Izzy Braithwaite, a student at Clare College, Cambridge, writes:
I have always liked food. At my 2nd birthday party, I sang
'Happy Cake' instead of 'Happy Birthday.' And I'd agree with
George Bernard Shaw that "there is no sincerer love than the
love of food." But - whilst I still love food - I'm now most
interested in other questions about it. How can we provide food
for 7+ billion people, in a warming world, in a way that doesn't
destroy what remains of wild nature or further mess up our
atmosphere? It's never possible to attribute a single event to
climate change, but there's been a long-term trend of increasing
frequency and severity of droughts recently. Last year, East
Africa suffered the worst drought in 60 years, putting millions
of lives at risk, and tens of thousands are believed to have
died before aid arrived. As Amartya Sen pointed out in 1981,
political and economic factors are often at least as important
in famines as the food shortage itself: in Somalia it was
greatly compounded by the activit