Molly E. Brown
Biospheric Sciences Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Agriculture is a weather-sensitive industry, but it is also big business. Everyone needs to eat, and thus demand for food is strong, predicable, and steady from one year to the next. Weather, climate, and economic conditions, on the other hand, are highly variable across agricultural regions, resulting in the need for global agricultural monitoring. Satellite remote sensing observations are global, daily and quantitative, and provide the opportunity to understand the impact of weather on food production, and how this affects food security.
This talk will provide an overview of the use of satellite remote sensing to observe global variations in food production, food prices and ultimately food security. Information on the food system, and how global environmental change is likely to affect agriculture, will also be provided with examples from the Asian region. As the global population expands and more people move from a diet mostly made up of grains, to one with more meat, dairy and processed foods, the agriculture system is under greater pressure to produce more every year. This talk will focus on the role of global observing systems in better understanding the system and how it is responding to these changes.
(Presented in the 2012 Asian Food Heritage Forum: Harmonizing Culture , Technology and Industry, 20-21 August 2012, Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Chinese Dietary Culture Institute, Zhejiang Gongshang University, and Ministry of Culture, Thailand)