Can the World Feed Itself Without Destroying Itself?

Based on new data about the Earth’s agri­cul­tural lands and crop yields, the study offers some core strate­gies to meet future food pro­duc­tion needs and envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges. Those strate­gies include:

• Stop farm­ing in places like trop­i­cal rain­forests, which have high eco­log­i­cal value and low food output;
• Improve crop yields in regions of Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe where farm­land isn’t meet­ing its potential;
• Change farm­ing prac­tices to bet­ter man­age water, nutri­ents and chemicals;
• Shift diets away from meat; and
• Stop wast­ing food (up to 1/3 of all food grown is wasted either in pro­duc­tion, trans­port or after purchase).

Taken together, these strate­gies could lead to 100-180% more food avail­able for con­sump­tion and sus­tain the lakes, rivers, forests and soil that food pro­duc­tion depends on.

I talked with Jon Foley—lead author of the study and direc­tor of the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Environment, as well as a mem­ber of The Nature Conservancy’s Science Council advi­sory board—to find out what it would take to make these rec­om­men­da­tions a reality.

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Q: Your study’s find­ings are very promis­ing. But the money ques­tion is—how do we do this? Roughly 1 bil­lion peo­ple don’t have enough food right now, so it’s clearly a dif­fi­cult challenge.

JON FOLEY: In this paper we’re look­ing at, “What does the sci­ence say?” A lot of peo­ple talk about the issue of food, but don’t have much data or sci­ence to back up the claims. So we wanted to find out which ideas can actu­ally solve the problem.

We found that there is no sil­ver bullet—we need to incor­po­rate the best of what we know now into solv­ing the world’s food prob­lems and pro­tect­ing our nat­ural resources.

Can we do it? We have to—it’s absolutely nec­es­sary. It’s up to us to decide what’s polit­i­cally fea­si­ble. We can change how we gov­ern, tax, ship, pro­duce, etc. What we can’t change are the laws of physics.

The prob­lem of feed­ing the world and not wreck­ing the planet is a huge chal­lenge and it’s going to shape a lot of the 21st cen­tury. Solving it will require huge coop­er­a­tion, inno­va­tion and hard work. What our study does is lay out the data.

Q: One focus of the arti­cle is how much land is given over to meat and dairy pro­duc­tion, espe­cially for grow­ing fod­der crops for these ani­mals. Are you rec­om­mend­ing that every­one should be vegetarian?

JON FOLEY: No, we’re not say­ing that—and that’s not real­is­tic. People are going to eat meat. But it mat­ters how meat is produced.

35% of our agri­cul­tural lands go to pro­duc­ing ani­mal feed, and cat­tle and dairy farm­ing take up 3.38 bil­lion hectares. Grain-fed beef is a huge drain on the planet—it takes 30 kilos of grain to pro­duce 1 kilo of bone­less beef. It’s just not effi­cient. We’re bet­ter off pro­duc­ing grass-fed beef or more chicken and pork, which requires far less grain feed. And we’re clear­ing rain­forests to pro­duce this meat! It’s not necessary.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Nature.org.