Mission impossible: The challenge is to double world food output by 2050 using less land, far less water and fewer nutrients – all in the teeth of increasing rates of drought.
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BARRING NUCLEAR WARS, pandemics and cosmic accidents, there will be about 9.1 billion people living in the world in 2050. Yet they will eat as much food as 13 billion people at today's nutritional levels. So how will we feed them all? The answer to this question could be the greatest scientific challenge of the 21st century – greater even than finding a solution to climate change.
The problem is that humanity is consuming more food, year-on-year, than it produces, especially as demand for high-protein food increases in high population developing countries like China and India.
The world is also moving towards a water crisis: cities are now taking up to half of the water that was once used to grow food, while groundwater levels are declining in every country where it is used for food production. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the U.S. suggests that by 2025 water scarcity may inflict an annual loss of 350 million tonnes of food – roughly equivalent to losing today's global rice harvest or the entire U.S. grain crop.
We're also losing land; we are building on it, eroding and degrading it, or locking it in conservation reserves. Whatever the cause, the total available area of arable land is now falling. Compounding this, we are losing nutrients in the land we do have.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation notes that we apply about 150 million tonnes of elemental fertiliser to our farms every year; however the U.S. Department of Agriculture points out that we lose six times that amount – an estimated 1.1 billion tonnes of nutrients – through soil erosion and leaching.
The rise of biofuels presents another serious issue since it takes over arable land and diverts resources from food production (see, Non-crop biofuels to boost food security, Cosmos Online). It is estimated that by 2020 we will be burning 400 million tonnes of grain a year – equivalent to the entire world rice crop – just to keep our cars on the road.
And if you thought those figures weren't alarming enough, then there's the issue thrown up by climate change. For example, the Peterson Institute for International Economics in the U.S. says "agricultural production in developing countries may fall between 10 and 25 per cent, and if global warming progresses unabated, India's agricultural capacity could fall as much as 40 per cent."
In light of all these hurdles, as I see it, the challenge is to double world food output by 2050 using less land, far less water and fewer nutrients – all in the teeth of increasing rates of drought. And we need to do it sustainably.
Famine/population dilemma
Populations clearly need to be stabilized. China has enforced the one child per family policy to address the problem of overpopulation. Maybe the rest of the world should be doing this too. This would be called 'managing the situation'. The other alternative is to not manage the situation and wait for a meteor or a mega volcanic eruption to reduce world population, or, one can wait for disease and famine to sort out the problem as we see on small islands where snake and rat populations go through repeated boom and bust cycles.
By increasing food supply merely passes on the problem to the next generation, when the situation will be even worse. Having only one or two children per family is surely the most humane alternative.