No longer able to rely on the countryside for food, people all over the world are moving to cities, says Despommier.
Question: What is the Third Green Revolution?
Dickson Despommier:When horizontal soil-based farming fails on a mega-scale, it hasn'tdone that yet. It's failing in pieces around the world, but it hasn'tyet failed to the point of creating such food shortages that entirepopulations of countries go starving. Now I think anybody who's paidattention to Africa will disagree with that statement, so I willqualify that by saying there are some areas of the world where farmingcould have never occurred, and then we've forced that square peg intothat round hole so rigorously that those countries will be the first tosuffer. And I'm talking about Niger and all of these central Africancountries and some Saharan. But for the most part for the rest of theworld we're still doing okay. It looks like we're doing okay, and itdoesn't matter if crops fail here, we'll get another crop from overhere. Chile and South America in general throughout Southeast Asia I'vedone a lot of traveling there just on vacations, and the abundance offood and the varieties of food are incredible. You go down to Thailandor Cambodia or Laos or Vietnam you're just amazed at the variety ofstuff that people have available to them. By the way that can'tcontinue. There's another trend to pay attention to, and that isurbanization. If you now look at the trend of where people choose tolive rather than where they have to live, they choose to live in thecities. And by the year 2030, so I'm told, that's not my figures butthe World Population Council and WHO and other places like that makethese predictions based on current trends, and about 80 percent of uswill live in a city by the time the year 2030 comes around and that'snot that far in the future. Okay, so the third green revolution in myview needs to occur by learning how to grow our food in those urbansettings.
Recorded on: 6/10/09
