The following are 12 signs that the world is running out of food….
#1 More than 3 billion people, close to half the world’s population, live on less than 2 dollar a day.
#2 Over the past year, the global price of food has risen by 37 percent.
#3 Just about every major agricultural commodity has been skyrocketing in price. Check out what a recent Bloomberg article had to say about what has been happening to many key agricultural commodities over the past year….
Corn futures advanced 77 percent in the past 12 months in Chicago trading, a global benchmark, rice gained 39 percent and sugar jumped 64 percent. There will be shortages in corn, wheat, soybeans, coffee and cocoa this year or next, according to Utrecht, Netherlands-based Rabobank Groep. Prices also rose after droughts and floods from Australia to Canada ruined crops last year. European farmers are now contending with their driest growing season in more than three decades.
#4 According to the World Bank, 44 million more people around the globe have been pushed into extreme poverty since last June because of rising food prices.
#5 Sadly, rising food prices is not a new trend. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the global price of food has gone up by 240% since 2004.
#6 To a large extent, this global food crisis has been brought on by the greed of the wealthy. A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research discovered that the bottom half of the world population ownsapproximately 1 percent of all global wealth.
#7 The average income per person in the poorest countries on the continent of Africa has fallen by one-fourth over the past twenty years.
#8 It is estimated that over 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where the income gap between the rich and the poor is widening.
#9 Approximately 1 billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry every single night.
#10 Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death and three-quarters of them are children under the age of 5.
#11 It is estimated that the entire continent of Africa only owns approximately 1 percent of the total wealth of the world.
#12 According to the most recent “Global Wealth Report” by Credit Suisse, the wealthiest 0.5% of the global population controls over 35% of all the wealth on the planet.
Those of us that live in wealthy countries have it really good.
We get to shovel huge amounts of food into our faces whenever we want.
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