How Long Until We Run Out Of Food? | Avoiding Apocalypse | Spark

never before in history has mother earth been under such stress seven billion people rely on her for their survival food isn't distributed evenly around the world so it's not like most of the world will be hungry the poorest parts of the world will be more hungry than they are now one out of seven people in the world already are going hungry and that number is just going to go up the fact is that in another 20 years if there are another 2 billion people coming we won't have enough land to farm traditionally [Music] the population is growing at an alarming rate four babies are born every second that's 360 000 births a day a million and a half individuals a week and 130 million people a year [Music] today we're up to seven billion and in another 20 to 30 maybe 40 years from now we might add another two to three billion more people to an already large population notice i'm not saying too many people it's never too many when everybody has enough the increase in population that's occurring is going to cause stress all across the board it's going to result in enormous pressure for food for instance at the very time that climate change and extreme weather events are going to make growing food harder and harder the climate change that stephen schwartz is talking about also has an effect on bees about one-third of the beehives in the united states for instance died off last year colony collapse disorder is such a serious issue that the press describes it as the martyrdom of bees although parasites are often blamed the most likely enemy is humankind and it's pesticides bees are sentinel species and protectors of the environment without them our meals would no longer be the same the important thing to remember of the 90 foodstuffs that humanity lives on and requires to survive 70 of them are pollinated by bees and with the demise of the bees the whole agricultural cycle is called into question and could collapse at the same time as our agriculture is collapsing we are similarly seeing the breakdown of the world's great fisheries not only because of overfishing but because the food cycle's breaking down emerging countries experiencing unparalleled growth want to feed their population as they see fit but farmland is scarce and the desire for it at any cost causes high speculation and land grabbing the capacity the capacity of the country itself to produce for its people is insufficient one way around this is to go to another country buy land and begin agricultural production there to directly feed its population and this is currently taking place on a relatively large scale in some sub-saharan african countries in the early 1960s the agricultural industry was revolutionized by science with the arrival of chemical fertilizers and new plants everything was geared for increased production this was the green revolution i think the future in the 21st century it's not about one green revolution it's not one technology it's not the gmos it's not an organic culture i think it's a vast number of green revolutions despite the fact that we have the green movement and the organic food movement our meat consumption has not fallen off so improving photosynthesis potentially is a way where we could meet the food needs of the people without giving up meat i think the industrial model is the one that's actually productive enough to feed nine billion people two groups are colliding on this planet that will need to accommodate nine billion people by the year 2050 the hungry and the overfed in addition demographic changes specific to modern life and developed countries questioned the viability of large-scale agriculture [Music] we are getting older we're having less and less children which means that we are eating less and less yet we are producing more and more for example when we talk about sustainable development i think we should be more concerned with the phenomenon of food waste who live on the edge of poverty or even extreme poverty and so just a slight increase in the cost of certain food staples could have terrible consequences the already deep gap between developed and third world countries is widening poor people spend between 50 to 80 percent of their income on food hunger riots can even be seen in european countries strongly shaken by the economic crisis are we heading for a struggle between economic ideology and the stark reality of the malnourished if you were to assume right now that seven billion people had enough although that's not true because of the maldistribution of the food itself but we produce enough to feed seven billion people today while the population is growing at an alarming rate resources are diminishing how can we find a balance between too much and not enough how can we reconcile science with the art of agriculture at a time when humanity is propelling itself towards a major food crisis scientists are coming up with diverse inventive solutions to answer the question how will we feed all these people [Music] we thought we could be masters of the soil and enjoy its seemingly unlimited fruits but it's now showing signs of depletion inconceivable even 10 years ago the waterloo biotron research center in ontario was set up specifically to help agriculture survive climate change you see under cis here is one of the six biomes that we have and we can adjust temperature photo period in other words length of a day the question of rain we can say that we have one millimeter of rain per hour or we can have a flood