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Asked by to Andy, Cathie, Jules, Les, Ricarda on 20 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by alexrive.
Question: What do you think is the main issue for ensuring we can feed the world in 2050?
- Keywords:
- 2050,
- feed,
- food supply,
- world
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Julian Little answered on 20 Jun 2012:
Crumbs – that is a heck of a first question. I guess it is a balance of producing enough food, of the right sort, of the right nutritional type, in the right places, at the right time, at an affordable price. The last one is a tricky one. Back in the 1940s or 1950s, probably half the average wage being earned was being spent on food. Roll on 50 years and the percentage was nearer 12% meaning that people in the UK and many countries had a lot more money to spend on other things – TVs, cars, mobile phones, etc. Since about 2008, however, the relative cost of food has been on the increase, as the supply of food has been struggling to meet the demands of a larger and more affluent population in countries such as India and China http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/projects/current-projects/global-food-and-farming-future ). For us here in the UK, food security is therefore all about “how much will it cost?” In other parts of the world, it may be, “how much food can I afford?” And rolling on another 40 years, the larger populations are likely to be in Africa. Can we help that food to be produced where it is needed, in a way that works for the local inhabitants? I think we can but not without technical help.
- Keywords:
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Les Firbank answered on 20 Jun 2012:
One of the big questions to start us off …
The problem is that the demand for food is expect to rise by about 50 % in this time. This is because the world’s population is increasing, and that many people want to eat diets richer in meat and milk. Meanwhile, the world is struggling to meet the increasing demand, and there is an increasing need to use crops to produce energy and even raw materials to make plastics. The trick is to ensure that people can get the food, water and other essentials they need without destroying more areas of our wild places, and losing more of our planet’s wildlife.
This is not just scaremongering; over the last few years there have been several rapid food price rises, at exactly the same time there have been riots and civil war in many parts of the world.
I believe that there is no single answer. We need to reduce food wastes: in the richer countries, a lot of food is thrown away, while in poorer countries a lot of food is lost before it gets to people, because of insects, fungi and bacteria. We may need to reduce demand for meat and dairy, as farm animals are often fed on grains and soya that could be used to feed people directly. We will need to produce more food. Smallholders produce a lot of food in the developing world, and we could grow a lot more food in towns and cities, in small parks, on rooftops, even in new ‘sustainable’ towers that are being planned that will be like self-contained towns. Big farms can produce more food by being better able to cope with potential water shortages, or the extreme droughts and floods we are starting to see, or with new pests and diseases that are spreading around the world. It’s not just a scientific issue; how we make sure everyone gets access to what they need, whether it’s food, water, land, knowledge or the basics for farming, such as tractors and plant seeds.
This is a huge challenge, and will involve a lot of different kinds of science; new ways of storing and transporting food; new ways of growing plants and animals, that take better care of the soil, water and bidiversity; new varieties of plants and animals that can cope with drought, or diseases. -
Andy Stirling answered on 20 Jun 2012:
I agree with Julian and Les. “How can we feed the world?” is a corker! Because it is so crucial, I’ll take a bit of space to answer it. But the bottom line for me is: “social justice” – and I’ll say why. I’ll come at the end to ten bullet points pointing to practical strategies – each preferable to GM. This is why I reckon that obsessing about ‘GM or not?’ can distract attention from what could be really effective.
In a nutshell, the style of the question reflects a key problem in the whole debate. The problem is not so much about how some privileged ‘we’ can ourselves feed ‘others’. Instead, the challenge lies in removing the obstacles that currently stop people currently living in abject poverty from having the power to feed themselves. This is why the main issue to address, in order to ensure the world is better fed, is “social justice”. It’s about giving a fairer deal to the poorest people. In practice, this means a whole bunch of things – some of which are not even directly about food.
This isn’t rocket science! By helping make the poorest people better off, we allow them more power to assert their own demand for food. And improving the financial position of poor farmers enables them to invest in their own production. What this means is, that the main kinds of innovation that are needed are social and organisational – not technological. The idea that there are ‘magic bullets’ (GM or otherwise) is dangerously misleading – and a distraction from the real solutions. There are plenty of well-proven policies, much more effective than GM crops.
1) Increase incomes of poor rural people, instead of the usual tendency to favour urban elites. This helps give purchasing power which is so essential for people to resist chronic hunger and famine.
2) Ensure that food prices paid by affluent populations in rich countries reflect the real costs of production – handled in the right ways, this could increase investment in food production.
3) Allow landless people, farmworkers and poor tenant farmers greater rights to their land. This is often the main reason preventing efforts to invest in greater food production in the future.
