RISKS AND SOLUTIONS FOR GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY^©

It is forecasted there will be 9.2 billion people in the world in 2050 and this will keep climbing, reaching 11.4 billion by the mid 2060s.
The world’s economy will also not stop growing.
China, India, Brazil, and other rapidly advancing economies will continue to demand more protein food.
Global demand for food will have to more than double to feed the additional 4.7 billion people.
These people will eat 600 quadrillion calories a day.
This is the equivalent of feeding around 14 billion people at today’s nutritional levels.
Therefore the issue for the human race over the next half century is not climate change or the current global financial crisis, it is whether humanity can achieve and sustain the required harvest.
Agriculture faces multiple critical constraints that are intertwined and serious.
There are looming scarcities of just about all food production inputs – water, land, nutrients, oil, technology, skills, fish, and stable climates.
This is not a simple problem, susceptible to technological fixes or national policy changes, it is a wicked problem.

Proceedings of the International Plant Propagators Society – 2012

A. Curtis

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2013.1014.12