birth and death rates, others –
mainly those with high levels of poverty and limited social and economic progress for women – are experiencing constant birth rates at a high level. In aggregate, the population of the developing countries – 80% of the

Klaus M. Leisinger is with the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, P.O. Box CH 4002, Basel, Switzerland.

*Presented at the Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Malthus and Mendel: Population, Science and Sustainable Food Security held at M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai, 28 January 1998.

(e-mail: [email protected])

global total – continues to increase at record levels in
absolute terms: with an increase of over 50 million per year, Asia has the highest absolute growth; with 2.6% population growth per year, Africa has the steepest rate.

Because nearly 40% of the people living in developing countries are younger than 15 years, i.e. still not in what the demographers call reproductive age, the high absolute population growth will continue into the next century despite declining birth rates. The present international consensus is that in the next thirty years the world population will swell to over 8 billions – and there might be one billion more until population growth reaches replacement levels.

Already the fact that a significantly higher number of human beings will have to be provided with food in adequate quantity and quality poses a number of political, economic, social, ecological and technological problems. Two salient features of population growth will make it particularly difficult to achieve future successes on the food security front.

The world, in particular the developing world, is in the midst of an unprecedented urban transition. Within the next decade, more than half of the world’s population, an estimated 3.3 billion, will be living in urban areas2. As recently as 1975, just over one-third of the world’s population lived in urban areas; by 2025, only 50 years later, it will be almost two-thirds (Table 2).

The megacities of the future are increasingly to be found in developing countries, and will confront them with social and environmental problems of unprecedented magnitude3. This has notable consequences for food security: urban populations are not able to feed themselves by subsistence food production, and their eating patterns differ from those of rural folk. The amount of high-value, transportable, and storable grain (such as rice and wheat), animal protein, and vegetables in their diets is higher, with a corresponding decrease in the proportion of traditional foodstuffs.

trializing Asian countries – people move up the food chain, i.e. consume more livestock products, the production of which either requires more grain or absorbs arable land.