4) Make available ‘micro-finance’ – which means loans to poor farmers to enable them to plan ahead and invest in increasing the productivity of their own land.
5) Restrict the market power of big international food corporations, which further drives down the prices paid to poor farmers, so reducing investment in their own production of food.
6) Invest in the infrastructures that service poorer people – for transporting and storing food (so it is less expensive), improving communication (mobile phones) and giving easier access to markets
7) Research, promote and provide training in ecologically intensive crops and farming – which respect farmers’ knowledge of their own land, instead of forcing them into industrial production.
8] Make available seeds that farmers can save, select, share and breed for their own particular land – and which don’t depend on expensive chemical inputs. This cannot be done with most GM.
9) Take measures to reduce meat consumption in rich countries. Even a slight drop in meat demand can significantly reduce worldwide pressure on the land used inefficiently for animal feed.
10) Resist pressures to take agricultural land out of food production, for instance for making energy crops to power cars. Farmland should be used to grow food, not biofuels.
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Ricarda Steinbrecher answered on 23 Jun 2012:
Vital ingredients for long term food production include: water, land, fertile soil, agro-biodiversity.
Another major issue is to have the right farming systems and practices in place, to have functioning agro-ecosystems that can support plant growth and health and protect against pests and other stresses and, crucially, establish and maintain soil fertility. Feeding all the people in 2050 means ensuring that small scale farmers around the world have access to land and to water, especially in countries of the global South. They must also have the right to develop, save, breed and exchange their own seeds that are adapted to the locality. Crucially seed and knowledge about cultivation, selection and breeding must be in the ownership of the farmers and the community. Furthermore, having access to food is also a matter of local/regional storage, preservation and distribution systems, (eg drying, canning, freezing).
So what are the right farming systems for maximising food production and reducing yield loss?
It is often forgotten that large-scale monocultures generally produce less per acre than small scale agroecological systems using intercropping and companion planting. To be able to compare the yield of such dissimilar systems, the concept of ‘land equivalent ratio’ (LER) was devised. If we for example want to know if wheat and beans perform better in intercropping systems than under monoculture conditions, we need four equal plots of land. The first plot is planted with wheat, the second with beans, and the third and fourth are combined and planted with a mixture of wheat and beans. When harvested, the yield of wheat and beans is added up for the monocultures and compared to the yield from the intercropped fields, and expressed as a ratio, eg 1: 1.2. In Brazil, a root vegetable (arracacha) and onions grown as monocultures needed nearly 50 per cent more land to produce the same yield as when grown together on the same field. In Ethiopia, researchers observed that the yields of wheat and faba beans grown together were about 20 per cent higher than when grown on two separate fields; the mixed (intercropped) field also had 20 per cent less weeds, and viral damage to the beans was reduced by a third. Intercropping of maize, squash and beans in Mexico lead to 73 per cent higher yield as compared to mono-crop production.
But what about pests? drought? floods?
Agro-ecological systems have been developed to deal exactly with such environmental stresses. One of the better known systems are the ‘push-pull’ systems, developed in Kenya, to protect maize against the stemborer, by planting napier grass around the maize plot (pull: attracting and holding the stemborer) and interplanting desmodium between maize rows. Desmodium is a small leguminous “weed” that produces a scent that repels the stemborer (push). It also has secondary benefits: Desmodium is a cover crop preventing soil erosion during rains and dry winds, it fixes nitrogen, thus enriching the soil and it also protects maize from Striga weed, a parasitic plant causing US$ 10 billion yield loss/year (effecting 100 million Africans).
Such solutions are easily applied and do not require any external inputs or special seeds. They are owned by the farmer or community. More research, support and creative lateral thinking are required to support and expand such system based solutions, and collaboratively developing appropriate technologies. Pushing or enticing farmers into monoculture practices equates yield loss, especially over time, which small scale farmers can ill afford. Nor can their families and communities who depend on them for food production. Instead we should be working with them to support and collaboratively build on their knowledge and expertise and rebuilding it where it has been eroded.
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Cathie Martin answered on 24 Jun 2012:
Food security as defined by the FAO means considerably more than simply feeding the world. The FAO defines food security as ‘existing when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’. This means that achieving food security is much more of a challenge than simply ‘feeding the world’ because we need to ensure that there is enough nutritious food for everyone. The challenge of food security is therefore a global one and not restricted to developing countries.
