eckart sager sat down with the director of the earth institute, jeffrey sachs to find out more. >>in general the staple foods; rice included, but also wheat, maize and other grains have seen a very significant increase of price in recent years. basically this is rise in world demand pushing against limited supplies; and there's more pressure like that to come. the world's getting richer in income levels, especially with asia's growth. the world's becoming more populous; reaching 7 billion in2011 and a little more than a decade later we'll reach 8 billion, according to the un medium forecast now it could be more than 10 billion by the end of this century. all of this means this challengeis becoming more and more serious; while there still is some productivity growth, it's much slower than it was in the past. the big gains of the green revolution have already been achieved, the ecological cost of the first green revolution are becoming greater and greater. for instance the drop in water tables in places like northern china and in india where bore wells were used to irrigate greenr

professor sachs was also director of the un millennium project so when eckart sager sat down with him at the world economic forum on east asia,he took the opportunity to get his take whether the region was attaining the millennium developmentgoals. >>asia's on track for reducing income poverty, in fact it's the champion of getting income poverty down. but when it comes to the health outcomes, to under nutrition, and to sanitation and other aspects of the environment; asia's not fully on track yet. it hasn't turned this wondrous growth machine into the other two bottom lines; the social bottom line and the environmental bottom line. we have to understand that we are in a new world where gnp is not enough. we are in a triple bottom line world where we need income progress, we need social progress, we need health and education and nutrition, and we need environmental sustainability. it's the triple bottom line that we have to judge the performance of our economies. asia's doing super on the economic side; it's starting to make investments in the social and in the environmental side that