COP18 (30/11/12) – Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change at Leeds University talks about the issue of food security and how this will be affected by climate change.
He says that food security is a complicated issue and not entirely about people not having enough food sources. He uses the example of China, and says that while they grow a lot of food crops much of this goes into feeding pigs. He stresses food security is about the way people are eating and how that could change and how the food is distributed around the world.
He warns that countries such as China and India are both on high development curves and are beginning to eat different food products, increasing their intake of high protein sources, which could threaten food security further.
He says that he hopes to make policy maker focus not on dates far into the future but on the immediate future and the 2020s. He says they ought to be going home from Doha and putting concrete and immediate decisions on the table.