End of Sumer Corn, Fairfax City Farmers Market 2010
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While the course on World Food Supply: A Famine in Our Future will not be offered at OLLI, I have continued to collect materials and read about the subject. The other day the Guardian from the UK had a disturbing article Food Prices May Rise Up to 20%, Warns UN. A combination of factors, most of them related to climate, have resulted in poor grain harvests in various places. We have already noted here the effects of drought on Russian grain production, long-term drought in Africa and the devastation of agricultural land in Pakistan as a consequence of flooding. Crops in parts of North America were good, but increased demand for maize (corn) and other food crops for bio-fuels adds a great deal of uncertainty to price predictions. Added together, those factors lead to a decline in the world's supply of basic food and feed grains and promise to drive prices up. The increase in food prices in Africa and some of the poorer parts of Asia are all but certain to lead to increased hunger, though for the moment starvation and famine would appear to be over the horizon. It is quite worrisome, and it will be more so should the 2011 growing season in the Southern Hemisphere, including the grain producing areas of South America and Australia, produce poor yields.On a loosley related issue, I am a great fan of bargain bins and used book sales. The other day I was at a local branch of one of the huge bookstore chains and happened on remaindered copy of a volume which I find fascinating, an encyclopedia of the world's food plants Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants (Washington, DC: National Geographic. ISBN 978-1-4262-0372-5 for the North American edition of a book that was originally published in Australia). With the National Geographic's (should really be called the National Photographic!) signature color photography, the book is an excellent guide to the what, where, and why of world food plants and great fun to thumb through or to use as a reference to look up some unusual food plant or another.
