Yesterday I attended a talk at Hay Festival entitled ‘Feeding the Nine Billion’, which very quickly qualified that the large population growth predicted for the next thirty years will almost exclusively be found in developing countries.
This news is no surprise, it’s long been acknowledged that parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America are growing at a rapid rate and this is where our ‘global community’ will be developing the most. The chair, Jonathon Harrington, an agronomy advisor and fierce proponent of GM crops, began by saying this was the most important question of the day and wanted to see how we could solve it in an hour.
For a discussion of developing world issues, it was acutely amusing that this talk featured the whitest audience I’ve seen at a food talk for a long time, and that’s really saying something, for a genre of events which is famed for…