Feeding Rotterdam City in 2050

Feeding Rotterdam city in 2050

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Names:

Neira Bruno                        0817820

Mohames Elshenawy

Miyannou Winklaar

Content

Introduction

In the current century we are living in today, the world’s population is expecting a growth to be around 9 billion. Global demand on food will nearly double. We can interpret from this that agriculture will be essential in the upcoming years. The world’s population today is nearly above 7 billion, and surely, we are expecting a huge growth, so one of the huge questions to be addressed is: How are we going to feed the population in 2050? So in order to fully understand the problem, we need to investigate various aspects to find the best solutions. First of all, we need to understand the pricing strategy of food; millions of people around the world suffer from food prices, and millions are dying of hunger. With so many people under the poverty line and the percentage is expected to grow by 2050, will the people be able to afford food prices in 2050?  Secondly, the growth of industrial and agricultural industries requires more land, water and scarce resources, the capacity of these resources are limited, so how will the world be able to overcome this problem by 2050. This perspective for 2050 raises an important questions; the natural resource base to 2050, will there be enough land, water and genetic diversity to meet demands?

In this case, on a smaller scale, we want to figure out how we are going to feed the city of Rotterdam in 2050. Since the Netherlands is one of the most important countries in Europe known for its agriculture, it gives the country a comparative advantage amongst other in the future for food supply and demand.

The city of Rotterdam

Some demographics

Rotterdam is the second largest city in the Netherlands. With a population that has been gradually growing over recent years. On January the first of 2012, the number of habitants stood at 616 thousand people. According to the population forecast of CBS it is expected that the total number of Rotterdam inhabitants will keep growing in the coming years. In the year 2030 it is expected that Rotterdam has approximately 660 thousand inhabitants, which will mean an increase of 43 thousand people. The average annual growth in the forecast period is 2,400 people.

Food problems

Problems regarding food consumption are related to trust and health. Consumers nowadays distrust the safety and quality of food, because of the many outbreaks of various animal and vegetable diseases and the big gap between farmers and end-consumers. Many people do not know where their food comes from. This has to do with a transparency issue. The end consumers never get the chance to visit the farms where the food they eat daily was grown; this has to do mostly with the fact that we import most of the food we consume. This makes it very difficult sometimes for even people in the food industry to trace back the origin of the products or the ingredients it contains. If these people do not know themselves and cannot assure us where the products we eat come from and what they contain, how are we supposed to be sure of the origin of the products and trust the labels and the information provided by the food industry?