My name is Bob Lawrence and I'll be providing this introductory lecture and setting the stage for following modules. First, I want to say that the Center for Livable Future is based at the School of Public Health but it is a university center and we work with many people from different disciplines trying to pull together all the different important strands that bear on food security, food production, and public health. The vicious spiral was a term introduced by the late James Grant. James was the director of UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund until his premature death in 1993. Here was great advocate for children and for equity and very concerned about the fact that severe poverty was limiting opportunities for children worldwide. He invoked the notion that poverty, population growth, and environmental degradation created a vicious spiral that had to be interrupted before we could really make progress with child development and indeed with overall economic development for the entire population. Sustainable development is the progress for all without exceeding planetary resources and the carrying capacity of the planet. When the Center for a Livable Future was established in 1996, we wanted to focus on the fact that we have had in public health, strong contributions to diet for virtually the entire last century. One of the very first faculty members in the School of Public Health was EV. Mccollum who had discovered both vitamins A and D, and from 1916 on was the first real nutritionist in the faculty of the school. Similarly, we've had a very strong Department of Environmental Health Sciences for many decades. Neglected however with the transformation of American agriculture, was the overall impact of the food production system on both the quality of the diet available to the American people and the impact of that food production on the environment. So as this concept model shows, food production influences diet in terms of the quality of the inputs. Similarly, the production of the food system with the generation of large amounts of waste, excess nutrients, air, water, and soil pollution profoundly influences the ecosystem. These changes in our ecosystem and in the diet have profound influences on the health of the public. We also have ongoing pressures of population growth, climate disruption, lack of equity in the distribution of food and resource depletion of non-renewables. From a global perspective, the problem of feeding the world is largely a problem of poverty. This slide shows that extreme poverty is at the heart of the sustainable development agenda. Data from the World Bank shows that between 1990 and 2013, the number of people living below $1.90 a day fell by over 1 billion. Highlighted in the upper part of the slide, is the fact that these 1.9 billion people or about a third of the total world population were living on less than $1.90 a day. By 2013, this group had diminished in size to 769 million or 10.7% of people. This dramatic decline in the number of the very poor is a combination of an increase in the size of the denominator, that is the total world population continues to grow but significantly, a very marked decrease in the size of the numerator, those who are actually living in extreme poverty. The lower part of the slide shows that about four billion people, over half of the world's population are living between the $1.90 and $10 a day. For all of us who are highly educated and many of us living in high-income countries, this of course would be an unbelievably difficult budget to live on. But for much of the world, these people actually have made significant improvement in the standard of living and then their ability to procure food. The next slide shows that most of the countries of China, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh house significant share of the total number of people still living in extreme poverty. In 2011, India was home to more than 260 million people, the largest concentration of people living in extreme poverty anywhere in the world. However, Africa with a total of 390 million people living in extreme poverty has an aggregate a larger number, and you can see that these red dots are proportional to the numbers living in extreme poverty. I want to draw your attention to North America and the dot in the heart of the United States, because we as a wealthy country, the wealthiest country in the world still have people living in extreme poverty. Population growth continues to be a major challenge for our food security and for the ability to bring people out of poverty and to interrupt that vicious cycle. Most of the growth now is in less developed countries meaning low income and lower middle income countries. In the high income countries in fact, there are several places in the world now where replacement rate fertility rates of 2.1 are not being met that in fact there is a population decrease because total fertility has fallen to as low as 1.3 or 1.4. Projected growth shown in this chart has concentrations of high fertility and high population growth rates across the heart of Africa down into Southern Africa. There is a very impressive decrease or stabilization of population growth in China and actual diminished population growth in the Russian Federation. Other pockets of very low population growth can be seen in southern Europe, the Iberian Peninsula and Packets in Latin America.