and have three centimeters in a few minutes we can even have it rain on one half of the bile and have dryness or drought on the other half to compare how the plants react and at the same time with the co2 we can have four times the normal levels how this specific variety of tomato will behave under today's climatic conditions we can even anticipate worse conditions in the year 2050. in this way we can help agricultural plant producers to foresee whether a variety of plant that we have today will be usable in a few years down the road and if we see that only two to three percent can survive we at least know that genetically this strain is capable of surviving during this period there are so many components in relation to climate change we're talking of course about temperature increased co2 drought what is the effect on the plant more co2 theoretically that would bring about more photosynthesis but if it's dry it will be stressed if we can't grow tomatoes now because it's very hot maybe we can grow lemons a mystery remains how will insects both helpful and harmful behave in a future paralyzed by global warming we will study the harmful insects and ask the same questions do they perform well on a plant that has been grown at a higher temperature under drier conditions and higher co2 levels here we're in the entomology section where we have a series of rooms where we can breed the insects under temperature controlled conditions we can alter the light the temperature the relative humidity etc and here what you see is a crop of harmful insects that migrate every year it's the common army worm a harmful insect that attacks corn and grains and some years they arrive in canada in low numbers they come each year but every five years we get a large number that then cause millions of dollars worth of damage with the shorter days and lower temperatures they change physiologically they don't enter into their reproduction phase they put on a lot of fat and they start migrating but with climate change what's going to happen [Music] each link in the food chain is connected to keep everything balanced if you disturb only one of these links the chain breaks [Music] whether the food chain is broken by humans or by nature our unlimited appetites continue to come up against the limited amount of what the earth can produce and we are asking it to produce much faster than it is capable of the green revolution helped liberate us from these limitations it enabled the emergence of gmos by reducing them to their acronym we sometimes forget that they are genetically modified organisms [Music] the gmo debate is an interesting debate for scientists the bottom line i think is that there is a polarization between the people who are for them and the people who are against them those who are for them say look we can resolve our production problems because straight from the labs or from our test fields we can have such incredible yield those who are against them say yes but be careful we could be playing with fire these technologies are making fundamental changes to life and we don't know yet what the impact might be on human allergies the changes in animals insects bacterial flora with its beginnings dating back to the early 1980s gmo technology is relatively new one thing that is unanimous in the debate is that they are disruptive both those who are for and those against them often rely on unsubstantiated facts about their risks and benefits moreover most grain crops that have been modified to make them more robust come from a handful of biotechnology giants the biotechnology industry needs to be democratized a little we can't deny it it's controlled by very few players we are dealing with an oligopoly that makes many farmers uncomfortable because if for example we buy a license from monsanto were then forced by a whole bunch of products and were stuck with one company for several years gmos bring their share of complexities their use is controversial the research done in the field is tainted by the conflicts of interest between researchers and the companies that sell them and the question of bioethics regularly resurfaces [Music] the possibility of a weed resistance or so herbicide resistance gene escaping from a gmo is is a possibility so for example a crop that we grow a lot of canola has wild relatives a wild mustard so it's conceivable that gene then gets transferred into what might be weedy species and that makes that particular mustard hard to control as a weed in canola it's a measurable risk but i don't think it fundamentally destroys biodiversity biotechnology researchers are forever searching for that perfect plant the one that will grow in the most severe conditions with half as much water under a blazing sun no insect or disease will hold up against it there's always a fascination of making a change and then actually seeing that change have a practical use at the end every plant breeder always selects first for yield if it doesn't yield well then we're not going to select it as a variety the conventional way to improve plants is to make crosses between two parents that have traits that you want combined into one plant so there are two general classifications of techniques for moving genes into plants to produce transgenic or gmo plants one relies on a natural genetic engineer which is a bacterium which when it infects roots of plants actually moves dna into a plant and creates at least a portion of the plant that's transgenic another way is simply to use a physical force we call it biolystics