the challenge of feeding the world essay

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Feeding the Developing World: Six Major Challenges

September 17, 2015 • 13 min read.

Globally, beating the scourge of hunger means addressing climate change, food waste, global conflicts, resource-heavy meat production and population growth.

• Public Policy

Today, one in nine of the world’s 7.3 billion people — more than 800 million men, women and children — don’t get enough to eat, despite the fact that more than enough food is produced daily to feed everyone on Earth (at least based on calories).

Most of the world’s hungry live in the developing regions of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and many of them are children. Inadequate nutrition kills more than three million children under age 5 every year, and is responsible for 45% of all such global deaths. Worldwide, one in six kids (a total of about 100 million) is underweight.

And yet, according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ “Healthy Food for a Healthy World” report, 1.9 billion people globally are overweight and 600 million are obese. Thanks in large part to growing consumption of so-called empty calories, many of these people are also among those with inadequate nutrition. “There are a billion hungry people, and more than two billion who are overweight or obese,” said Danielle Nierenberg, the president of the nonprofit Food Tank advisory group. “People can be overweight and also malnourished.”

Some progress is being made, however. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports a drop of 42% in the number of chronically hungry people in the developing world since 1990, although China alone accounts for the vast majority of this progress (the reduction would have been just 7% without China’s contribution).

Making more progress on hunger means facing up to the following six challenges:

• Population Growth. The FAO notes that world population growth is slowing, but the U.N. still projects an additional 2.3 billion people by 2050, nearly all of them in the developing world. Sub-Saharan Africa’s population will grow by 114% in the period, and that of East and Southeast Asia by 13%. Accelerating urbanization means that 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050 (up from 49% in 2009).

Estimates of how much more food will be needed to feed this growing population range from 60% (according to the ActionAid report, “Rising to the Challenge: Changing Course to Feed the World in 2050”) to 100% (the estimate that Robert Fraley, chief technology officer at Monsanto, gave National Public Radio in a 2014 interview). The FAO projects that it will require “raising overall food production by some 70% between 2005-2007 and 2050.” According to the agency, “Production in the developing countries would need to almost double.” Specifically, “annual cereal production will need to rise to about three billion tons from 2.1 billion today and annual meat production will need to rise by over 200 million tons to reach 470 million tons.”

Today, one in nine of the world’s 7.3 billion people — more than 800 million men, women and children — don’t get enough to eat.

The need to increase food production so dramatically in just 35 years is daunting, but Nierenberg points out that such a scenario “is based on a lot of assumptions,” such as the conclusion that a growing middle class will demand more meat in their diets, and that educating girls and investing in family planning won’t reduce actual population numbers. “If nothing changes we’ll have to reach that 70% figure, but much can be done to change that scenario,” she said. “Just reducing post-harvest losses through better storage [cutting the tops off sweet potatoes before you store them, for example, or better silos and drying mats] could help reduce the 1.3 billion tons of food waste ever year.”

• Food Waste. Many experts say that enough food exists to feed 10 billion people today. Unfortunately, it’s not only inadequately distributed but also, to a large extent, wasted. “It’s terrible that farmers put so much labor and water into growing crops, but then can’t sell them because they rot before getting to market,” Food Tank’s Nierenberg said. “Food waste is the low-hanging fruit in the system.”

According to the World Resources Institute, “About 24% of all the calories produced for human consumption don’t actually end up reaching human mouths.” The group said that if that rate of loss could be cut in half, to 12%, the world would need about 1,314 trillion kilocalories (kcal) less food per year than in a business-as-usual scenario.

“Food is lost or wasted throughout the supply chain, from initial production down to final household consumption,” the FAO said. “The decrease may be accidental or intentional, but ultimately leads to less food available for all. This may be due to problems in harvesting, storage, packing, transport, infrastructure or market/price mechanisms, as well as institutional and legal frameworks.”

While more than half of all food waste (56%) occurs in the developed world, a 2014 report titled, “Feeding Cities: Food Security in a Rapidly Urbanizing World,” concludes that the most severe food losses occur in Asia, at five stages in the process — production, handling and storage, processing and packaging, distribution and market, and consumption. According to the authors, Eugénie L. Birch, co-director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research (IUR) and Alexander Keating, Penn IUR project director, more than 80% of all this waste occurs in just three stages — 24% in production, 24% in handling and storage and 35% in consumption. “In the west, it occurs on the plate,” Birch said in an interview. “In the developing world, the biggest problems are during production and the journey from the farm to the city. These are two different issues that have to be addressed.”

• Climate Change. “Trying to understand the overall effect of climate change on our food supply can be difficult,” wrote the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a report titled, “Climate Impacts on Agriculture and Food Supply,” based in part on 2008 reporting from the U.S. Climate Change Science program and others. The EPA points out that, ironically, increases in carbon dioxide can be beneficial to “some crops in some places,” but only if necessary conditions of nutrient levels, soil moisture and water availability are met. “Changes in the frequency and severity of droughts and floods could pose challenges for farmers and ranchers…. Overall, climate change could make it more difficult to grow crops, raise animals and catch fish in the same ways and same places as we have done in the past.”

A 2014 paper by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Colorado State University, published in the journal Nature, concluded that climate change would reduce crop yields by more than 10% by 2050, “with a potential to substantially worsen global malnutrition in all scenarios considered.” The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) concluded in a 2009 report that an additional 25 million children would be malnourished by 2050 because of global warming’s negative effect on agriculture.

Rising temperatures are a key part of the problem. “It’s an unknown, but we do know that as temperatures rise, crop productivity declines,” said Alan M. Kelly, the Gilbert S. Kahn dean emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. A National Academies of Science report said that yields of corn, soybeans and cotton in the U.S. could drop dramatically because of many more days with temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit. A further wild card is that both insects and crop diseases are likely to flourish with warmer temperatures.

Some 1.9 billion people globally are overweight and 600 million are obese. Thanks in large part to growing consumption of so-called empty calories, many of these people are also among those with inadequate nutrition.

Ozone levels are another part of the challenge posed by climate change. According to the Nature article, “Ozone trends either exacerbate or offset a substantial fraction of climate impacts depending on the scenario, suggesting the importance of air quality management in agricultural planning. Furthermore, we find that depending on the region, some crops are primarily sensitive to either ozone (for example, wheat) or heat (for example, maize) alone, providing a measure of relative benefits of climate adaptation versus ozone regulation for food security in different regions.”

All of these climate-induced changes will affect food prices, a critical consideration for the world’s poor. IFPRI agricultural economist Gerald Nelson told Scientific American , “Biological impacts on crop yields work through the economic system resulting in reduced production, higher crop and meat prices, and a reduction in cereal consumption. This reduction means reduced calorie intake and increased childhood malnutrition.” Without climate change, IFPRI reported that wheat prices could rise 39% by 2050 (from $113 to $158 per metric ton). Once global warming is factored in, the cost of wheat could rise at least 170%, to approximately $190 per metric ton.

“If climate change were to retard economic development beyond the direct effects on agriculture in the poorer regions, especially in Africa [as a result of human health impacts or other factors], then overall impacts could be sizeable,” noted the FAO study titled, “Global Climate Change and Agricultural Production: Direct and Indirect Effects.” Relative agricultural productivity will shift to favor developed countries, it said, with direct impact on already skewed resource allocation.

• What People Eat. The World Resources Institute projects livestock consumption in the U.S. and Canada could actually drop 2% between 2006 and 2050 (and climb just 7% in the European Union), but increase 46% in China and 94% in India.

