When the world's seven billionth person was born last month, that event was merely a signpost along a much longer and arduous path. The world population is projected to reach 9.3 billion by mid-century and exceed 10 billion by 2100. Among all the questions about how such a large population can actually exist (and dare I say thrive), here is a basic one: Will 10 billion of us have enough to eat?
The The Food and Agriculture Organization’s business-as-usual scenario forecasts that annual food production by 2050 will need to rise 70 percent compared to 2006. Annual cereal production will have to rise by nearly one billion metric tons and meat production by 200 million metric tons. The World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay estimates that we will need to produce 2.5 times as much food in the next 90 years as we have in all of the last 8,000 years combined.
Food production already uses 58 percent of Earth’s habitable land and consumes 67 percent of the fresh water. Climate change goes hand in hand with this. According to the FAO, agriculture directly contributes 13.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. With the additional impacts of land-use changes, food processing and the rest of the value chain, the provision of food likely exceeds a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Given the limited availability of additional land and water -- and really nowhere to go as far as higher emissions -- two distinct narratives are emerging about how we should respond to these projections.
One of these takes the population and consumption trends as given, and focuses on how to increase production to meet the rising demand for food. The FAO is part of this thread, and has highlighted the big question of how to achieve the yield and productivity gains needed to feed the world sustainably in 2050. It points out that agricultural productivity growth over the last half century was the real reason why the rapidly rising demand for food, feed and fiber could be met.
Since yield growth rates have slowed down for major commodities such as cereals, the FAO advocates technologies that can boost crop yields -- including crop management practices and plant breeding. One of the opportunities here is to reduce the current 23 percent yield loss across major cereals due to insects and disease.
Clay points out that 10 crops account for nearly 90 percent of all calories and only two of these are on track to double production by 2050. He believes that we can’t afford to leave genetics -- including both traditional plant breeding and genetic engineering -- off the table.
The other narrative takes issue with both the demand projections and the solutions. Isobel Tomlinson of the UK Soil Association has argued that the FAO’s projections reflect its view of the most likely future but not necessarily the most desirable one.
One point of contention is the expected dietary changes in developing countries, with an increasing share of calories coming from livestock products such as meat, milk and eggs. This, in turn, requires a much larger increase in the demand for grains used as animal feed -- about a third of the grain produced today is consumed by domestic animals. This is one of the major drivers behind the need for a big jump in crop production.
Tomlinson and others have suggested that we will not be able to feed 10 billion people on a Western diet without some combination of massive land-use changes -- with deforestation leading to biodiversity and carbon losses -- and very intensive crop and livestock production. There is at least a likelihood that this will not be feasible within the energy, water and greenhouse gas emissions constraints that agriculture might have to operate under in the coming decades.
This alternative perspective advocates changing the definition of the problem itself. Slowing down -- and perhaps even reversing -- the emerging dietary trend is clearly a part of this approach. In addition, Joel Cohen of Columbia University argues that the demographic trends are not cast in concrete and population growth can in fact be slowed down with relatively small investments in contraceptives, education and other initiatives. There are substantial uncertainties about population estimates, and Warren Sanderson of Stony Brook University suggests that educating the masses is the best insurance against uncertainties: This reduces population growth and increases adaptability to environmental changes.
On a less grand scale, reducing the unacceptably high levels of wasted food could be another benign way to reduce demand. This is a problem not just in developed countries, but surprisingly also in developing countries where inefficient supply chains are a major reason for food loss. If the demand for food could somehow be capped, more earth-friendly production methods might become viable. Organic production today typically produces lower yields than conventional production and therefore it is less likely to play a role in scenarios of dramatically higher production.
Long-term projections are dicey at best, but there is every indication that feeding the world’s population at the middle or end of this century could be enormously difficult. The two narratives I have presented here are about fundamentally different strategies: one is adaptation (increase production) and the other is mitigation (decrease demand). There are interesting similarities with the climate change problem in terms of both scale and strategies. And what we have learned from climate change suggests that the right answers will involve both adaptation and mitigation. How we frame this problem and what solutions we back will likely change the world in fundamental ways.
Kumar Venkat is president and chief technologist at CleanMetrics Corp., a provider of analytical solutions for the sustainable economy.