where you take the gene as an isolated dna you coat it onto gold particles and then you shoot those gold particles into plant tissues once this part has become transgenic we can then use it to regenerate an entire plant one that could withstand disease and insects for example genetic engineering is a complex science it can be looked at as a kind of infinite alphabet unlocking the code would allow us to create all the desired words all these letters represent an individual piece of the code of the plant and if we consider that in something like soybean or common bean there are hundreds of millions and even billions of these letters that make up the identity of those plants before we were able to get this genetic information we were really only able to look at the plants on the scale of the whole plant so rather than just taking a look at either 96 or a couple of hundred sequences we're actually able to just take a sample of a plant and sequence the whole organism that can then be compared to other plants with newer technology we can actually sequence hundreds of millions of base pairs simultaneously we're able to get a snapshot of a whole organism and that's where things are going next and that's where things are getting really exciting if the first wave of gmos was designed primarily to feed livestock and humans the second generation targets the health of the consumer itself the golden rice project was really focused on the developing world where finding a diversity of food is a challenge this is uh rice that has high levels of vitamin a so having adequate levels is there to prevent blindness and so on the rationale was to provide a basic staple of diets for parts of the world where rice is an important component of that diet that's a next generation crop which is focused more on the consumer gmos nonetheless continue to spark many other debates when i've talked to muslim students for example and asked are you opposed to producing genetically modified organisms and the response is no not but i said if the gene that we move into the plant is a pig gene or would you be opposed to gmo and they would say yes so this is a decision based not on safety it's just based on a preference that in that case might be might be uh faith based [Applause] why are people against gmos it's a pic it is a puzzle to somebody who's working in this area and sees primarily advantages i guess i always thought initially that if people understood then they would come to accept them at the moment the plants that we consume have a 15-year history of safety because rice is responsible for feeding more than half the planet it is the most pressing grain to modify through biotechnology we want to do it by converting rice which is a c3 plant into a c4 plant making a rice that would be twice as efficient the designation c3 comes from the fact that the plant needs three carbon molecules to transform its carbohydrate at the time of photosynthesis the c4 plant has four carbon molecules but it stores its carbohydrate overnight or until it's ready for photosynthesis in less harsh climate conditions in the industrialized world where we have a very efficient agricultural system the crops are approaching their peak productive capacity and the only way to increase their yields ultimately will be to increase their ability to convert sunlight into photosynthesis grains that can produce beyond our usual agricultural performance are part of the c4 photosynthetic system most of the plants that we directly eat in our in our diet are c3 most of the c4s that we grow actually go to feeding animals because humans tend not to prefer them the c4 system includes crops such as maize sugar cane the millets these are the most productive crops we have in the world the c4s have a somewhere between 50 to 300 percent higher water use efficiency than the c3s the c4s also because of their efficiency for a given unit of protein which comes from nitrogen they produce approximately 50 to 100 percent more biomass this is rice which is a c3 plant and this is sugar sugarcane which is a very productive c4 plant and the size difference you see here sort of illustrates well the difference in productivity at this stage of growth that you would have between rice and a c4 rice elephant grass as an example when it's growing say four sometimes five meters high will produce uh upwards of a hundred tons per hectare whereas the peak production in a c3 grass is only approaching 50 tons per hectare whether living or decomposing plants produce organic matter it's biomass a natural fertilizer that's very nutritious for soil we'd be able to fertilize our plants with less nitrogen or for a given amount of nitrogen you just get a lot more food out of the out of the crops so in a world that's limited by space by agricultural land it's a way of boosting our yields will biotechnology soon be able to transform c3 cultures into c4 cultures the true answer is we don't know for sure but our estimates are probably 15 to 30 years this is not going to be a simple step there's probably dozens to hundreds of genes involved in this transformation it's just moving so many genes at once is a relatively novel capability we hope to develop [Music] despite the great promise of c4 rice critics of genetic engineering will certainly make themselves genetic engineering and biotechnology is very controversial can we do without it to meet the food needs in the future yes if people give up meat staple foods such as rice wheat and corn provide rice dishes pasta and bread to all cultures