1.11.2 Relation in the developing countries (2024)
- Tessa Jacobs
- Kor Oldenbroek
In poorer areas of the world, the main worry is about having enough money to buy food of sufficient quality, and people are less concerned on how it was produced. In the figure below you see 9 countries where people spend more than 40% of their income on food:
The world population is growing rapidly. In 2022 we reached already the number of 8 billion people. The growth is especially in urban areas (see figure at the right). All these people need food. At the moment, we are using twice the resources that should be used to ensure that our planet will survive. At the same time, about 20% of the food is wasted in developed countries, while there is still considerable food shortage in developing countries. Challenge for the future is to reduce wastage in the developed world, increase food availability in the developing world, and do that with a decreased carbon footprint. An additional challenge lays in the fact that fossil fuel is replaced in some countries by biofuel. Many crops like wheat or sugar cane can be used for biofuel production, but this goes at the expense of food production.