Scientists: Tech to feed the world by 2050

Being aware that poverty is rampant nowadays, scientists say that technology could help in supplying food to the world’s population. Imagine, for a third world country, 80% of its population is experiencing poverty and out of this 80%, 50% of which are children. Doesn’t that sound pitiful?

Good thing there are people who thought of ways on how to eradicate this certain problem. Scientists have seen that artificial meat, nanotechnology and genetic tools are the “tools of science” that maybe needed to help supply food to the world’s population. But the Royal Society published a paper saying that this could also be critical due to the face of enormous technological, climatic and social changes. But if these tools of science could help, more than nine billion people could be fed by 2050. It sounds so very far, but hoping is not limited to our near future.

Meanwhile, water and land for agriculture is also going scarce. This was made worse by climate change and biofuel crops. Many people will get affected by this problem since it will be the cause of too much higher prices for some goods in the market like milk, meat and eggs. This is a report made by Phillip Thornton, an author of the paper by Royal Society.

An alternative for this was also studied and he said that the growing of animal muscle in vats to produce artificial, cultures or “in-vitro” meat is one possible way to help meet the demand. This could also help the environment in such a way that it could also reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by livestock. Isn’t that great?

Well, this could have been done earlier and just wait only a few years from now. But what else can we do but to wait and see what we can help. One lesson here is that, we should not waste our food. Every time we eat our meal, let us make sure we consume enough for ourselves and less leftovers. Imagine there are millions of people around the world who only eat once a day and we are all lucky we at 3-4 times a day. If we could do this to ourselves, why not help to feed the world in our own little ways.

source: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/08/16/technology-food-security-artificial-meat.html