The world cannot feed itself. Discuss

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Amye Harrison                5/2/07

The world cannot feed itself. Discuss

Across the world at the moment there are ten’s of millions of people starving, either the world is not producing enough food to feed its population, or the distribution of food is so uneven, that the world produces enough food, but the starving never receive the extra food.

For example in Ghana, West Africa, most people own farms (around 70%) and lack of food is not a problem, what is a problem is that their main crop is cocoa beans, this cannot be eaten until it has been processed, and in Ghana they do not do the processing, they sell the crops abroad, for a small amount of money, and the buyer’s process the crops and sell of chocolate bars for a much higher price than they paid.  The land in Ghana is extremely suitable for Cocoa beans growth, and many other crops, but cocoa beans bring in more money than other crops, so basically the crops they grow get sold abroad and the people in Ghana end up with little money and no food.  In order to help solve this problem the people of Ghana grow more than one type of crop, so that when they sell on the cocoa beans they still have some subsistence crops to feed themselves with (agricultural diversification), but this means they have to use up farmland which could otherwise be used for cocoa beans.Ghana has a huge debt which needs to repaid to the developed countries, around $6 billion, and tied up in their cocoa crops is around $2 million a year.

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In Northern Ghana they have a different problem, here the climate is hot, dry and tropical, with extended dry seasons.  In this area the best crop to grow is tomatoes, the distance to the main town in the area is very large and therefore they cannot transport their own crops.  In this town they can not use agricultual diversification, so their only choise is to do a different type of diversification, they get extra jobs to pay off their debts.

In England, and other European countries, there was a problem off too much food being produced.  This was ...

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