This broader definition means that the main issues for ensuring food security are very different in different parts of the world. In sub-Saharan Africa the main issues are problems associated with low efficiency cultivation due to harsh environments and lack of resources. Greater access to inorganic fertilisers would have an enormous impact not only on yields but also on problems such as Striga infection. Improved infrastructure would significantly facilitate distribution of food, but charities have been recommending this for years without much progress. These are factors that could make major contributions. More resources should be invested in developing orphan (often forgotten) crops which are well adapted to harsh conditions. This type of crop improvement could be made without GM. However, genetically enginneered crops could make a smaller contribution, particularly in providing disease resistance in specialised crops where viral infections cause major losses. Herbicide resistance could also benefit these areas by reducing the level of weeding necessary, allowing women and female children (who do most of the weeding in developing countries) greater time for other activities, especially opportunities for education. These are not traits offered by conventional breeding especially in low priority specialist crops or crops propagated largely vegetatively.
In 2005 the number of obese people in the world exceeded those classified as underweight or malnourished. This is largely a problem of declining quality of diets, and will major effects on the levels of chronic disease in the world. We need to improve the nutritional quality of the foods that people actually consume, to avoid some of the huge economic burden that escalating levels of Type 2 diabetes , cardiovascular disease and cancer impose on developing and developed societies alike. Addressing this side of the Food Security issue, is extremely difficult – dietary recommendations largely do not work, and ensuring adequate supplies of nutritious foods will place even higher demands on food/agricultural suppliers. Biofortification of crops using GM offers a rapid way of producing foods enriched with specific vitamins/ phytonutrients – a way that could result in products available in 10 years rather than the 20-30 years required for conventional breeding, even when supported by modern biotechnological tools such as marker assisted selection.
I do not see GM or non-GM being the major issue for ensuring food security by 2050, but I see GM as part of the tool box necessary for providing rapid and effective solutions to some problems. As a scientist, trying very hard to make progress in this area, I know we are going to need every tool available to have any hope of meeting this challenge.
Comments
mary_whibley commented on :
Excellent previous comments but the MAIN issue is to make best use of agricultural land to provide food. We will need to change & consume a mainly cereal/vegetable diet as this uses far less land & water compared with meat production. Of course the problem is far more complicated than that but I believe that to be the main issue.
Jules commented on :
Hi Mary, a good point, of course – IF we switched to a more vegetarian diet, there is no doubt that there would be more food to go around.
BUT, and it is a big but, the reality is that the reverse is happening. As the rise in the more affluent middle classes in China at the moment, and in India in the future, they aspire to eat a meat-enhanced diet. Result, you need more vegetable protein to be produced to feed these chickens, pigs and cows – and a lot more!! Chickens to be the most efficient converter of food to meat , needing 4kg protein to put on a kg of protein, whereas beef cattle production requires 54kg to have the same effect.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.html. So how do you deal with this (in reality rather than theory)? In reality, China has become the largest importer of soya in the world, both from North and South America – because that is where it can be grown in the amounts required. More recently, the sustainability of such sources has been under much discussion, and new accreditation schemes are up-and-running to ensure that we can produce the amounts of soya we need throughout the world without, for example impacting on the Brazilian rainforest, either directly or indirectly. Take a look at http://www.responsiblesoy.org/ – its members include the WWF.
dingo commented on :
There’s often an implied assumption that we ‘need’ GM to feed the world. But GM crops don’t give higher intrinsic yields, so how can they provide more food? Nor were they meant to–most GM crops are engineered to tolerate being sprayed with herbicides, or to contain a pesticide, or both. In other words, they are irrelevant to feeding the world.
Jules commented on :
Hi Dingo,
Is there an absolute necessity for GM to feed the world? Well one thing is for sure, GM is not a silver bullet – it certainly won’t solve a number of the key problems – such as roads, infrastructure, unrest, wars, etc, but making a decision NOT to use a technology that has proved successful elsewhere does seem a bit strange. GM crops don’t give higher intrinsic yields? OK, some of the first GM crops, for example GM canola in Canada, were designed to be extremely high yielding by producing near 100% hybrids, something extremely difficult to do through conventional breeding – the fact that they are also herbicide tolerant is almost a by-the-by – actually the fact that the GM plants were resistant to the herbicide glufosinate meant that scientists could pick out the GM plants from the non-GM plants in the laboratory or greenhouse.
But I would agree that most GM varieties are not intrinsically higher yielding – but they frequently outyield their non-GM counterparts because they protect the crop from damaging insects or viruses. Take a look at http://www.pgeconomics.co.uk/page/33/global-impact-2012 . Especially the fact that “Of the total farm income benefit [accredited to the use of GM crops], 60% ($46.8 billion) has been due to yield gains resulting from lower pest and weed pressure and improved genetics, with the balance arising from reductions in the cost of production. Three-quarters of the yield gain came from adoption of IR [insect resistant] crops and the balance from herbicide tolerant (HT) crops”
dingo commented on :
As a scientist, do you feel comfortable about relying for your data on a non-peer reviewed report by PG Economics (consultants to the biotech industry) and if so, why?
t1mmyb commented on :
I am in no way an expert, but I’d like to know what everyone else thinks of Permaculture as a solution. So much about conventional agriculture is resource-intensive because it is, in essence, *fighting* what the land wants to do if it’s left to its own devices. In the UK, that inclination is towards forests.
