Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is expected to increase the imbalance in food production, the temperature and rainfall variations ( onset of monsoon, changes in duration, frequency and quantity of rains), the tropical countries are the one which are going to be the most affected. In fact the climate change has already happened. In its recently released Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the United Nations, concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet. The industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in the last 150 years. The panel also concluded there's a better than 90 percent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years, which has impacted the food production in different countries.

A Food is needed for survival and good food is needed for a healthy living. There are now 707,59,51,643 human mouth to feed(7 billion). But today nearly 92.5 crore people are hungry and another 100 crore are malnourished. India presently has a population of over 124 crores, of which 18% are under nourished. ( http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Today’s hard reality is that by 2050, another 2 billion people will be added to the planet. In essence, the world’s farmers, ranchers, and fishers will be expected to produce more food in the next 40 years than they have had to in the last 8,000 years combined(Our food production has to increase by 60 % from the present situation to feed the growing population by 2050. With respect to India the estimated demand for food grains including pulses is 285 million tonnes in 2020, while the present production is 252 million tonnes and this poses a question “whether India will be forced to import food grains by 2020?”. In increasing the food production, climate change may be the biggest obstacle along with other factors.

Food production in tropical countries is expected to be affected more and the resultant food crisis will affect the people in tropical developing countries. Most of the needed increase hence must come from these developing countries which are subjected to the stress due to climate change, exploitative agricultural practices which have led to degradation of natural resources and to the global economic pressure on the food market.

Considering the above, the theme for the eighth edition of Development Film Festival is fixed as “Climate change and Food Security”