Overall, the FAO report “World Livestock 2011” concludes that by 2050, average global consumption of meat protein will be 73% higher than in 2011. Dairy consumption is also on an upward trajectory, scheduled to grow 58% in the period.

A switch to meat-based diets, which are resource-intensive, has clear implications for agricultural productivity and feeding a growing world population. Much new meat production would come from the intensive systems common in the U.S., and FAO writes that such methods “are a concern because of potential environmental impacts, such as groundwater pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.” The study adds, “An urgent challenge is to make intensive production more environmentally benign.”

The primary driver of this increase in meat and dairy consumption is increasing wealth. FarmEcon LLC, an agricultural and food industry consulting firm, projects, “Production growth will be primarily driven by a near doubling of per capita GDP in constant dollar purchasing power. A more affluent world will, as it has in the past, want the variety and nutrition offered by more meat in the diet.”

But Food Tank’s Nierenberg suggests that this assumption is worth questioning. “The assumption is that the growing middle class in places such as China and India is going to eat more meat, but people could be convinced that industrially produced meat isn’t the best bet for their future.” Food Tank advocates for gradual steps, such as Meatless Mondays, and healthy steps such as increasing vegetables and fruit in the diet.

• Water Risk. “The water issue is more imminent than climate change,” says Lester Brown, author of the forthcoming book When the Wells Go Dry and founder of both the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute. “We’re overpumping our aquifers virtually everywhere in the world to support the current population,” he said. “The world is running up a vast water deficit.”

In the book, Brown writes that the number of rivers in China dropped from 50,000 in 1950 to 23,000 in 2013. In India, he said, “Water tables are falling in every state. And aquifer depletion can shrink harvests, something we’ve seen in the Middle East. The grain harvest in Texas and Oklahoma has been affected in that way, and that’s in part because those states are on the shallow, southern end of the Ogallala Aquifer.” Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Human Resources Development Working Group reports that in the Texas High Plains, 10 times as much water is being pumped out of the aquifer than is being replaced by rainfall.

Climate change would reduce crop yields by more than 10% by 2050, “with a potential to substantially worsen global malnutrition in all scenarios considered.”

And National Geographic reported, “As drought worsens groundwater depletion, water supplies for people and farming shrink, and this scarcity can set the table for social unrest. Saudi Arabia, which a few decades ago began pumping deep underground aquifers to grow wheat in the desert, has since abandoned the plan, in order to conserve what groundwater supplies remain, relying instead on imported wheat to feed the people of this arid land.”

By 2025, 1.8 billion people are likely to be living in regions with absolute water scarcity, the United Nations reports — and Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world in the number of water-stressed countries in any region. By 2030, up to 250 million Africans will be living in areas of high water stress. Scarcity in arid and semi-arid places, mostly in the developing world, will affect — and displace — up to 700 million people.

According to the World Bank, a warmer world would leave about a billion people living in monsoon basins (and 500 million in deltas) “especially vulnerable” to water scarcity. The 2012 report, titled, “Turn Down the Heat,” concludes, “Poorer countries, which contributed least to the problem, will be the most affected.”

The Bank said that 70% of global water withdrawals are for agriculture, and that meeting the food needs of nine billion people by 2050 will require a 15% increase in those withdrawals.

• Global Conflict and Food Insecurity. Food insecurity is both a cause of civil conflict, and a result of it. According to “Food Insecurity and Global Conflict,” a 2011 report from the World Food Programme, “Rising food prices contribute to food insecurity, which is a clear and serious threat to human security.” In 2007 and 2008, food protests and riots occurred in 48 countries as a result of record high prices. In 2011, FAO reported a new peak for the food price index, with subsequent protests in North Africa and the Middle East (toppling two presidents).

The Global Food Report for 2014/2015 recounts the destroyed infrastructure in Gaza, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen and other “conflicted-afflicted places” in 2014. And it concludes, “In addition to the humanitarian tragedies associated with these conflicts, the destruction of infrastructure, together with disruptions in access to markets, often renders goods and services prohibitively expensive or makes them unavailable altogether. Both investors and tourists often abandon conflict-affected areas, and clashes between conflicting parties force millions of refugees to flee either to safer places within the affected countries or across the border to neighboring countries. As a result, economies often contract, instability and insecurity spill over national borders, and food and nutrition insecurity rises.”

Ÿ Ÿ The world faces substantial challenges in meeting the food and water needs of 2050, when global population could be 9 billion or more. Initiatives to address our future needs are critical, and they will have to take into account the complicated interplay of a variety of stressors on the world agriculture system.

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• Brief Communication
• Published: 14 August 2018

The challenge of feeding the world while conserving half the planet

• Zia Mehrabi 1 , 2 ,
• Erle C. Ellis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2006-3362 3 &
• Navin Ramankutty   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3737-5717 1 , 2  

Nature Sustainability volume  1 ,  pages 409–412 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Amid widespread concerns about biodiversity loss, a single clear conservation message is engaging leading conservationists: the proposal to give half the surface of the Earth back to nature. Depending on the landscape conservation strategy, we find that, globally, 15–31% of cropland, 10–45% of pasture land, 23–25% of non-food calories and 3–29% of food calories from crops could be lost if half of Earth’s terrestrial ecoregions were given back to nature.

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This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant and a Genome Canada/Genome BC grant (to N.R.).

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Mehrabi, Z., Ellis, E.C. & Ramankutty, N. The challenge of feeding the world while conserving half the planet. Nat Sustain 1 , 409–412 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0119-8

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Future of Food: Exploring Challenges to Global Food Systems

Mahak Agrawal

Food is fuel to human existence, and in the evolution of human settlements, food— its production, availability, demand and supply — and food systems have steered the development, expansion and decline of human settlements.

In the 21st century, global food systems face dual challenges of increasing food demand while competing for resources — such as land, water, and energy — that affect food supply. In context of climate change and unpredictable shocks, such as a global pandemic, the need for resiliency in global food systems has become more pressing than ever.

With the globalization of food systems in 1950s, the global food production and associated trade has witnessed a sustained growth, and continues to be driven by advancements in transport and communications, reduction in trade barriers and agricultural tariffs. But, the effectiveness of global food system is undermined by two key challenges: waste and nutrition.

Food wastage is common across all stages of the food chain. Nearly 13.8% of food is lost in supply chains — from harvesting to transport to storage to processing. However, limited research and scientific understanding of price elasticity of food waste makes it tough to evaluate how food waste can be reduced with pricing strategy.

When food is wasted, so are the energy, land, and resources that were used to create it . Nearly 23% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions between 2007-2016 were derived from agriculture, forestry and other land uses. Apart from cultivation and livestock rearing, agriculture also adds emissions through land clearance for cultivation. Overfishing, soil erosion, and depletion and deterioration of aquifers threaten food security. At the same time, food production faces increasing risks from climate change — particularly droughts, increasing frequency of storms, and other extreme weather events.

The world has made significant progress in reducing hunger in the past 50 years. Yet there are nearly 800 million people without access to adequate food. Additionally, two billion people are affected by hidden hunger wherein people lack key micronutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin A and iodine. Apart from nutrient deficiency, approximately two billion people are overweight and affected by chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.

In essence, the global food system is inadequate in delivering the changing and increasing demands of the human population. The system requires an upgrade that takes into account the social-cultural interactions, changing diets, increasing wealth and wealth gap, finite resources, challenges of inequitable access, and the needs of the disadvantaged who spend the greatest proportion of their income on food. To feed the projected 10 billion people by 2050, it is essential to increase and stabilize global food trade and simultaneously align the food demand and supply chains across different geographies and at various scales of space and time.

