Food Security - National Agricultural Biotechnology Council ...

Simultaneously Addressing Food Security andGlobal Sustainability Challenges: A Summary1of Jonathan Foley’s Verbal PresentationAllan EagleshamNational Agricultural Biotechnology CouncilIthaca, New Yorkaeaglesh@twcny.rr.comFeeding the World• The question of how we will feed 9 billion people by 2050 is daunting. In 2011the global population increased to over 7 billion. Two billion additional peoplewill constitute a 28% increase. More people will be economically prosperous andwill want to eat meat and other nutritious foods, and there will be increasingdemands for biofuels; these factors, with population increase, will require a doublingof global agricultural output.• While meeting the challenges of doubling output, agriculture will have to bereinvented so that it doesn’t contribute to environmental damage in the longterm. Doubling output while reinventing agriculture will make what is already ahuge problem instantly larger, because we need to think in terms of agriculture’salready vast environmental footprint.• The acreage that is used to grow food is by far the largest use of land in the world.Arable farming occupies about sixty times more land than all of the cities andsuburbs in the world combined—about 18 million square kilometers, equivalentto the size of South America. Pastures constitute the largest ecosystem, larger thanany biome by far at about 34 million square kilometers, equivalent to the size ofAfrica. Together, agriculture already uses about 40% of the earth’s land surface togrow food, leaving rainforest, Siberia, Antarctic and the Sahara and other deserts.1From a transcript of Solutions for a Cultivated Planet: Simultaneously Addressing Food Security and Global SustainabilityChallenges, a verbal presentation made at NABC 23 by Jonathan Foley, University of Minnesota,St. Paul, Minnesota, jfoley@umn.edu.37