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  3. There’s a common warning about our planet’s future; the risk of food shortages. "We’ve got a growing world and a hungry world. W

There’s a common warning about our planet’s future; the risk of food shortages. "We’ve got a growing world and a hungry world. W

admin2021-09-25  0
问题     There’s a common warning about our planet’s future; the risk of food shortages. "We’ve got a growing world and a hungry world. We need to make sure we do our part in helping feed that hungry world, " said Kip Tom, a farmer from Indiana who’s currently the U. S. ambassador to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, as he closed a panel discussion in 2018.
    "That is totally the mantra," says Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University. "I’ll bet I’ve been to 50 meetings in the past 5 to 10 years where the beginning is, ’ We have to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This is a crisis situation.’ The word ’crisis’ gets used too regularly. "
    But, in fact, the long-term trend, for more than a century, has been toward ever more abundant food, and declining prices. To be sure, every once in a while, it really does seem like a crisis. It certainly did in 2008. Tom Hertel, a economist at Purdue University, remembers it well. " This was right in the thick of the biofuel-driven madness," Hertel says, when the US government policies drove a surge in demand for corn to make ethanol. Rice and wheat prices were spiking for other reasons. "People were really panicking," he says. Some economists thought that consumers would always experience chronic food shortages and high prices. Hertel didn’t believe it, though. He and his colleagues have a computer model of long-term trends that drive supply and demand for global food, and their model predicted plenty of food, with lower prices. And he turned out to be right. Prices soon came back down.
    And in fact, the long-term trend, for more than a century, has been toward ever more abundant food, and declining prices. From 1900 to 2000, the number of people in the world quadrupled, yet food prices at the end of the century were only one-third of their starting level. It’s true, of course, that millions of people in the world are hungry or malnourished. But the main reason is that people lack the money to buy food, or because of war and political oppression. Reducing hunger requires addressing poverty and conflict, not just growing more food.
    Farmers and their lobbyists use the idea that the world needs more food to argue that governments shouldn’t impose environmental regulations that might force farmers to pay for all the water pollution they cause, and the wetlands that they destroy. They say, "Oh, we can’t possibly impose those costs. Farmers will go out of business and we’ll starve". Even scientists may sometimes have reason to overstate the risks of future food shortages. If you were in the market to raise money for agricultural research, it was a beneficial message.
    Farming consumes vast amounts of the planet’s land and water. But as farming becomes more productive, perhaps some of that land could be spared. Farmers could turn some cropland back into grasslands, or forest, or wetlands. If farmers were paid to do this, this could be a very profitable activity, and it could become an important part of their revenue stream. This is already happening in Europe. This measure also could reduce greenhouse emissions and help farmers cope with the warming climate, years from now.
What does the author suggest the government to do?
选项 A、It should focus on developing greener biofuel.
B、It should invest more fund in upgrading agricultural infrastructure.
C、It should pay the farmers to transform croplands for ecological purposes.
D、It should cut greenhouse emissions by developing tertiary industry.
答案C
解析 细节题。根据关键词government定位到第六段。作者建议由于不需要扩大粮食生产，政府可以给农民钱，让农民把一些农田变成草地、森林或湿地，以保护环境和防止全球变暖。[C]是对原文的同义转述，故为答案。[A][B][D]与原文无关，均属于干扰项。
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