Back in 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus, in his essay on the principle of population, concluded that “ the power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must come in some shape or other visit the human race .” Malthus projected that short-term gains in living standards would eventually be undermined as human population growth outstripped food production, thereby pushing back living standards towards subsistence.

Malthus’ projections were based on a model where population grew geometrically, while food production increased arithmetically. While Malthus emphasized the importance of land in population-food production dynamics, he understated the role of technology in augmenting total production and family planning in reducing fertility rates. Nonetheless, one cannot banish the Malthusian specter; food production and population are closely intertwined. This close relationship, however, is also affected by changing and improving diets in developing countries and biofuel production — factors that increase the global demand for food and feed.

Around the world, enough food is produced to feed the planet and provide 3,000 calories of nutritious food to each human being every day. In the story of global food systems once defined by starvation and death to now feeding the world, there have been a few ratchets — technologies and innovations that helped the human species transition from hunters and gatherers to shoppers in a supermarket . While some of these ratchets have helped improve and expand the global food systems, some create new opportunities for environmental damage.

To sum it up, the future of global food systems is strongly interlinked to the planning, management and development of sustainable, equitable and healthy food systems delivering food and nutrition security for all. A bundle of interventions and stimulus packages are needed at both the supply and demand ends to feed the world in the present as well as the future — sustainably, within the planetary boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity. It requires an intersectoral policy analysis, multi-stakeholder engagement — involving farms, retailers, food processors, technology providers, financial institutions, government agencies, consumers — and interdisciplinary actions.

This blog post is based on an independent study — Future of Food: Examining the supply-demand chains feeding the world — led by Mahak Agrawal in fall 2020 under the guidance of Steven Cohen.

Mahak Agrawal is a medical candidate turned urban planner, exploring innovative, implementable, impactful solutions for pressing urban-regional challenges in her diverse works. Presently, she is studying environmental science and policy at Columbia University as a Shardashish Interschool Fellow and SIPA Environmental Fellow. In different capacities, Mahak has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Town and Country Planning Organization-Government of India, Institute of Transport Economics, Oslo. In 2019, she founded Spatial Perspectives as an initiative that uses the power of digital storytelling and open data to dismantle myths and faulty perspectives associated with spaces around the world. In her spare time, Mahak creates sustainable artwork to tell tales of environmental crisis.

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I’m doing an assignment on food production, ad I just happened to come across this article! Wow, what a lucky find! I’m going to use it for some information in my paragraphs.

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The Challenge of Feeding the World Sustainably: Summary of the US-UK Scientific Forum on Sustainable Agriculture (2021)

Chapter: summary.

The surface of the Earth has been transformed by agriculture. Cropland and pastureland cover more than one-third of the Earth’s ice-free surface. Of the water withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and aquifers, 70 percent goes to agriculture. The global food system feeds a world population of nearly 8 billion people, which is a remarkable achievement. Yet, more than 800 million people worldwide remain malnourished, and more than 2 billion adults and children are overweight or obese, in part because of a worldwide trend toward eating more processed foods and higher quantities of salt, sugar, and fat.

Agriculture’s extensive use of the Earth’s land and water has already had many deleterious effects on the environment and on biodiversity. Inputs to agriculture in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, and the mechanization of farming have produced higher yields but also have polluted the air, water, and soil. The expansion of agriculture has placed pressures on wild habitats and fisheries. Greenhouse gases from agriculture are contributing to higher temperatures and changing precipitation patterns, which have further stressed many plant and animal species.

Under a business-as-usual scenario, the deleterious effects of agriculture on the environment and on biodiversity will continue to increase. Higher levels of food production will require more fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation and more extensive resource extraction from the land and sea. Growing populations and increased demand will exert pressures to convert more wildland to cropland. Such an approach would bring more air and water pollution, increases in greenhouse gas emissions, greater degradation and erosion of soils, greater threats to biodiversity, and intensified competition for land and other resource inputs. Given the already substantial effects of agriculture on biodiversity and the environment, such a future is not sustainable.

Many deliberative levers of change are available to transition agriculture to sustainability, including increased agricultural efficiency and yields, smarter land use, better use of markets and trade, reduction of waste, and shifts in diets. These levers of change often have multiple benefits. For example, many of the foods associated with a higher risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, such as red meat and highly processed foods, also have the highest environmental impacts. Eating less of these foods and more locally produced fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts would reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also reducing the number of years of life lost to diet-related diseases. Similarly, reduction of the 25 to 30 percent of all food produced that is lost or wasted would mitigate environmental harms while enhancing food security and health.

Many ongoing and potential developments in science and technology could contribute to sustainability. An approach known as precision agriculture based on extensive data gathering, analysis, and use offers great potential to improve yields, reduce costs, and minimize environmental damage. Genetic technologies and other advanced biotechnologies could yield crops and livestock resistant to high temperatures and drought, protect against new and emerging pests and disease, increase efficiency in water use, improve nutritional value in foods, and reduce fertilizer use. Technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, process engineering, and synthetic biology could come together to shift the paradigm from “food produced by agriculture” to “food produced by manufacturing.” The social sciences could also foster sustainability—for example, through interdisciplinary assessments of incentives and preferences.

Policy actions will be needed to move the world not only toward sustainable agriculture but also toward a much broader sustainable global food system. A wide range of policy levers exists to overcome barriers to change, including incentives, regulation, and the establishment of new governance frameworks. At the same time, researchers will continue to investigate the food system and sustainability and how best to implement new knowledge in policy. Incremental steps may not be enough to produce the needed change. When dramatic change becomes possible, researchers and policy makers will need to be prepared with solutions that can be implemented quickly.

Sustainable agriculture will be characterized by healthy ecosystems and healthy diets that ensure resilience to climate change, economic security, social inclusion, and human well-being. A clear, long-term strategy for what needs to be achieved would provide policy actors and food systems with both direction and coherence. A coalition of national and international organizations, perhaps through an ongoing forum on sustainable agriculture, could promote both the research that is needed and the translation of this research into evidence-based policies.

The need for sustainable agriculture is becoming ever more significant. The world's population is still increasing, requiring more from our agricultural systems. Malnutrition and diet-related illnesses are present in nearly all societies. At the same time, agriculture plays a significant role in some of the biggest environmental challenges that humanity is facing, including the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and the pollution of our soil, water, and air. The need to balance the growing demand for nutritious food with these environmental threats is a complex issue, and ensuring sustainable food systems will require a collaborative effort from many different communities.

These issues were addressed during the US-UK Scientific Forum on Sustainable Agriculture held in Washington, DC, on March 5-6, 2020. Organized by the National Academy of Sciences and the United Kingdom's Royal Society, the forum brought together leading scientists, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in agricultural sciences, food policy, biodiversity, and environmental science (among other specialties). The forum provided an opportunity for members of these research communities to build multidisciplinary and international collaborations that can inform solutions to a broad set of problems. This publication summarizes the presentations of the forum.

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Challenge of feeding the world

Despite significant growth in food production over the past 50 years, it has been estimated the world needs to produce 70-100% more food to meet expected demand without significant increases in prices.

But the solution to this complex issue is not simply about maximising productivity. With additional challenges from climate change, water stresses, energy insecurity and dietary shifts, global agricultural and food systems will have to change substantially to meet the challenge of feeding the world.

A new paper published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability identifies the top 100 questions for the future of global agriculture.

