23 July 2009

Getting a handle on future food, energy demands

With food needs of the planet expected to soar by 50% over the next 40 years, planning and investment in global agriculture will become critically important, according a new report.

The report provides a framework for investing in sustainable agriculture against a backdrop of massive population growth and escalating demands for food, fiber, and fuel.

“We are at a crossroads in terms of our investments in agriculture and what we will need to do to feed the world population by 2050,” said David Zaks, a co-author of the report and a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s leading global investment banks, produced the report in collaboration with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

By 2050, world population should exceed 9 billion people, up from 6.5 billion today. A gap is already emerging between agricultural production and demand, and the disconnect should amplify by climate change, increasing demand for biofuels, and a growing scarcity of water, according to the report.

“There will come a point in time when we will have difficulties feeding world population,” said Zaks, a graduate student whose research focuses on the patterns, trends, and processes of global agriculture.

Although unchecked population growth will put severe strains on global agriculture, the world can meet the demand through a combination of expanding agriculture to now marginal or unused land, substituting new types of crops, and technology, according to the report. “The solution is only going to come about by changing the way we use land, changing the things that we grow, and changing the way that we grow them,” Zaks said.

The report notes agricultural research and technological development in the U.S. and Europe have increased in the last decade, but those advances have not translated into increased production on a global scale.

The report identifies strategies to increase global agricultural productions in sustainable ways:

• Improvements in irrigation, fertilization, and agricultural equipment using technologies ranging from geographic information systems and global analytical maps to the development of precision, high performance equipment.
• Applying sophisticated management and technologies on a global scale, essentially extending research and investment into developing regions of the world.
• Investing in “farmer competence” to take full advantage of new technologies through education and extension services, including investing private capital in better training farmers.
• Intensifying yield using new technologies, including genetically modified crops.
• Increasing the amount of land under cultivation without expanding to forested lands through the use of multiple cropping, improving degraded crop and pasturelands, and converting productive pastures to biofuel production.

“First we have to improve yield,” said Zaks. “Next, we have to bring in more land in agriculture while considering the environmental implications, and then we have to look at technology.”

For related information, go to www.isa.org/environment.