Blog 8 Amelia Xi

The lecture that I found most informative and inspiring was titled “Globalization and Agriculture,” given by guest speaker Peter Motavalli, who is a professor at the University of Missouri under the Department of Soil. Professor Motavalli talked about food scarcity and insecurity around the world, as well as what efforts can be made to fight these challenges. He’s presentation was very strong and insightful because it was based on plenty of thorough researches. The data he showed us in the lecture was shocking, and really drove me to think deeper about and study more on the issue of hunger. For example, he mentioned at the beginning of his lecture that research shows a total of 842 million people in 2011-13 were estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger. That’s around one eighth of the population in the world. This number far exceeded what I expected, and I deeply realized how severe the food issue is. It is not an easy task to overcome the challenge of feeding the world. According to Professor Motavalli, the world food production will need to double in 30 years to meet world food demand, which seems like an impossible mission. There are so many countries in the world that suffer from food insecurity and even food desert. Professor Motavalli listed a few countries and showed pictures of the people in these countries with food poverty. While millions of people in these countries do not have access to healthy food and suffer from malnutrition and other health problems, people in other countries, especially developed countries, are wasting an enormous amount of food that they have easy access to. From Professor Motavalli’s presentation, I learned that American families throw out approximately ¼ to 1/3 of their food and beverages they buy, and the average family of four wastes about 1,160 lbs (290 lbs per person) annually costing between $1,365 to $2,275. These numbers startled me at first, but immediately I thought back to my daily life in the U.S., and the fact that I see people around me, including myself, waste food everyday, made me feel very guilty. People like us can have access to healthy food so easily that we don’t cherish it anymore, and that makes us responsible for the hunger issue around the world. Although it might seem nearly impossible to double world food production in 30 years, if we could make efforts to reduce food waste, I believe that will also be very effective for helping the world reduce hunger. Thanks to Professor Motavalli’s informative and inspiring lecture, I started to try my best to waste less when eating and have been encouraging my roommate to do it with me.

The topic of Professor Motavalli’s lecture, food poverty, is also a big issue in the country I have been studying for this semester—Madagascar. In fact, Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. Poverty of this country has caused plenty of other problems, such as malnutrition of children due to food scarcity, low birth rate and diseases due to insufficient health care, environmental degradation that the country has too few money to manage, and so on. At the beginning of the semester I have read a few articles written by local Malagasy writers. Many of them expressed the concern of being involved in globalization because they wanted to preserve their unique native culture. However, I believe that Madagascar has a strong potential if its people are more willing to join the globalization movement with the rest of the world. Their exotic culture and rich natural resources are something they can take advantage of and gain commercial benefits from.