Food in the 21st century: from science to sustainable agriculture (original) (raw)
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Report of the Fao Expert Meeting on How to Feed the World in 2050
2009
In the first half of this century, global demand for food, feed and fibre is projected to increase by some 70 percent while, increasingly, crops may also be used for bioenergy and other industrial purposes. New and traditional demand for agricultural produce will thus put growing pressure on already scarce agricultural resources. And while agriculture will be forced to compete for land and water with sprawling urban settlements, it will also be required to serve on other major fronts: adapting to and contributing to the mitigation of climate change, helping preserve natural habitats, and maintaining biodiversity. At the same time, fewer people will be living in rural areas and even fewer will be farmers. They will need new technologies to grow more from less land, with fewer hands.
Future Food Production as Interplay of Natural Resources, Technology, and Human Society
Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2010
Food security in 2050 will not be easy to achieve due to a number of real and evident but little understood and greatly unsolved challenges. Improving crops and agricultural practices is an ongoing and indispensable aspect of these efforts. Yet, on a global scale and from a systems perspective, these are insufficient to reduce the substantial risk of potential system collapses due to excessive stress on the production ecosystems or transgression of the "planetary boundaries."
World food and agriculture: Outlook for the medium and longer term - PNAS 1999
The world has been making progress in improving food security, as measured by the per person availability of food for direct human consumption. However, progress has been very uneven, and many developing countries have failed to participate in such progress. In some countries, the food security situation is today worse than 20 years ago. The persistence of food insecurity does not ref lect so much a lack of capacity of the world as a whole to increase food production to whatever level would be required for everyone to have consumption levels assuring satisfactory nutrition. The world already produces sufficient food. The undernourished and the food-insecure persons are in these conditions because they are poor in terms of income with which to purchase food or in terms of access to agricultural resources, education, technology, infrastructure, credit, etc., to produce their own food. Economic development failures account for the persistence of poverty and food insecurity. In the majority of countries with severe food-security problems, the greatest part of the poor and food-insecure population depend greatly on local agriculture for a living. In such cases, development failures are often tantamount to failures of agricultural development. Development of agriculture is seen as the first crucial step toward broader development, reduction of poverty and food insecurity, and eventually freedom from excessive economic dependence on poor agricultural resources. Projections indicate that progress would continue, but at a pace and pattern that would be insufficient for the incidence of undernutrition to be reduced significantly in the medium-term future. As in the past, world agricultural production is likely to keep up with, and perhaps tend to exceed, the growth of the effective demand for food. The problem will continue to be one of persistence of poverty, leading to growth of the effective demand for food on the part of the poor that would fall short of that required for them to attain levels of consumption compatible with freedom from undernutrition.
2008
Recent food riots brought home the crucial importance of food and agriculture in dramatic fashion. They are one of this century?s major concerns. Beyond the current crisis, world agriculture must address three challenges: demographic growth - we will be 9 billion people in 2050 - and food security in both quantity and quality; protection of the environment and natural resources; and the growing scarcity of fossil fuels. In this perspective, we decided in early 2006 to take the initiative of developing a capacity to analyse the possible balances of global food and agricultural systems in 2050. This document summarises some of the results of this "Agrimonde" foresight study. We have a twofold objective: to provide our two institutions, and more generally our country, with a basis for discussion of global food and agriculture issues, and to identify the top priority research questions submitted to CIRAD and INRA and to international agricultural research as a whole. The chall...
Washington DC, IFPRI, …, 2001
overnment officials and representatives of aid agencies are continually making decisions about how to spend their resources. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that each decision to be made represents a fork in the road, and each investment is a step in the direction of a future that will bring a healthy, sustainably produced diet to more people-or to fewer. This report shows just how, and how much, certain policy decisions and social changes will affect the world's future food security. It projects the likely food situation in 2020 if the world continues on more or less its present course, and it then shows how alternative choices could produce a different future. Even rather small changes in agricultural and development policies and investments, it turns out, can have wide-reaching effects on the number of poor and undernourished people around the world. A world of less poverty, greater food security, and a healthier environment is possible, but it will not come about without explicit policy steps in that direction. 2020 Global Food Outlook is the latest in a series of world food projections based on a model developed at IFPRI beginning in 1992.The model has been updated and expanded periodically since then as a way of painting an everclearer picture of the global food situation in 2020. More details about the simulations in this report are available in a comprehensive monograph titled Global Food Projections to 2020: Emerging Trends and Alternative Futures. Our thanks go to Rajul Pandya-Lorch for her intellectual support and editorial guidance during the preparation of this report and to Heidi Fritschel for editorial assistance. 2020 GLOBAL FOOD OUTLOOK 1 C oncern about the world's future food security seems to run in cycles. In the mid-1990s world cereal prices rose dramatically as cereal stocks fell sharply, and some observers foresaw a starving 21st century world unable to meet growing food demands from a deteriorating natural resource base.Worries eased in the late 1990s as global cereal production hit record levels in response to high prices and falling stocks, while declining incomes due to the East Asian economic crisis reduced the demand for food commodities. As cereal prices plummeted in response, the policy focus in much of the world shifted from concern over long-term food supply and demand problems to concerns about subsidy provision to financially distressed farmers.
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires This important analysis demonstrates that big changes are possible. The solutions on our menu would allow the world to sustainably increase food production and reduce excess consumption. Governments, the private sector, farming organizations, and civil society must urgently come together in a determined alliance in order to deliver on the promise of a sustainable food future. We cannot afford to wait.