Weekly Program - Feeding Nine Billion by Evan Fraser
By 2050 there will be 9 billion people on the planet - but will there be enough food for everyone? Food security expert Dr Evan Fraser guides you through a whiteboard presentation of his solution to the Global Food Crisis. Food security expert Dr Evan Fraser guides you through a whiteboard presentation of his solution to the Global Food Crisis. Evan Fraser is an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and a Senior Lecturer at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in the UK. His research is on farming, climate change and the environment. He lives in the Yorkshire Dales with his wife and three children.
Professor Fraser organizes his work into four distinct strands with the following questions. First, What can we learn from past food security crises in order to understand where we might be vulnerable today? "I have used historic cases to combine work from a number of disciplines (including comparative history, development studies, landscape ecology, ecological economics, and political science) to identify food systems “vulnerable” to environmental change and published comparative work where relatively minor weather anomalies sparked major food-crises as a way of understanding how our own society may respond to similar shocks. In particular, I have explored the Irish Potato Famine, the “Great Famines” of the early 1300s, and the Ethiopian famine of the early 1980s." Second, What are the socio-economic forces that shape our food-producing landscapes today? "In my opinion, we have adequate scientific knowledge to sustainably produce food in many parts of the world. However, farmers are not always able to use this knowledge. Therefore, I am interested in understanding the socio-economic factors that shape farmer decisions. This had led me to conduct empirical work (usually involving interviews, questionnaires or focus groups discussions) in a range of settings including: urban Thailand, rural Belize, and rural British Columbia. I have also supervised graduate students or post-doctoral researchers to do similar work in: the uplands of the UK, rural and urban Malawi, rural Ghana, and peri-urban Bangladesh." Third, What are the implications of different types of landscapes for both food security and other ecosystem services? "Different landscapes provide different things: some provide low-cost food; some provide habitat conservation; others provide carbons sequestration; still others are resilient to climate change. I am interested in conducting research that explores the synergies and tradeoffs implied by different types of landscape. This work has been based on extensive collaboration with natural and social science colleagues and involved working on a range of topics in different ecological settings including: the contribution of the uplands of the UK to a range of ecosystem services, on land management in general and on the relation between crops and climate. My current work in this area is to explore trade offs between food, fibre and fuel production in different parts of the world." Fourth, What regions of the world are likely to be vulnerable in terms of food in security in the 21st century?
"Different landscapes provide different things: some provide low-cost food; some provide habitat conservation; others provide carbons sequestration; still others are resilient to climate change. I am interested in conducting research that explores the synergies and tradeoffs implied by different types of landscape. This work has been based on extensive collaboration with natural and social science colleagues and involved working on a range of topics in different ecological settings including: the contribution of the uplands of the UK to a range of ecosystem services, on land management in general and on the relation between crops and climate. My current work in this area is to explore trade offs between food, fibre and fuel production in different parts of the world."