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The challenges of sustainably feeding a growing planet

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Abstract

Feeding the world’s population while ensuring environmental sustainability is one of the world’s ‘grand challenges’. While population and income will remain the most important drivers of global food production, their relative importance will be reversed by 2050, with income growth becoming the dominant force. Energy prices are a wildcard, with continued low prices dampening demand for biofuels and encouraging intensification of production. In contrast, a return to high oil prices could greatly increase pressure to expand cropland. Regional water shortages are likely to constrain irrigated agriculture in many key river basins. However, at global scale, international trade will moderate the impacts of water scarcity on food supplies and prices. The key determinant of global food prices in 2050 will be the rate of overall technological progress in agriculture. Here, there are two competing views of the world. Pessimists point to the slowing rate of yield growth in many key breadbaskets, suggesting this will be exacerbated by climate change. In contrast, optimists argue that overall productivity growth has continued to rise – fueled by record public R&D investments in China, India and Brazil, as well as by the private sector. Reduced food waste and post-harvest losses offers another potential source of food supply. However, future agricultural land use is likely to face increasing competition from environmental services, including carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Understanding these competing demands for global resources will require greater inter-disciplinary research effort, supported by improved global geospatial data and analytical frameworks.

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Notes

  1. One might reasonably ask: How can we know how consumers in Ethiopia will behave when they become as rich as consumers in South Africa? Will Chinese consumers follow the path charted by consumers in Taiwan? In order to predict the evolution of consumer spending as incomes rise, economists look at behavior across many countries, seeking to identify broad patterns across wide ranges of income. There is considerable evidence that consumers follow a common pattern with regard to broad-based consumption behavior (e.g., food, housing etc.) (Dowrick and Quiggin 1994). Muhammad et al. (2011) estimate the response of food consumption to changing prices and income. They find some relationships that are important for projections purposes – namely the diminishing marginal impact of income on consumption, as well as the fact that consumers’ responsiveness to food price changes also diminishes as incomes rise. Hertel and Baldos use these relationships to “backcast” global food demand, prices and land use, and find that, at global scale, they are able to reproduce historical food consumption over a 45 year period. This gives us some hope that we can say something useful about the next 45 years.

  2. These authors compare maize yield growth in Iowa with that in France and Italy. In the 25 years prior to the introduction of GM corn (the mid-1990’s), yields in the two regions grew at very similar rates. However, since 1996, GM-based maize yields in Iowa have grown at about 2 %/year, whereas they have remained largely flat in France and Italy. Of course, there were other factors at work during this period, include reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy which reduced the incentives for farmers to intensify production.

  3. Yet another, more pedestrian argument behind the slowdown in yield growth is simple arithmetic. As yield trends tend to grow at a linear rate (e.g., 1 bushel of grain/acre/year), as the yield level grows, this annual increment represents a smaller and smaller % of the total, thereby resulting in a slowing rate of growth (Cassman et al. 2010).

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Acknowledgements

This paper was part of a workshop sponsored by the OECD Co-operative Research Programme on Biological Resource Management for Sustainable Agricultural Systems.

Paper submitted for inclusion in a special issue of the journal: Food Security entitled: “Feeding 9.6 Billion in 2050: Challenges and Choices”, edited by Grafton, Daugberg and Qureshi. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the MIT-CSIS Energy Sustainability Challenge Forum, May 6–7, 2013: Washington, D.C. The author acknowledges valuable discussions with Uris Baldos, Derek Byerlee, Quentin Grafton, David Lobell, John Reilly and Farzad Taheripour. He would also like to acknowledge support for the underlying research into the climate-food-energy-land-water nexus from US DOE, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Integrated Assessment Research Program, Grant No. DE-SC005171, and from the National Science Foundation, grant 0951576: DMUU: Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy.

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  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Thomas W. Hertel

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Correspondence to Thomas W. Hertel.

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Hertel, T.W. The challenges of sustainably feeding a growing planet. Food Sec. 7, 185–198 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-015-0440-2

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