Can we feed the world and not destroy the environment?

Background/Question/Methods

Global agricultural demand is expected to roughly double by 2050 due to population growth, diet shifts and biofuel use. However, already 24%-39% of our most important croplands are no longer witnessing yield improvement raising the important question of whether we can continue to feed the world and increase food security. At current rates of net global yield change how much would be the gap between required and achieved crop production? Significant gaps could be closed via increasing the harvested land area but clearing more land for agriculture may not be desirable; the alternative however is global food insecurity. Tracking ~13500 political units globally over the last 20 years we determine where crop yield improvement rates are sufficient to double crop production and where this fails. Scaling the results to the country level, we determine where food security in the top global crops increases, remains stagnant, and decreases from crop yield improvements alone into the future.

Results/Conclusions

Our results show that at the global scale we are not on track to double global crop production from yield increases alone. However, this does not mean that all countries would suffer from reductions in their dietary energy supply per capita. In this presentation we will discuss, given current trends, which countries could produce greater amounts of per capita globally important crops, which could suffer no significant changes and where the per capita production could reduce. In the later countries without an immediate attention to boosting crop yields the only other pathway to reduce food insecurity is, convert more land to agriculture, implying a major loss of their natural ecosystems, if any still available.