By Meredith Woodward King
In a news photo from China, an elderly couple sits on stools beside a farm field. Nearby, six empty seats represent their adult children, who have left the land to seek prosperity in the city.
It’s a scenario that Geography Professor Gustavo Oliveira of Clark’s School of Climate, Environment, and Society understands all too well. An expert in global agro-industrial trade and food-supply systems, he has experienced the issues facing small-scale farmers firsthand. Oliveira and his wife, a professor at Amherst College, have traveled back to her native China to help her elderly parents transplant rice. No one else is available to work the farm.
For decades, food insecurity commonly — and mistakenly — has become linked to population growth, he says.
“People still rely on 20th-century thinking about overpopulation and the need to increase food production,” explains Oliveira (above, in a cotton field in Brazil’s Cerrado).
“But that way of thinking doesn’t accurately reflect our current reality, which is about urbanization, industrialization, and market forces.”
Source : clarku.edu