Too Many People & Too Little Food – Food & Energy Needs Will Outpace Production By 2050

Charlton Heston in Soylent Green

Like the plot of a 1970s Charlton Heston movie, a recent report by Deutsche Bank warns that we’d better get busy on food production in the developing world or we’re going to be processing human corpses into high- protein crackers to mollify an itchy populace of illiterate,  starving people ready to riot at the drop of a hat.

OK…that’s not exactly what they said.  They were more circumspect.  Less Hollywood-ish.

“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,” says David Zaks, a co-author of the report and a researcher at the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

According to the report, agricultural production isn’t keeping pace with increasing demand. A pile on of additional needs – like water, biofuels and climate change – are only set to make the problems worse.

“There will come a point in time when we will have difficulties feeding world population,” says Zaks.

And what does Zaks suggest we do about said impending mess?

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

Some of the direct suggestions included investing in “farmer competence” (are you listening Zimbabwe?), improved land use and greater use of technologies like genetically modified crops.

Needless to say, the last suggestions hits at the heart of the pro-organic, anti-genetically modified crops issue.  While they all make good points, yeilds (amount of clories produced per unit of land) are the critical factor.

Read more here.