of the world on the other hand the appetite for meat has been increasing both in developed and emerging countries and this causes additional problems because raising livestock puts even more stress on our already struggling fields making animals more productive has a big impact because if a cow goes from four pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef to three pounds all sudden you can produce more meat for the world with less inputs nearly half of the world's grain is used to feed animals and that has a huge impact on food resources one of the most contentious parts of biotechnology is animal biotechnology and we've seen some interesting forays into animal biotechnology with cloning and also with modifying genes inside things like pigs to actually reduce their impact on the environment there's one at the university of guelph called the enviro pig the public basically hates this idea they do not like us mucking around with the genes of animals emerging countries now have the means of producing all types of meats but farming cattle is a major source of pollution animals produce the majority of greenhouse gases both from their digestion digestive process but also from managing the manure and so if we can use biotechnology to dramatically reduce that then i think there might be a little more acceptance of that technology the chinese are a little different they recognize that they have a serious problem in terms of feeding their population they also recognize they have a very large population in not a very large space and so if they can reduce the environmental impact of something like hogs they're interested [Music] the establishment of a more environmentally sound aquaculture is being considered in several parts of the world for example we no longer feed fish with other fish but rather with plants or insects and recycle farming water to avoid polluting at aqua bounty research focuses on farm salmon that are genetically modified to grow twice as fast as their free-range counterparts they do not run the risk of contaminating the natural population and thus reduce overfishing these schools of fish however the effects on human beings remain unknown a more natural solution is to explore hitherto ignored and less appreciated species like the grey mullet sea bass and mackerel [Music] if meat or fish is scarce or even unobtainable for the poor an original source of protein is hidden in some surprising species insects are eaten in several parts of the world mostly in asia africa and south america in asia for example china is known for eating silkworms it is a rich food that can contain up to 60 crude protein there are approximately 1700 species of edible insects in the world the fao the food and agriculture organization believes that insects will be part of the solution to the rapidly emerging food crisis in africa people are more likely to eat caterpillars than a more standard protein like beef or some other kind of meat raising insects cost very little they emit very little methane gas and they are easy to transport to the market insects have always been considered as a possible protein source of the future eating crickets is thought to be more sustainable than eating beef we're talking about a farm that isn't very big and they can be raised in large quantities very quickly and transported well they can be easily obtained we don't need to go to another country to find crickets we can find them close to us from seeding to harvesting the earth toils to keep up with the demand in order to produce the food that we want more and more of soft technologies can perhaps succeed where biotechnology not always synonymous with healthy soil might fail biochar is a vegetable charcoal that's several thousand years old and has stunning effects on improving soil quality biochar is not a fertilizer as such we use the word more as a soil enrichment plants don't absorb biochar it's really rather inert in the earth biochar interacts a lot with microbes nutrients but it stays in place here at mcgill we're doing field and greenhouse research on the effects that biochar has on the production of a variety of cultures we think that by using biochar on the earth we can reduce the amount of fertilizers that we need to get a given yield biochar is relatively easy to make biochar is made from biomass or vegetable waste we take the waste and heat it up it's a little like cooking it we heat it up in a closed container there are also long-term advantages to using biochar like nutrient retention for example they can be retained in the root zones or any zone that has had biochar applied to it over time studies have shown that biochar has other benefits beyond just soil improvement biochar is very very porous it's where the microbes can live it's also where the biochar can absorb the different contaminants from the soil it's in our best interest to use biochar in contaminated soils even four years after a single application we can still see the benefits of that application there is no reason to think that the benefits will not remain perhaps even increase over a period of time because we know that biochar will be there for centuries or even millennia [Music] natural fertilizers 100 organic grains and the efforts of the men and women dedicated to nature are the cornerstone of the guelph center for urban organic farming we're in fact not using any inputs except human energy we're growing food here at the farm in guelph without using oil so we're calling it post oil and post water agriculture when the price