World Food Day

Yesterday was the World Food Day. This morning I would like to take this opportunity to share the message of food problem with you.

Food is one of the basic necessities of life. However, there are many people in the world suffering from food shortage. Do you know how many people are suffering from hunger?

According to the Hunger Report from the United Nation, as many as 821 million people in the world go to bed hungry each night. (You may refer to the figure that is showing on the screen to know more about the problem.) About 1 in 9 people suffers from hunger and every 1 in 6 children is underweight. Most of them are in the less developed countries.

And do you know who always suffer from hunger? You may not believe, they are actually the small farmers, herders, and fishermen who produce about 70 percent of the world food supply, but these rural populations are especially suffer from poverty and hunger.

This problem gets worse in 2022. This year we are having an ongoing pandemic, the war between Ukraine and Russia, rising food price and also global warming problem. All these affect the world food supply. We need to build a sustainable world where everyone, everywhere has regular access to enough food. Therefore, the theme of World Food Day this year is LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND.

Then how to make it? How do different countries increase food production? How can we provide better nutrition so as to make people have a better life? Let’s see how China, our mother country tackles these problems.

As a country with the highest population, China has the most mouths to feed. In 2020, its population reached 1.41 billion. Even though population growth has dropped to the slowest ever, President Xi Jingping recognizes the need to address the country’s food security. As a responsible government, maintaining stable food supply and the country’s food security is important to national security.

In order to increase food supply in China, there is an innovation of Seawater rice. It is a crossbreed of high-yield rice and a form of wild rice that is resistant to salt. Not only can it be grown on salty lands, but also it gains a higher yield than standard rice varieties. Seawater rice production was pioneered by a very famous agricultural scientist, Mr. Yuan Longping, who was known as ‘the father of hybrid rice’. He has spent his whole life in the battle against food poverty. His innovations helped to end malnutrition in China and are also used in the world which saved million people from hunger.

With the development of science and technologies such as AI and 5G technologies, automation and other modern farming methods have been widely used in different farming processes in China such as irrigation, pest and disease control and harvesting. Smart green farms can be easily found everywhere in China. Space breeding experiments have also been carried out in Shenzhou 12 spaceship and the seeds brought back to the earth are growing in the experimental farms. This helps to lower production cost and increase farm productivity. Also, high quality food products are grown.

In order to help you know more about how China maintains her food security, the Geography Club will arrange a thematic reading session on this topic during the class teacher period on this Thursday. Students hope you will learn more from that.

Ms Koo WC
17 Oct 2022