A multi-disciplinary team of 55 agricultural and food experts from the world's major agricultural organisations, professional scientific societies and academic institutions was appointed to identify the top 100 questions for global agriculture and food. They were drawn from 23 countries and work in universities, UN agencies, CG research institutes, NGOs, private companies, foundations and regional research secretariats.

An initial list of 618 key questions was, over the course of a year, whittled down by the team to the top 100.

If addressed and answered, it is anticipated these questions will have a significant impact on global agricultural practices worldwide. They offer policy and funding organisations an agenda for change. The questions are wide-ranging, are designed to be answerable and capable of realistic research design, and cover 13 themes identified as priority to global agriculture (see Notes).

Lead author, Professor Jules Pretty, of the University of Essex, said: "The challenges facing world agriculture are unprecedented and are likely to magnify with pressures on resources and increasing consumption.

"What is unique here is that experts from many countries, institutions and disciplines have agreed on the top 100 questions that need answering if agriculture is to succeed this century. These questions now form the potential for driving research systems, private sector investments, NGO priorities, and UN projects and programmes."

Professor Sir John Beddington, Government Chief Scientific Advisor and Head of the Government's Foresight programme, said,

"This paper and its lead author Jules Pretty have provided an important contribution to the Foresight project on Global Food and Farming Futures. This study poses the central question, how can a future global population of nine billion people be fed sustainably, healthily and equitably. The project will publish its findings in January 2011."

• Agriculture and Food
• Food and Agriculture
• Environmental Issues
• Global Warming
• Environmental Policy
• World Development
• Environmental Policies
• Resource Shortage
• Water resources
• Genetic drift
• Tuberculosis
• Urbanization
• Commercial fishing
• Climate change mitigation

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Materials provided by University of Essex . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Jules Pretty, William J. Sutherland, Jacqueline Ashby, Jill Auburn, David Baulcombe, Michael Bell, Jeffrey Bentley, Sam Bickersteth, Katrina Brown, Jacob Burke, Hugh Campbell, Kevin Chen, Eve Crowley, Ian Crute, Dirk Dobbelaere, Gareth Edwards-Jones, Fernando Funes-Monzote, H. Charles J. Godfray, Michel Griffon, Phrek Gypmantisiri, Lawrence Haddad, Siosiua Halavatau, Hans Herren, Mark Holderness, Anne-Marie Izac, Monty Jones, Parviz Koohafkan, Rattan Lal, Timothy Lang, Jeffrey McNeely, Alexander Mueller, Nicholas Nisbett, Andrew Noble, Prabhu Pingali, Yvonne Pinto, Rudy Rabbinge, N. H. Ravindranath, Agnes Rola, Niels Roling, Colin Sage, William Settle, J. M. Sha, Luo Shiming, Tony Simons, Pete Smith, Kenneth Strzepeck, Harry Swaine, Eugene Terry, Thomas P. Tomich, Camilla Toulmin, Eduardo Trigo, Stephen Twomlow, Jan Kees Vis, Jeremy Wilson, Sarah Pilgrim. The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture . International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability , 2010; 8 (4): 219 DOI: 10.3763/ijas.2010.0534

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Feeding the world: a global challenge

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Posted: 20 February 2018 | Dr Riaz Bhunnoo | Director | Global Food Security | No comments yet

The world is facing a crisis in global food security as the global population increases and diets change with economic development. Riaz Bhunnoo, Director of the Global Food Security programme, outlines the key challenges.

BOOMING: The world population is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030

The population is increasing, meaning more mouths to feed, and it is unlikely that this will stabilise by the end of the century. Recent estimates suggest that the population will rise to 9.7 billion by 2050. 1 At the same time, diets are changing as incomes grow through economic development, which can have positive impacts in helping to lift people out of poverty and improving nutritional outcomes. However, richer people tend to both eat more food 2 and more meat and dairy (Figures 1 and 2), which are resource intensive to produce and can have a higher environmental impact than other food types. 3

If diets continue as they are, it is estimated that we will need to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have ever produced in human history,4 (Figure 3) with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN FAO) projecting that 60 per cent more food will be required by 2050. 5

However, there are two major externalities not captured by the market that must be acknowledged – the impact on health and the impact on the environment. In terms of health, around one in three people globally suffer from some form of malnutrition – whether hunger, micronutrient-deficiency, overweight or obesity. Recent data suggests that there are now more people in the world who are overweight and obese than underweight, with the two combined accounting for more than half of the world population – a new normal. 6 The trends in the data suggest that is likely to continue over time. 

In terms of the environment, resources for agriculture are becoming scarce. If diets continue as they are, by 2050 we will need 120 per cent more water and 42 per cent more cropland, we will have lost 14 per cent of forests, and be generating 77 per cent more greenhouse gases. However, agriculture already uses 70 per cent of all fresh water and there is, by good approximation, no new land for agriculture. 7 In fact, land area for agriculture is more likely to shrink due to urbanisation and rising sea levels, but also because we will need land for negative emissions technologies such as bioenergy, carbon capture and storage to meet the Paris Agreement target of a 1.5°C temperature rise. This agreement also requires net global emissions to reach zero by 2040-2060. 8

This implies sustainable intensification of agriculture on existing land – producing as much as we can in the most sustainable way. However, even if we are able to close yield gaps we still need 56 per cent more water, 5 per cent more land, the loss of 8 per cent more forest and 42 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions. Clearing rainforest or natural landscapes is not desirable because it leads to biodiversity loss and more emissions. It is therefore clear that sustainable intensification on its own will not be sufficient – demand-side measures on consumption and waste will also be required.

The impact of climate change

Climate change will make it more difficult to meet the food security challenge. Increased CO 2 levels could increase the rate of photosynthesis and, in turn, yields; however, this has also been associated with a reduction in the nutritional content of crops, including protein and micronutrients such as iron and zinc. This will produce more calories but not necessarily more nutritious foods, which will impact on health. In addition, climate change can alter the distribution and severity of pests and diseases of crops and livestock, and it is estimated that around a quarter of our food production is already lost in this way.

Climate change predictions based on averages can help predict what can be grown and where in the world, and some countries will do better than others. However, these only provide a partial view, and it is the extremes that make up the average temperature and rainfall, such as heatwaves, cold snaps, floods and droughts, that will be challenging.

At the Global Food Security programme, our own analysis suggests that the risk of extreme weather hitting several major food-producing regions of the world at the same time could triple by 2040, so that a once in 100 years event could become a once in 30 years event. Climatic shocks do not only lead to a substantive yield loss – the impacts are channelled downstream via market and policy responses, such as export bans, for example, and lead to food price spikes. There is some evidence linking food price volatility and social unrest, and more research is needed on the link between climate change, food security and conflict.

Growing homogeneity of diets and food production

Our food system is predicated on a small number of commodity crops. Comparative advantage, coupled with a range of policy levers to underpin production, drives the scales and concentration of production so that some areas become ‘breadbaskets’ for the rest of the world. Globalisation has significant benefits, both in terms of access to food that can be grown more efficiently and cheaply elsewhere, food that may be seasonal but which we want year-round, or food that cannot be grown in a particular country.

One consequence of this is that diets are becoming increasingly similar over time. According to the FAO, just 15 crop plants out of 50,000 provide 90 per cent of the world’s calorie intake, with rice, maize and wheat making up two-thirds of this. Large-scale agriculture has undoubtedly improved efficiency and reduced the price of food, but its scale, uniformity and lack of genetic diversity can reduce resilience to pests and diseases and extreme weather. It can also reduce biodiversity through monocultures, and has implications for nutrition, adding to the growing disparity between what we produce in the world and what we should be eating as part of a healthy diet (Figure 4). This suggests that we should be diversifying both food production and demand, with potential win-win-wins for health, sustainability and resilience.