of fuel rises food prices immediately rise biofuel made from corn helps rid us of our dependence on oil but perversely adds to our agricultural stress because the resource in addition to having to feed us must also fulfill our energy needs my aim is to grow the best quality food in a most efficient manner with virtually no input so we can actually talk about sustainable farming in the truest sense of the word sustainable which is a 360 it's it's the completion of a circle we are putting in we're taking out we're putting it back in so all of the food crops that come off all of the waste from those food crops will be returned in the form of nutrient growing organically respects the earth's natural cycle in some cases it's the only way to renew the soil organic farming has the potential to not only feed the world but restore areas of the world that are that have degraded their soils which in fact is a reality it's like areas of china that are producing foods right now are being maximized to the point where the land has become salty we can restore that land through organic farming practices as more and more seeds are genetically modified the biggest challenge facing organic farming is to find 100 organic seeds because organic starts with the seed we cannot have a certified organic farm with the use of gmo seed or any product coming into the farm that has been you know animals that have been raised with gmo farm feed lot that manure could not come onto a certified organic farm we have about 30 varieties of seed that we've saved so far over the last two years so it's certified organic we need more seed producers so i'm hoping that we can be one of those by increasing the organic farming models in our cities we could meet our needs for vital foods entirely independently i think a farm like this could be replicated and become sort of a prototype in many urban areas we really do want to promote the idea that we can eat food local food year round all the over packaging at the grocery store it's difficult to know where our food is coming from the road from the farm to our plate is full of twists and turns and it's easy to lose sight of the tomato or the beef that comes from the field or livestock the sanitized cities that we live in tend to obscure even more the concept of agriculture in the 21st century i feel that people don't understand farming and don't understand what farming can do for urban areas and if in the northern hemisphere we can eliminate the divide between the rural and urban areas i feel that people would worry less about the future of agriculture the size of a meal served in a restaurant today is four times bigger than one served in the 1950s the green revolution has succeeded in satisfying our endless appetites even though we rely more on imports to satisfy our needs growing locally eliminates our dependence on food imports a city like toronto there was a study done in 2006 that said if the city were cut off from imports from the united states within three days its grocery stores would have insufficient food to feed its population the idea of growing food within a city's borders protects cities from social unrest or cataclysmic weather events that can could disrupt food importation i think we all need to take more responsibility for feeding ourselves there's no reason why that we have to import such large quantities of food tearing up the land and raising prices pushing fields beyond their capacities these methods must give way to gentler farming [Music] the city has a new calling in montreal luffa organic farms has a vision of a city filled with rooftop farms that grow day and night their farm is a thirty one thousand square foot greenhouse on top of a montreal office building in hunsick there are two zones we divided the greenhouse into two parts here we have the hotter part where we grow the eggplants you see here the tomatoes and the peppers and we have a colder zone that we've dedicated to lettuce arugula or anything that likes cooler temperatures a lot of farmers devote themselves to monoculture the cultivation of a single species crop like the tomato for example while it is profitable this type of farming will deplete the soil over the years luffa farm stands out because of their polyculture they offer 40 varieties of vegetables to 2 000 montrealers a year here we have tomatoes cucumbers peppers eggplants lettuce arugula bok choy a little bit of everything practically a hundred herbs so everything is drip irrigated and then this water the excess irrigation water is recirculated into the ground and filtered and reused here in this greenhouse we use biological control and we don't use pesticides or herbicides to control the pest problems so when we find a certain kind of pest we can introduce a predator that will go eat it what is also interesting is that we use energy curtains at night that reduce the area of the greenhouse that needs to be heated so this system cuts the heating needs almost in half we have a computer system that manages the entire greenhouse it controls the humidity the ventilation the lighting the energy curtain screens the heating and everything and it's a system that we can control from well from our iphone or a laptop from anywhere in the world so it's a rather technologically advanced greenhouse without pollination we wouldn't be able to eat fruits or vegetables at luffa farms they practice assisted pollination with drones these gather pollen and nectar from twice as many flowers a minute as their unassisted counterparts so here we use