How Will We Feed The World in 2050?

by Mike Smith · 2009-10-05 06:39:00 UTC
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How To Feed the World 2050 is a high-level expert forum held in Rome next week that will ask how on earth we will feed 9 billion people, as demand for food grows, and is forced to compete with biofuels for the arable land. Add a lot of climate change to the mix and increasing rates of urbanization meaning fewer people living in rural areas, and growing more food isn't going to be easy.

There are answers, like increasing yields rather than farming more land, but food production is going to have to increase by 70 percent if we want to avoid more of the world's populations drifting deeper in poverty and hunger. There is hope, suggests FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN) Assistant Director-General Hafez Ghanem: "FAO is cautiously optimistic about the world's potential to feed itself by 2050."

As if hunger alone wasn't enough, let's not forget the the paper (pdf) explaining how under-nutrition can be an "underlying cause of child-deaths associated with diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and measles." The How To Feed The World In 2050 forum is one of a number of events, including World Food Day on October 16th, that prepare the ground for the World Summit on Food Security, November 16-18.

Photo credit: Filipe Moreira

Mike Smith
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