Global agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement could be game changing in shaping future food systems. In terms of the latter, one analysis suggests that the food system will likely account for the majority of the carbon budget and a 2°C rise by 2050, if diets continue as they are.9 Given that the food system accounts for around 30 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, it should have a strong role in climate change mitigation. Our work on ‘Paris-compliant healthy food systems’ will identify the hotspots for reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the food system that could have simultaneous benefits for nutrition. 10

The food industry has a significant role to play in making our food healthier and more sustainable. We are already seeing many companies changing their business models and embracing the trends being set by Millennials, who account for around a quarter of our population. Changing attitudes coupled with new technology will lead to a whole host of new food products in future, many plant-based, and with health and sustainability at their core.

•  Gerland P, Raftery AE, Ševčíková H, Li N, Gu D, Spoorenberg T, Alkema L, Fosdick BK, Chunn J, Lalic N, Bay G. World population stabilization unlikely this century. Science 2014;346(6206):234-237. 
• Tilman D, Balzer C, Hill J, Befort BL. Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(50):20260-20264. 
• Wellesley L, Happer C, Froggatt A. Changing climatediets: pathways to lower meat consumption. Royal Institute of International Affairs. 2015. Chatham House.
• Ja C. Food needs over next 50 years greater than all of human history, says CSIRO. 2009. www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/ food-needs-over-next-50-years-greater-than-all-of-human-hi story-says-csiro/news-story/aebad37b22bfb145b7a3b421ddb62997.
• Alexandratos N, Bruinsma J. World agriculture towards 2030/2050: the 2012 revision (No.12-03, p4). Rome. 2012. FAO: ESA Working paper.
• NCD Risk Factor Collaboration. Trends in adult body-mass index in 200 countries from 1975 to 2014: a pooled analysis of 1698 population-based measurement studies with 19.2 million participants. The Lancet. 2016;387(10026):1377-1396.
• Godfray HCJ, Beddington JR, Crute IR, Haddad L, Lawrence D, Muir JF, Pretty J, Robinson S, Thomas SM, Toulmin C. Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science. 2010;327(5967): 812-818.
• International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook. 2016. France.
• Wellesley L, Happer C, Froggatt A. Changing climate, changing diets: pathways to lower meat consumption, Royal Institute of International Affairs. 2015. Chatham House.
• Global Food Security. Paris-compliant healthy food systems. 2017. Insight Paper.

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The challenges of sustainably feeding a growing planet

• Original Paper
• Published: 08 March 2015
• Volume 7 , pages 185–198, ( 2015 )

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• Thomas W. Hertel 1  

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Feeding the world’s population while ensuring environmental sustainability is one of the world’s ‘grand challenges’. While population and income will remain the most important drivers of global food production, their relative importance will be reversed by 2050, with income growth becoming the dominant force. Energy prices are a wildcard, with continued low prices dampening demand for biofuels and encouraging intensification of production. In contrast, a return to high oil prices could greatly increase pressure to expand cropland. Regional water shortages are likely to constrain irrigated agriculture in many key river basins. However, at global scale, international trade will moderate the impacts of water scarcity on food supplies and prices. The key determinant of global food prices in 2050 will be the rate of overall technological progress in agriculture. Here, there are two competing views of the world. Pessimists point to the slowing rate of yield growth in many key breadbaskets, suggesting this will be exacerbated by climate change. In contrast, optimists argue that overall productivity growth has continued to rise – fueled by record public R&D investments in China, India and Brazil, as well as by the private sector. Reduced food waste and post-harvest losses offers another potential source of food supply. However, future agricultural land use is likely to face increasing competition from environmental services, including carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Understanding these competing demands for global resources will require greater inter-disciplinary research effort, supported by improved global geospatial data and analytical frameworks.

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Sustainable intensification: overcoming land and water constraints on food production

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Sustainable food production: constraints, challenges and choices by 2050

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The Challenge of Feeding the World While Preserving Natural Resources: Findings of a Global Bioeconomic Model

One might reasonably ask: How can we know how consumers in Ethiopia will behave when they become as rich as consumers in South Africa? Will Chinese consumers follow the path charted by consumers in Taiwan? In order to predict the evolution of consumer spending as incomes rise, economists look at behavior across many countries, seeking to identify broad patterns across wide ranges of income. There is considerable evidence that consumers follow a common pattern with regard to broad-based consumption behavior (e.g., food, housing etc.) (Dowrick and Quiggin 1994 ). Muhammad et al. ( 2011 ) estimate the response of food consumption to changing prices and income. They find some relationships that are important for projections purposes – namely the diminishing marginal impact of income on consumption, as well as the fact that consumers’ responsiveness to food price changes also diminishes as incomes rise. Hertel and Baldos use these relationships to “backcast” global food demand, prices and land use, and find that, at global scale, they are able to reproduce historical food consumption over a 45 year period. This gives us some hope that we can say something useful about the next 45 years.

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Yet another, more pedestrian argument behind the slowdown in yield growth is simple arithmetic. As yield trends tend to grow at a linear rate (e.g., 1 bushel of grain/acre/year), as the yield level grows, this annual increment represents a smaller and smaller % of the total, thereby resulting in a slowing rate of growth (Cassman et al. 2010 ).

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Acknowledgements

This paper was part of a workshop sponsored by the OECD Co-operative Research Programme on Biological Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Systems.

Paper submitted for inclusion in a special issue of the journal: Food Security entitled: “Feeding 9.6 Billion in 2050: Challenges and Choices”, edited by Grafton, Daugberg and Qureshi. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the MIT-CSIS Energy Sustainability Challenge Forum, May 6–7, 2013: Washington, D.C. The author acknowledges valuable discussions with Uris Baldos, Derek Byerlee, Quentin Grafton, David Lobell, John Reilly and Farzad Taheripour. He would also like to acknowledge support for the underlying research into the climate-food-energy-land-water nexus from US DOE, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Integrated Assessment Research Program, Grant No. DE-SC005171, and from the National Science Foundation, grant 0951576: DMUU: Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy.

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Hertel, T.W. The challenges of sustainably feeding a growing planet. Food Sec. 7 , 185–198 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-015-0440-2

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November 1, 2011

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Can We Feed the World and Sustain the Planet?

A five-step global plan could double food production by 2050 while greatly reducing environmental damage

By Jonathan A. Foley

Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. the world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it, because prices are escalating.

But another challenge looms.

By 2050 the world’s population will increase by two billion or three billion, which will likely double the demand for food, according to several studies. Demand will also rise because many more people will have higher incomes, which means they will eat more, especially meat. Increasing use of cropland for biofuels will put additional demands on our farms. So even if we solve today’s problems of poverty and access—a daunting task—we will also have to produce twice as much to guarantee adequate supply worldwide.

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And that’s not all.

By clearing tropical forests, farming marginal lands, and intensifying industrial farming in sensitive landscapes and watersheds, humankind has made agriculture the planet’s dominant environmental threat. Agriculture already consumes a large percentage of the earth’s land surface and is destroying habitat, using up freshwater, polluting rivers and oceans, and emitting greenhouse gases more extensively than almost any other human activity. To guarantee the globe’s long-term health, we must dramatically reduce agriculture’s adverse impacts.

