Ayush Iyer has big plans to end world hunger — and he's only in the eighth grade.
Iyer created a video that won first place among middle schoolers in the "World of 7 Billion" contest, which invites students to submit videos addressing global challenges related to population growth.
Ayush took home one of our top prizes for his video "Feeding 10 Billion People on Earth" and was interviewed about his accomplishment and interest in solving global challenges. Congrats Ayush! @LancasterOnline@ManheimTownshiphttps://t.co/FkOQE7Nmyfpic.twitter.com/AT23EQSpbc
— Population Education (@PopulationEd) May 14, 2018
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The contest awarded cash prizes for both middle and high schoolers across three topics: Advancing Women and Girls, Feeding 10 Billion, and Preventing Pollution. Iyer, a student at Manheim Township Middle School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, chose to spotlight global hunger, saying that if he "could solve one world problem, that would be it."
The global population is expected to increase from 7.6 billion to 10 billion in 2050. Currently, the world’s population consumes 9 billion tons of food, but will need 18 billion tons to feed the 10 billion people projected to live on the planet by 2050.
In his short video, Iyer proposes three ways the world can tackle its growing hunger problem: reducing food waste, building vertical farms, and consuming fewer meat products.
Food waste, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is when edible items go unconsumed, "as in food discarded by retailers due to color or appearance and plate waste by consumers." Iyer argues that reducing food waste could save $680 billion and feed 3.5 billion people.
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Personally, Iyer believes vegetarianism is the best way to tackle the issue of hunger.
“The process of which farms use to raise cattle and kill them for meat is a very polluting process,” he said in a phone interview with his local paper, Lancaster Online.
In fact, 30% of the world’s land is used to support chickens, pigs, and cattle. And if the grain used to feed livestock were instead directed to populations, it could feed 800 million people.
Encouraging people to eat less meat would also free up land for farming, and using vertical farming techniques could increase the efficiency of farmland usage. Plenty, a California company that has championed this method, claims 350 times greater yield than traditional farming and 1% of the water.
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