This is a busy month on the feeding-the-world front. October 16 is World Food Day, which means that food and anti-hunger organizations are holding meetings, making statements, handing out prizes, launching campaigns and publishing reports. Then, on October 31, the human population is expected to pass the 7 billion mark. And so media outlets from The Nation to the Financial Times are turning their attention, at least briefly, to the question of how (or whether) everyone on the planet may be adequately fed, not just this year, but into the increasingly hot, stormy, crowded future.
We at Homelands have been poking around these issues for some time now. Our next project, “Food for 9 Billion” (sorry, no website yet!), is scheduled to launch in November and continue for a year. We’re teaming up with the Center for Investigative Reporting, Marketplace and PBS NewsHour to produce a radio series, TV series, web features and (if funding permits) hour-long TV and radio documentaries. The hope is to make some sense of the economic, environmental, technical, social and political dimensions of one of humanity’s most fundamental challenges. We go in with few preconceptions—we’re as curious as we hope you are about what works and what doesn’t.
If you’d like to get an email when the project goes public, please join our mailing list on the lower left-hand corner of our website.