The world’s food system faces three incredible, interwoven challenges. It must guarantee that all seven billion people alive today are adequately fed; it must double food production in the next 40 years; and it must achieve both goals while becoming truly environmentally sustainable.

Could these simultaneous goals possibly be met? An international team of experts, which I coordinated, has settled on five steps that, if pursued together, could raise by more than 100 percent the food available for human consumption globally, while significantly lessening greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity losses, water use and water pollution. Tackling the triple challenge will be one of the most important tests humanity has ever faced. It is fair to say that our response will determine the fate of our civilization.

Bumping Up against Barriers At first blush, the way to feed more people would seem clear: grow more food, by expanding farmland and improving yield—the amount of crops harvested per hectare. Unfortunately, the world is running into significant barriers on both counts.

Society already farms roughly 38 percent of the earth’s land surface, not counting Greenland or Antarctica. Agriculture is by far the biggest human use of land on the planet; nothing else comes close. And most of that 38 percent covers the best farmland. Much of the remainder is covered by deserts, mountains, tundra, ice, cities, parks and other unsuitable growing areas. The few remaining frontiers are mainly in tropical forests and savannas, which are vital to the stability of the globe, especially as stores of carbon and biodiversity. Expanding into those areas is not a good idea, yet over the past 20 years five million to 10 million hectares of cropland a year have been created, with a significant portion of that amount in the tropics. These additions enlarged the net area of cultivated land by only 3 percent, however, because of farmland losses caused by urban development and other forces, particularly in temperate zones.

Improving yield also sounds enticing. Yet our research team found that average global crop yield increased by about 20 percent in the past 20 years—far less than what is typically reported. That improvement is significant, but the rate is nowhere near enough to double food production by midcentury. Whereas yields of some crops improved substantially, others saw little gain and a few even declined.

Feeding more people would be easier if all the food we grew went into human hands. But only 60 percent of the world’s crops are meant for people: mostly grains, followed by pulses (beans, lentils), oil plants, vegetables and fruits. Another 35 percent is used for animal feed, and the final 5 percent goes to biofuels and other industrial products. Meat is the biggest issue here. Even with the most efficient meat and dairy systems, feeding crops to animals reduces the world’s potential food supply. Typically grain-fed cattle operations use 30 kilograms of grain to make one kilogram of edible, boneless beef. Chicken and pork are more efficient, and grass-fed beef converts nonfood material into protein. No matter how you slice it, though, grain-fed meat production systems are a drain on the global food supply.

Another deterrent to growing more food is damage to the environment, which is already extensive. Only our use of energy, with its profound impacts on climate and ocean acidification, rivals the sheer magnitude of agriculture’s environmental impacts. Our research team estimates that agriculture has already cleared or radically transformed 70 percent of the world’s prehistoric grasslands, 50 percent of the savannas, 45 percent of the temperate deciduous forests and 25 percent of the tropical forests. Since the last ice age, nothing has disrupted ecosystems more. Agriculture’s physical footprint is nearly 60 times that of the world’s pavements and buildings.

Freshwater is another casualty. Humans use an astounding 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, mostly withdrawn from rivers and aquifers. Irrigation accounts for 70 percent of the draw. If we count only consumptive water use—water that is used and not returned to the watershed—irrigation climbs to 80 or 90 percent of the total. As a result, many large rivers, such as the Colorado, have diminished flows, some have dried up altogether, and many places have rapidly declining water tables, including regions of the U.S. and India.

Water is not only disappearing, it is being contaminated. Fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides are being spread at incredible levels and are found in nearly every ecosystem. The flows of nitrogen and phosphorus through the environment have more than doubled since 1960, causing widespread water pollution and enormous hypoxic “dead zones” at the mouths of many of the world’s major rivers. Ironically, fertilizer runoff from farmland—in the name of growing more food—compromises another crucial source of nutrition: coastal fishing grounds. Fertilizer certainly has been a key ingredient of the green revolution that has helped feed the world, but when nearly half the fertilizer we apply runs off rather than nourishes crops, we clearly can do better.

Agriculture is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions from society, collectively accounting for about 35 percent of the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide we release. That is more than the emissions from worldwide transportation (including all cars, trucks and planes) or electricity generation. The energy used to grow, process and transport food is a concern, but the vast majority of emissions comes from tropical deforestation, methane released from animals and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide from overfertilized soils.

Five Solutions Modern agriculture has been an incredibly positive force in the world, but we can no longer ignore its dwindling ability to expand or the mounting environmental harm it imposes. Previous approaches to solving food and environmental issues were often at odds. We could boost food production by clearing more land or using more water and chemicals but only at a cost to the environment. Or we could restore ecosystems by taking farmland out of cultivation but only by reducing food production. This either-or approach is no longer acceptable. We need truly integrated solutions.

After many months of research and deliberation—based on analysis of newly generated global agricultural and environmental data—our international team has settled on a five-point plan for dealing with food and environmental challenges together.

Stop expanding agriculture’s footprint. Our first recommendation is to slow and ultimately stop the expansion of agriculture, particularly into tropical forests and savannas. The demise of these ecosystems has far-reaching impacts on the environment, especially through lost biodiversity and increased carbon dioxide emissions (from clearing land).

Slowing deforestation would dramatically reduce environmental damage while imposing only minor constraints on global food production. The resulting dip in farm capacity could be offset by reducing the displacement of more productive croplands by urbanization, degradation and abandonment.

Many proposals have been made to reduce deforestation. One of the most promising is the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanism. Under REDD, rich nations pay tropical nations to protect their rain forests, in exchange for carbon credits. Other mechanisms include developing certification standards for agricultural products so that supply chains can be assured that crops were not grown on lands created by deforestation. Also, better biofuel policy that relies on nonfood crops such as switchgrass instead of food crops could make vital farmland newly available.

Close the world’s yield gaps . To double global food production without expanding agriculture’s footprint, we must significantly improve yields of existing farmlands. Two options exist: We can boost the productivity of our best farms—raising their “yield ceiling” through improved crop genetics and management. Or we can improve the yields of the world’s least productive farms—closing the “yield gap” between a farm’s current yield and its higher potential yield. The second option provides the largest and most immediate gain—especially in regions where hunger is most acute.

Our research team has analyzed global patterns of crop yields and found that much of the world has a significant yield gap. In particular, yields could increase substantially across many parts of Africa, Central America and eastern Europe. In these regions, better seeds, more effective fertilizer application and efficient irrigation could produce much more food on the same amount of land. Our analysis suggests that closing the yield gap for the world’s top 16 crops could increase total food production by 50 to 60 percent, with little environmental damage.

Reducing yield gaps in the least productive agricultural lands may often require some additional fertilizer and water. Care will have to be taken to avoid unbridled irrigation and chemical use. Many other techniques can improve yield. “Reduced tillage” planting techniques disturb less soil, preventing erosion. Cover crops planted between food-crop seasons reduce weeds and add nutrients and nitrogen to the soil when plowed under. Lessons from organic and agroecological systems can also be adopted, such as leaving crop residues on fields so that they decompose into nutrients. To close the world’s yield gaps, we also have to overcome serious economic and social challenges, including better distribution of fertilizer and seed varieties to farms in impoverished regions and improving access to global markets for many regions.

Use resources much more efficiently . To reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture, low- and high-yield regions alike must practice agriculture with vastly greater efficiency: far more crop output per unit of water, fertilizer and energy.

