Global food production needs to keep increasing, but not as fast as previously thought
a prominent ecologist at the University of Minnesota. Hunter and his colleagues did not dispute these underlying projections; they simply updated them to help reframe the narrative.
“Both of these projections are credible and important, but the baseline years they used are over a decade past now, and global production has ramped up considerably in that time,” Hunter explained.
So, while Tilman’s study showed that the world will demand 100 percent more calories in 2050 than in 2005, that is the equivalent of only a 68 percent increase over production levels in 2014, the most recent year with available data. To meet the FAO projection, which used different assumptions and projected lower demand, production would have to increase only 26 percent from 2014 levels.
“Given how much production has increased recently, it is pretty misleading to continue to argue that we need to double our crop output by 2050,” Hunter said.
Aiming to double food production makes it much harder to move the needle on our environmental challenges.
“To double food production, we would have to increase global agricultural output faster than we ever have before, and we are at a point in the developed world where we already are pushing our farming systems to the max. We don’t know how to double yields in these systems, especially without multiplying our environmental impacts,” Hunter said.
Despite increased discussion of sustainability in agriculture, the common narrative that we need to drastically increase food production is seldom challenged in agricultural circles, according to the researchers. This is partly because definitions of sustainability vary widely, ranging from “not increasing agriculture’s environmental footprint” to achieving “major reductions in environmental impact.”
Penn State notes that the researchers present hard data and quantitative goals to help clear up this confusion. For global greenhouse gas emissions and nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River Basin, the data show that agriculture’s environmental performance is going in the wrong direction, with aggregate impacts steadily increasing. Science-based goals indicate that these impacts must fall sharply over the coming decades to avoid the worst impacts of climate change and reduce the size of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
The authors argue for research and policy efforts to help identify production methods that can meet growing global food demand while also hitting sustainability targets.
“Even with lower demand projections, growing enough food while protecting the environment will be a daunting challenge,” Hunter said. “We call on researchers, policymakers and farmers to embrace this recalibrated vision of the future of agriculture and start working toward these goals.”
— Read more in Mitchell C. Hunter et al., “Agriculture in 2050: Recalibrating Targets for Sustainable Intensification,” Bioscience (forthcoming)