Permaculture aims to take that natural inclination and bend it towards food production: forest gardens etc.; with “stacking” (multiple layers of food crops, from ground level up to shrubs, bushes and trees), it is possible to return a much higher yield per hectare than with single-crop land use. Companion planting, use of animals etc. can help keep pests at bay (e.g. a particular species of duck loves to gobble on slugs, keeping lettuces etc. from being eaten).
The problem, of course, is that we (in the Western world) have diets that are largely composed of wheat and other grains, replacements for which would need to be found. Given the health concerns surrounding over-reliance on highly-refined carbohydrates, it would perhaps not be a bad thing to find more nut-based alternatives anyway.
Forests are teeming with life – they need no artificial fertilisers, yet they are abundant. This debate is about GM, but the ultimate goal is “living within our means on a finite planet” wrt Peak Oil etc. GM might help, but is not without risks, and doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of conventional agriculture, which (to quote Bill Mollison, the father of Permaculture) “if we don’t stop it, we’re toast” (or words to that effect).
As I said, I’m no expert, but I hope I’ve represented Permaculture fairly, based on reading around the subject and watching the films “In Grave Danger of Falling Food” and “A Farm for the Future”.
dingo commented on :
I agree that permaculture seems to be the most rational way ahead. It seems to first require a shift in thinking and political systems, however–it demands that we cease thinking of large-scale ‘agriculture’ as the way to feed the world and turn rather to something approaching intensive community gardening schemes. This will in turn require access to land. I’m excited about the prospect, though you can see why we never hear about it as a possibility–nothing in it for the big corporations and no patents (in fact it’s the opposite to GM).
fern commented on :
I know it is highly unpopular and deeply problematic, but couldn’t at least one of the main issues be making sure that there are not too many people to feed in 2050? We are always told that we will have to feed a population of XX number of people in the future – why is population control never up for debate? Furthermore, if we are talking about feeding ‘the world’ we need to recognise that humans are just one species in this incredibly diverse world. What would it mean or take to think about all different types of species and organisms when we talk about feeding ‘the world’?
dingo commented on :
I agree with fern that this factor is often strangely missing from the ‘debate’! But I actually think that the scaremongers who cite population growth as a reason for needing GM (even though GM crops don’t give higher yields!) are being dishonest, because 1) excess population is only invoked by those supporting a certain economic model, a highly mechanised, oil-reliant one which needs fewer people than, say, an economic model based on self-sufficiency in food production and closed loop production cycles; and 2) world populations were frequently predicted to level off and decline, before GM proponents and governments started needing the population argument to scare us into accepting GM. eg http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-12-09-worldpop-usat_x.htm
In other words, I think there are good reasons why we are being told that population is this major problem — and why it is always accompanied by only one ‘solution’ — GM! It is just a tactic to gain certain ends — to get us to accept something we wouldn’t otherwise accept.
Andy commented on :
A quick thought on the population point raised by Fern. The pressure exerted by population does, of course, depend on the level of resources that are consumed per head and by the efficiency with which resources are produced and distributed.
Here, the capacity for overconsumption of food in particular is relatively limited when compared, say, with energy. But it is still the case that richer populations tend to:
(1) consume more food per head;
(2) display levels of obesity which also partly further aggravate this;
(3) eat more meat, which further exacerbates pressures on land;
(4) concentrate at high densities which impose large footprints elsewhere;
(5) tolerate greater levels of some kinds of inefficiency in food use.
So, here as in other areas, the issue is not so much a direct one of population, but one of consumption and practice. And where we do consider the pressures caused directly by population on food production, we might first be expected to prioritise attention to the most densely populated countries – which (like the UK – and especially England) often tend to be among the richer countries.
All this said, it is important that all societies find their own more effectively progressive ways deliberately and democratically to steer their levels of population. Here, experience and history show that the best way to achieve this is by progressive policies that alleviate the pressures on the poorest and most vulnerable people. Womens’ education and cultural equality are key here, as are achieving better levels of social welfare justice and security. Finding ways to address these essential human challenges in their own right, also present the best ways to address the challenges of overconsumption, inefficiency and (behind this) over-population.