On average, it takes about one liter of irrigation water to grow one calorie of food, although some places use much more. Our analysis finds that farms can significantly curb water use without much reduction in food production, especially in dry climates. Primary strategies include drip irrigation (where water is applied directly to the plant’s base and not wastefully sprayed into the air); mulching (covering the soil with organic matter to retain moisture); and reducing water lost from irrigation systems (by lessening evaporation from canals and reservoirs).

With fertilizers, we face a kind of Goldilocks problem. Some places have too few nutrients and therefore poor crop production, whereas others have too much, leading to pollution. Almost no one uses fertilizers “just right.” Our analysis shows hotspots on the planet—particularly in China, northern India, the central U.S. and western Europe—where farmers could substantially reduce fertilizer use with little or no impact on food production. Amazingly, only 10 percent of the world’s cropland generates 30 to 40 percent of agriculture’s fertilizer pollution.

Among the actions that can fix this excess are policy and economic incentives, such as payments to farmers for watershed stewardship and protection, for reducing excessive fertilizer use, for improving manure management (especially manure storage, so that less runs off into the watershed during a storm), for capturing excess nutrients through recycling, and for instituting other conservation practices. In addition, restoring wetlands will enhance their capacity to act as a natural sponge to filter out nutrients in runoff.

Here again reduced tillage can help nourish the soil, as can precision agriculture (applying fertilizer and water only when and where they are needed and most effective) and organic farming techniques.

Shift diets away from meat . We can dramatically increase global food availability and environmental sustainability by using more of our crops to feed people directly and less to fatten livestock.

Globally, humans could net up to three quadrillion additional calories every year—a 50 percent increase from our current supply—by switching to all-plant diets. Naturally, our current diets and uses of crops have many economic and social benefits, and our preferences are unlikely to change completely. Still, even small shifts in diet, say, from grain-fed beef to poultry, pork or pasture-fed beef, can pay off handsomely.

Reduce food waste . A final, obvious but often neglected recommendation is to reduce waste in the food system. Roughly 30 percent of the food produced on the planet is discarded, lost, spoiled or consumed by pests.

In rich countries, much of the waste takes place at the consumer end of the system, in restaurants and trash cans. Simple changes in our daily consumption patterns—reducing oversize portions, food thrown in the garbage, and the number of takeout and restaurant meals—could significantly trim losses, as well as our expanding waistlines. In poorer countries, the losses are similar in size but occur at the producer end, in the form of failed crops, stockpiles ruined by pests, or food that is never delivered because of bad infrastructure and markets. Improved storage, refrigeration and distribution systems can cut waste appreciably. Moreover, better market tools can connect people who have crops to those who need them, such as cell-phone systems in Africa that link suppliers, traders and purchasers.

Although completely eliminating waste from farm to fork is not realistic, even small steps would be extremely beneficial. Targeted efforts—especially reducing waste of the most resource-intensive foods such as meat and dairy—could make a big difference.

Moving toward a Networked Food System In principle, our five-point strategy can address many food security and environmental challenges. Together the steps could increase the world’s food availability by 100 to 180 percent, while significantly lowering greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity losses, water use and water pollution.

It is important to emphasize that all five points (and perhaps more) must be pursued together. No single strategy is sufficient to solve all our problems. Think silver buckshot, not a silver bullet. We have tremendous successes from the green revolution and industrial-scale agriculture to build on, along with innovations in organic farming and local food systems. Let’s take the best ideas and incorporate them into a new approach—a sustainable food system that focuses on nutritional, social and environmental performance, to bring responsible food production to scale.

We can configure this next-generation system as a network of local agricultural systems that are sensitive to nearby climate, water resources, ecosystems and culture and that are connected through efficient means of global trade and transport. Such a system could be resilient and also pay farmers a living wage.

One device that would help foster this new food system would be the equivalent of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program now in place for constructing new commercial buildings sustainably. This LEED program awards increasingly higher levels of certification based on points that are accumulated by incorporating any of a wide range of green options, from solar power and efficient lighting to recycled building materials and low construction waste.

For sustainable agriculture, foods would be awarded points based on how well they deliver nutrition, food security and other public benefits, minus their environmental and social costs. This certification would help us get beyond current food labels such as “local” and “organic,” which really do not tell us much about what we are eating. Instead we can look at the whole performance of our food—across nutritional, social and environmental dimensions—and weigh the costs and benefits of different farming approaches.

Imagine the possibilities: sustainable citrus and coffee from the tropics, connected to sustainable cereals from the temperate zone, supplemented by locally grown greens and root vegetables, all grown under transparent, performance-based standards. Use your smartphone and the latest sustainable food app, and you will learn where your food came from, who grew it, how it was grown, and how it ranks against various social, nutritional and environmental criteria. And when you find food that works, you can tweet about it to your social network of farmers and foodies.

The principles and practices of our different agricultural systems—from large-scale commercial to local and organic—provide the foundation for grappling with the world’s food security and environmental needs. Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way will be one of the greatest challenges our civilization has had to confront. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world. There is no time to lose. 

Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people

Affiliation.

• 1 Department of Zoology and Institute of Biodiversity at the James Martin 21st Century School, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK. [email protected]
• PMID: 20110467
• DOI: 10.1126/science.1185383

Continuing population and consumption growth will mean that the global demand for food will increase for at least another 40 years. Growing competition for land, water, and energy, in addition to the overexploitation of fisheries, will affect our ability to produce food, as will the urgent requirement to reduce the impact of the food system on the environment. The effects of climate change are a further threat. But the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably. A multifaceted and linked global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security, different components of which are explored here.

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What World War II taught us about how to help starving people today

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Surviving children of the Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the camps the Nazis had set up to exterminate Jews and kill millions of others. Research into the appropriate way to "re-feed" those who've experienced starvation was prompted by the deaths of camp survivors after liberation. ullstein bild/Getty Images hide caption

Editor's note: This story contains detailed descriptions of how starvation affects the body.

Famine has been a threat to humanity since ancient times.

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Now aid advocates are calling for those lessons to be applied to today's food emergencies including the crises in Sudan, Gaza and Haiti.

Lessons from World War II

To understand why, Alex de Waal , a social scientist at Tufts University who specializes in famines, says you need to go back to an episode that sparked modern study of the subject: The moment at the end of World War II when Allied forces liberated the concentration camps that the Nazis had set up to exterminate Jews and kill millions of others.

The survivors of these camps were emaciated.

"American and British soldiers rushed to feed [them]," says de Waal. "Then had seen to their dismay that many of them actually perished."

It turned out starvation had thrown the survivors' biological functions so out of whack, their bodies couldn't handle starting up regular eating.

"It's called the re-feeding syndrome," says de Waal.

In the years since, researchers have uncovered a lot of the reasons behind it. For instance, when someone is suffering from severe acute malnutrition, "blood sugar levels and electrolyte levels can be volatile," says de Waal. "And simply feeding regular foodstuffs can actually upset those balances" – with sometimes deadly consequences.

Scientists also discovered some long term impacts of extreme malnutrition by studying another grim chapter of the Second World War: A famine during Germany's occupation of the Netherlands that's often referred to as the Dutch "hunger winter," when the Nazis blocked food supplies. Many of the survivors participated in follow-up studies for decades. The findings, says de Waal: "The children who were very young when they suffered malnutrition grew up stunted — they were appreciably shorter than their elder or younger siblings."

They also showed cognitive deficits, did less well in school and went on to have more health problems as adults.

By the 1980s additional research on brain development helped explain why young children are so vulnerable to this kind of lasting effect, says Anu Narayan , a senior adviser at UNICEF who coordinates its response to food emergencies affecting children.

"We now know that, really for children, under two years of age is when you're forming most of your neural pathways," says Narayan.

