By 2050, about 70% of the world's population would be city dwellers and the latest UN estimates stated that the world's population was expected to climb to 9.2 billion in 2050. Many cities around the world are suffering from water stress. In Malaysia, it it estimated that between 65 to 70% of the 28 million population live in the urban areas and water stress is fast developing due to high demends both for domestic and non-domestic uses. S Piarapakaran, president of Association of Water and Energy Research Malaysia (AWER), as quoted by Borneo Post March 22nd,2011, stated that most of the cities in the country do not have a water treatment plant within their vicinity, for example Taiping. Bukit Larut catchment that supplying water for Taiping is currently subjected to threat from development. More than 200,000 people are depending on the water source. He was also stressing about the important of having proper reserved margin in designing water treatment and supply system.
The food crisis in the beginning of year 2008 (April) was triggered by the dramatic escalation in the global food prices, that had caused hunger, riots and hoarding in poor countries. The crisis had been tackles by world wide actions, both the short term and long term meassures. The short term measure was to assist the poor countries with rapid financial assisstance by the World Bank, and as such eased the pressure to World Food Programme, a UN agency in feeding around 73 million people in that particular year. The longterm measures were to help developing countries to increase their food production capacity, as well as the continous effort to improve the world trading system. The top rice producers and the april 2008 rice projection as of November 2007, US Dept. of Agriculture data, were as follows: China 129.5 million tonnes India 94.0 Indonesia 35.5 Bangladesh 28.4 Vietnam 23.3 Thailand 18.5 Burma 11.3 Philippines 10.4 Brazil 8.2 Japan 7.9 Source: Borneo Post, April