Growers and Grocers

Some time ago, the Gadling travel blog introduced me to a fascinating web site called Worldmapper, redraws world maps, adjusting the size of each country for a certain piece of data, like population or energy consumption. Worldmapper is a collaboration between The University of Sheffield and the University of Michigan. Worldmapper has quite a few food-related maps (e.g., food imports and exports and agricultural production and consumption). In this post I’ll show a few of their maps that are relevant to Growers and Grocers.First, start with the land area map to get your bearings and associate key countries with their color on the map:

Population

Here’s the world re-scaled for population:

China is the green area that takes up most of the upper right corner, and India is the large yellow country to the southwest of China.

Undernourishment

The next map has the country size scaled to show the proportion of undernourished people who live there. Notice how Western Europe and Japan have almost completely disappeared but the United States is still quite easy to distinguish. Despite having an enormous economy and food production system that produces many times more calories than the population could eat, millions are undernourished. The Worldmapper site points out that “Of all the people living in Central Africa, over 60% are undernourished. The Democratic Republic of Congo has the highest levels of undernourishment: 3 in every 4 people there are undernourished.”

Access to Safe Water

Finally, a look at access to safe water, which might be one of the major crises of the future. This map has the territories scaled in proportion to the number of people without access to safe water. The United States, Western Europe, Japan and Australia have almost disappeared, but Africa, India and China loom larger than ever.

If this map bothers you like it bothers me, and you live in a place with safe tap water, consider buying less bottled water (which costs many times more than filtered tap water and consumes significant resources), and donate some of the savings to a charity working to improve access to safe water in the developing world, like Oxfam, WaterAid or Unicef (each of these charities has various national sites if you want a tax credit for the donation). In some of the countries without safe water systems, much of people’s time is spent searching or waiting for water (which might not be clean), instead of doing more productive things like farming or setting up entrepreneurial enterprises.

Explore the site and you’ll see the world in a new way.

Map images © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan), used with permission. All maps available at www.worldmapper.org