And a young child's stomach is very small.

"So the frequency with which they need to eat, and the quality of nutrition with each of the foods that they're eating, needs to be higher."

This means that even in the earliest stages of a food crisis, as families shift from consuming vegetables and proteins toward grains that are cheaper but less nutritious, "the child starts losing weight pretty rapidly."

It's the symptom of acute malnutrition often referred to as "wasting."

"That's when we see the quietness in the children. They'll become very, very quiet," says Narayan.

Their bodies are reserving energy for only the most basic functions.

Soon, even those bodily functions start to break down – often beginning with the regulation of fluid, says Narayan. "Children's bellies will get distended. There is accumulation of fluid in their feet and their extremities."

Their immune system also begins to suffer, and children often succumbs to diarrheal and respiratory infections.

They become too weak to stand up.

"At that stage," says Narayan, "they absolutely need medical care."

And aid groups have gotten really skilled at providing that kind of care.

For example, de Waal notes, in 1974 there was a massive famine in Bangladesh. In the aftermath, "nutritionists in South Asia developed very low-cost technologies for providing therapeutic feeding and salts and sugars for malnourished children." By the 1990s, he adds, clinicians had developed sophisticated protocols for how to use them.

Why help is now harder to give

Today, says de Waal, there's a new challenge: In an increasing number of hunger crises, aid workers who can provide that kind of specialized care are unable to get in due to ongoing conflicts.

UNICEF's Narayan agrees. Right now, she says, "the largest number of children at risk is in Sudan."

World experts project that in Sudan, nearly 4 million children under age 5 will suffer from acute malnutrition this year. And 730,000 of them will reach the life-threatening stage.

Also worrying, says Narayan is Northern Gaza, because of how quickly malnutrition has spread through the population. A data team led by UNICEF estimates that more than 21,000 young children there are now acutely malnourished — with about 4,400 at a point where, without medical intervention "they will not survive."

In short, says Narayan, for all the scientific progress on bringing people back from the brink of starvation, "when our access is limited, those are the children that we're likely to lose."

• malnourished children

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How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward

Journalists, researchers and the public often look at society through the lens of generation, using terms like Millennial or Gen Z to describe groups of similarly aged people. This approach can help readers see themselves in the data and assess where we are and where we’re headed as a country.

Pew Research Center has been at the forefront of generational research over the years, telling the story of Millennials as they came of age politically and as they moved more firmly into adult life . In recent years, we’ve also been eager to learn about Gen Z as the leading edge of this generation moves into adulthood.

But generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology. There’s also been a growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.

Recently, as we were preparing to embark on a major research project related to Gen Z, we decided to take a step back and consider how we can study generations in a way that aligns with our values of accuracy, rigor and providing a foundation of facts that enriches the public dialogue.

A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations.

We set out on a yearlong process of assessing the landscape of generational research. We spoke with experts from outside Pew Research Center, including those who have been publicly critical of our generational analysis, to get their take on the pros and cons of this type of work. We invested in methodological testing to determine whether we could compare findings from our earlier telephone surveys to the online ones we’re conducting now. And we experimented with higher-level statistical analyses that would allow us to isolate the effect of generation.

What emerged from this process was a set of clear guidelines that will help frame our approach going forward. Many of these are principles we’ve always adhered to , but others will require us to change the way we’ve been doing things in recent years.

Here’s a short overview of how we’ll approach generational research in the future:

We’ll only do generational analysis when we have historical data that allows us to compare generations at similar stages of life. When comparing generations, it’s crucial to control for age. In other words, researchers need to look at each generation or age cohort at a similar point in the life cycle. (“Age cohort” is a fancy way of referring to a group of people who were born around the same time.)

When doing this kind of research, the question isn’t whether young adults today are different from middle-aged or older adults today. The question is whether young adults today are different from young adults at some specific point in the past.

To answer this question, it’s necessary to have data that’s been collected over a considerable amount of time – think decades. Standard surveys don’t allow for this type of analysis. We can look at differences across age groups, but we can’t compare age groups over time.

Another complication is that the surveys we conducted 20 or 30 years ago aren’t usually comparable enough to the surveys we’re doing today. Our earlier surveys were done over the phone, and we’ve since transitioned to our nationally representative online survey panel , the American Trends Panel . Our internal testing showed that on many topics, respondents answer questions differently depending on the way they’re being interviewed. So we can’t use most of our surveys from the late 1980s and early 2000s to compare Gen Z with Millennials and Gen Xers at a similar stage of life.

This means that most generational analysis we do will use datasets that have employed similar methodologies over a long period of time, such as surveys from the U.S. Census Bureau. A good example is our 2020 report on Millennial families , which used census data going back to the late 1960s. The report showed that Millennials are marrying and forming families at a much different pace than the generations that came before them.

Even when we have historical data, we will attempt to control for other factors beyond age in making generational comparisons. If we accept that there are real differences across generations, we’re basically saying that people who were born around the same time share certain attitudes or beliefs – and that their views have been influenced by external forces that uniquely shaped them during their formative years. Those forces may have been social changes, economic circumstances, technological advances or political movements.

When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

The tricky part is isolating those forces from events or circumstances that have affected all age groups, not just one generation. These are often called “period effects.” An example of a period effect is the Watergate scandal, which drove down trust in government among all age groups. Differences in trust across age groups in the wake of Watergate shouldn’t be attributed to the outsize impact that event had on one age group or another, because the change occurred across the board.

Changing demographics also may play a role in patterns that might at first seem like generational differences. We know that the United States has become more racially and ethnically diverse in recent decades, and that race and ethnicity are linked with certain key social and political views. When we see that younger adults have different views than their older counterparts, it may be driven by their demographic traits rather than the fact that they belong to a particular generation.

Controlling for these factors can involve complicated statistical analysis that helps determine whether the differences we see across age groups are indeed due to generation or not. This additional step adds rigor to the process. Unfortunately, it’s often absent from current discussions about Gen Z, Millennials and other generations.

When we can’t do generational analysis, we still see value in looking at differences by age and will do so where it makes sense. Age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. And even if age gaps aren’t rooted in generational differences, they can still be illuminating. They help us understand how people across the age spectrum are responding to key trends, technological breakthroughs and historical events.

Each stage of life comes with a unique set of experiences. Young adults are often at the leading edge of changing attitudes on emerging social trends. Take views on same-sex marriage , for example, or attitudes about gender identity .

Many middle-aged adults, in turn, face the challenge of raising children while also providing care and support to their aging parents. And older adults have their own obstacles and opportunities. All of these stories – rooted in the life cycle, not in generations – are important and compelling, and we can tell them by analyzing our surveys at any given point in time.

When we do have the data to study groups of similarly aged people over time, we won’t always default to using the standard generational definitions and labels. While generational labels are simple and catchy, there are other ways to analyze age cohorts. For example, some observers have suggested grouping people by the decade in which they were born. This would create narrower cohorts in which the members may share more in common. People could also be grouped relative to their age during key historical events (such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic) or technological innovations (like the invention of the iPhone).

By choosing not to use the standard generational labels when they’re not appropriate, we can avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes or oversimplifying people’s complex lived experiences.

Existing generational definitions also may be too broad and arbitrary to capture differences that exist among narrower cohorts. A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behavior within generations. The key is to pick a lens that’s most appropriate for the research question that’s being studied. If we’re looking at political views and how they’ve shifted over time, for example, we might group people together according to the first presidential election in which they were eligible to vote.

With these considerations in mind, our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

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