natural pollination with drones we have a drone hive that is capable of pollinating this whole area growing a tomato on a city rooftop requires less energy than a tomato grown in the soil outside the city our customers are in a five to ten kilometer radius around our greenhouse and with our basket system we deliver in bulk so we deliver 10 baskets at a time so a small truck can feed 2 000 people and it's the only transport we need to bring fresh vegetables directly from the agricultural producer to the consumer people who subscribe to luffa farms pick up a weekly basket at a distribution point close to their homes to replenish the baskets and offer the greatest variety possible to its consumers luffa farms depends on organic farmers outside montreal there's almost no transportation involved to bring those vegetables to the consumers we think we have a much smaller ecological footprint than a producer in mexico who needs to ship his vegetables from mexico to here the most important thing is the fact that the quality of imported produce is never the same as food that is produced locally and is eaten fresh mexican tomatoes are often harvested while green and turn red while in transport so we harvest in the morning distribute in the afternoon like this we can deliver vegetables that are incredibly fresh and of superior nutritional value and taste very different we think that farming should be a part of cities we could become self-sufficient in montreal we couldn't grow wheat or corn but for fresh vegetables we think that there are enough roof surfaces in montreal to feed all montrealers and it's the same for many other cities as well like ottawa quebec toronto and other north american cities our vision is a vision of a city full of rooftop farms the course that i taught in that had as its theme gloom and doom was called medical ecology it says if you damage the environment there's a health risk associated with that they got tired of hearing it they didn't want to hear that anymore although they knew it was true they would rather work on something uplifting and that's where the idea about raising food on the rooftops of new york came from they said stop we've heard enough we can't eat we can't sleep we can't drink we don't even want to stay in college anymore what's the use the whole world is falling apart i said no it's not falling apart it's not falling apart you can help put it back together how often does an idea in a classroom ever escape into the real world people think it's a good idea and they start doing it how often does that happen this is how dickson de pommier became the world leader in vertical farming even if you think vertical farming is something of a technological breakthrough which has limited application think of the next two billion people and where their food will come from and you'll see why this idea has credibility with regards to using technology to remove food from the land to put it into the cities where people are living when you put all that together you have the option for an ecologically balanced city but it requires also the ability to convert waste to energy when we eat food we produce urine and feces what do we do with both of those products we throw them away there are a few places in the world that are forward-looking and that see human waste as a usable product and what's done there is that the the liquid waste is converted into two parts the liquid part and then there are dissolved solids the solids are separated and treated separately in some cases they dry them down heat them up to kill all the microbes and then they make pellets out of them and they can sell that as fertilizer for traditional farming but if we were to capture the energy just in the feces that we produce we could produce enough energy right now to actually supply the grow lights with enough energy to grow our food where does the water come from where does it go where does the food come from where does it go where does the waste go and once you've eliminated the word waste now you're thinking like an ecologist and i think the next mayor of every city has to be an ecologist it's not necessarily a utopian city that will foster vertical farms vertical farms can exist anywhere in any kind of building and the reason for that is that the plants only need two small wavelengths of light in order to grow the sun produces a complete spectrum of light but plants only use two narrow sections of that spectrum if you cut those spectra out and create led lights to grow the plants you can grow them anywhere you can grow them underground in fact [Music] at plant lab in holland the farm is built vertically this ensures that horizontal fields are unburdened from farming organic products are available year long without concerns for sunlight or extreme climatic events even the seeds 100 percent organic are recycled and grown on site so why would anyone want a vertical farm in their neighborhood and the best answer i can give you is two one is it supplies employment opportunities for people who need to work the second reason i would want it in my neighborhood is because i'm right next to where the fresh produce comes from the bottom of every vertical farm will be a green grocer you can go any time of the day or night and buy food that's less than one hour old on my desk for about 30 years i preserved a little saying that i got from a fortune cookie and the saying read nothing is impossible to a willing heart so i think with urban farming it sounds right everybody oh that sounds of course