Growing Enough Food

Food crisis looms, warn scientists
By Stuart Gary for ABC Science Online
Feb 12, 2010

A new report by Australian researchers claims far more needs to be done if we are to feed the estimated 9 billion people who will be living on the planet by 2050.

The report, by Professor Mark Tester and Professor Peter Langridge of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics at the University of Adelaide, appears today in the journal Science.
"The simple fact is while food production has increased by 32 million tonnes a year, an annual increase of 44 million tonnes a year is what's actually needed to meet the food targets for 2050 set down by the World Summit on Food security," Professor Tester said.

"But this represents a 38 per cent increase over historical improvements in food production and it needs to be sustained for the next 40 years.

"This scale of increase is unprecedented and will require huge changes to current food production methods."

"India, which has more undernourished people than Africa, is a real challenge," he said.
"Especially with their government's hard stand on genetically modified foods."

Professor Tester believes new breeding technologies are needed to increase crop yields by quickly identifying the best genes for any given conditions.

"This is the way forward if we are to feed the world in the future." Read More

We continue to hear food production experts stress the importance of using technology to meet demand. Just like Norman Borlaug used all the resources and technology at his disposal to stave off world wide famine, we will need to do the same. It would be unethical at this point in time to do anything less. We can’t turn our back on the ability to produce more food when we have hungry people in this world. We can’t let the Michael Pollan’s of the world decide who will eat and who won’t.

Increasing Food Production

World food supply must rise 50%, Ban Ki Moon tells Rome summit


A United Nations summit on resolving the world's food crisis opened this morning with a call from Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, for world farm production to rise by 50 per cent by 2030 to meet growing demand.

He called on leaders to lower export restrictions and import tariffs on food with immediate effect to avoid further hunger and malnutrition, which have caused riots in several Third World countries.

The three day summit, organised by the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization, follows massive food price rises over the past three years. Analysts blame the diversion of crops to make biofuel, drought and natural disasters, fuel costs, and speculation. Read More

The one good thing about the tight worldwide food supplies is that the world is realizing that not much else matters when you have no food. Oil prices don’t matter much when you are hungry. Increasing food production by 50% is possible if we are allowed to use the technology that is at our disposal.