Rising population ‘increases risk of food insecurity’
The world would have to boost cereals output by 1 billion tons and produce 200 million extra tons of livestock products a year by 2050 to feed a population projected at 9 billion people, up from 7 billion now, according to UN estimates.
Intensive farming of the past decades has helped to feed millions of hungry people, but it has often led to degradation of land and water systems on which food production depends, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
“These systems at risk may simply not be able to contribute as expected in meeting human demands by 2050. The consequences in terms of hunger and poverty are unacceptable. Remedial action needs to be taken now,” FAO director-general Jacques Diouf said.
A quarter of the earth’s land is highly degraded, another 8% is moderately degraded, while 36% is stable or slightly degraded and 10% ranked as improving, the FAO said in its report, State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.
Water scarcity is growing as salinisation and pollution of groundwater, as well as degradation of water bodies and water-related ecosystems, rise, the report said.
In many large rivers, only 5% of former water volumes remain in-stream and some rivers such as China’s Huang He (Yellow River) no longer reach the sea year-round. Large lakes and inland seas have shrunk and half the wetlands of Europe and North America no longer exist, said the Rome-based FAO. With the increasing competition for land and water for food and feed in agriculture, as well as industry and urban development uses, the challenge of providing sufficient food for all has never been greater.
Almost 1 billion people are undernourished, with 578 million people in Asia and 239 million in sub-Saharan Africa, the FAO said.
In developing countries, even if agricultural output doubled by 2050 as expected to feed the world, one person in 20 would still risk being undernourished, equivalent to 370 million hungry people, most of whom would be in Africa and Asia, it said.
Future agricultural production would have to rise faster than population growth for nutrition to improve and for food insecurity and hunger to recede.
That would have to occur largely on existing farming land with improvements coming from sustainable intensification that uses land and water efficiently without harming them, it said.