that's what we should be doing how how should we do it do it any way you can to begin with and it will evolve from there but i'm so happy that the world has been attracted to the idea and many different places are now trying this and i think it will succeed in some places and it won't succeed in others whoever succeeds will share those ideas with others and i think the world will be a better place because we'll have vertical farms that's what i [Music] think faced with the dwindling of our natural resources can our behaviors improve our conditions degrowth could be an important means in reaching that goal the concept of consuming less and sharing our resources more is the antithesis of waste it's not a step backwards nor would we be abandoning progress but rather we'd be moving forward positively in a new direction at whitby island south on the west coast of the united states the concept of degrowth is a way of life that has been adopted by the entire community researcher stephen schwartz has made the island his own living breathing laboratory part of it is that it's an island and so everybody's on the island and and it's a sort of isolated area so it's like a petri dish in a laboratory in a way on this island an experience has taken root in a spirit reminiscent of traditional rural values it shatters the notion of individualism prevalent in our society one of the interesting things about the wind program is the attitude of the providers concerning the recipients most food programs that are government administered treat people as if they were problems failures here on the island the food programs are successful because they treat people not as failures but just as neighbors who are going through a hard time the wind program which stands for whitby island nourishes was started with very little means and a lot of generosity several women here on the island saw that children were not eating properly children whose families were in food distress they started a program where they send the children home on the weekends with two grocery bags really enough to feed several people for the teenagers uh wynn established a series of free vending machines and these are spaced around the island and are policed by the teenagers themselves they see that abuse doesn't occur it's a fridge where like if people who don't have enough money for lunches for kids and likes they can go back there and get a lunch for free and it's open like 24 hours a day the win program is just one of the whole series we have a non-profit grocery store we have the good cheer food bank which has a series of community gardens where healthy vegetables are grown without use of pesticides or insecticides the good cheer bank is based on a point system where it's to your advantage to get organic fruits and vegetables instead of junk food for example junk food is in the red zone where only one item can be put in your basket whereas organic produce is free and only costs one point on whitby island there's also a communal coffee shop that teaches teens the basics of sharing it's a non-profit organization meant to bring the community together and people of all ages can volunteer and it's also another way for teenagers to get work experience it's more like community-based like everyone knows everyone so it's like close-knit community there is in fact an entire network of these food programs all of them interlocked uh started and run by citizens who mostly know each other when their lot improves many of the recipients become workers and volunteers in the programs i think the idea of a treating people with dignity and b as citizen-created programs in which both recipients and providers know each other and are friendly could be adopted elsewhere to an enormous success i think this is the future many of us imagine the apocalypse as being sudden the reality however suggests a slow building crisis that will arise from a series of shortages energy will be rationed each drop of water counted basic commodities will become increasingly rare and these scenarios are the plausible ones will tomorrow's farms the meat of the future sustainable aquaculture and gmos be enough to make the 21st century the one that will see the end of world hunger will a return to traditional values organic farming and urban farms be enough to stave off the inevitable global food crisis we are at a crossroads for the sake of generations to come it's up to us to put in place new agricultural systems that will provide for them and protect mother nature from a dire [Music] fate

Channel: Spark

Views: 246,029

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, 2017, 2016, 2015, full, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary

Id: BT4RgpcyfLg

Length: 50min 51sec (3051 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/metalreflectslime]

We may run out of food in 2030.

A BOE might happen in 2025.

Crops will fail and famines will ensue.

[u/k3surfacer]

In few days, I guess.

[u/suprmiikka]

So we have to do GMO foods just so we could keep eating meat? We even scale it to bugs just so we can hang on to that weird omnivore-status which we so highly value. I don't think there's a change if we don't change our perspective to meat consumption. And even then we might be already too late.

[u/ThanksKami]

This video made me feel a bit peckish. I wonder what's in the pantry?

[u/pjay900]

SS:The world's population has surpassed 7 billion today and will reach 9 billion individuals by 2050. But can the planet supply food for an unlimited number of people?