Food: A Major World Problem

 It’s noble. It’s not unique. It’s ominous…obvious and it’s necessary. Providing food for a hungry world is on the minds of anyone in the know in agriculture. All the big ag companies…Syngenta…Bayer…Monsanto remind the world in their marketing messages about the awesome responsibility associated with feeding billions of people. Idaho’s JR Simplot Company has a new President of Agribusiness named Garrett Lofto. Listen to his message. “There’s no more important industry in the world than feeding people and that’s what we do and we should be proud of that.”

 But if predictions by the United Nations and others are correct, simply supplying enough food for the world could become the major global issue, even topping such things as warming.

 Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture for Foreign Services Bud Philbrook:  “I would predict over the next couple of decades that food is going to become the issue overriding almost all others.”

 Deputy Undersecretary for Domestic Programs Michael Scuse says there was a glimpse of that recently when world harvests were mediocre and grain prices reached record levels: “And we had countries out there hoarding food because they were afraid that they would run out and other countries who didn’t have the food stocks or reserves, their citizens rioted in the streets because of lack of food.”