It’s the year 2050, and the world’s population has just passed 9 billion people. Economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of starvation-level poverty. But the encouraging trend comes with a catch: the global population has soared by 70%, spurring a doubling of demand for more calorie-dense, nutritious food yet there are no more large plots of farmable land. Exacerbating the crisis, climate instability is intensifying, disrupting our fragile ecosystem. We are speeding towards a reckoning, writes Jon Entine in an article published by the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP).

This bleak scenario is by no means baked in, but it is more than just crisis-mongering. There are no easy solutions to a looming food and sustainability crisis. Already, today, food-exporting, agriculturally rich regions have little unused land to sow, and China, India, and Russia are in no position to significantly increase exports.

Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are among the few regions with large plots of exploitable land, but they are food-producing deserts on a continental scale. Without a dramatic increase in production and yield, we’ll face a tipping point in years rather than decades. The poorest regions in the world desperately need an environmentally sustainable agricultural model.

With the help of genetic innovation and precision agriculture on its extensive and fertile farmland, the United States has become the world’s most efficient producer of food. But its farming practices are not easily replicated in parts of the world where water is scarce, desertification is escalating, insect swarms are common, and monsoons are on the increase.

Only one region offers a template that could be exportable to underdeveloped countries. In the 1950s and 60s, forced to import food, and with 350 million hectares (3.5 million square kilometers) of unfarmable, rock-strewn land across the Cerrado and Gran Chico tropical savannahs—94% of the region—South America seemed as agriculturally hopeless then as most of Africa and Asia appears today.

Sixty years later, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Colombia are major food exporters, and Brazil has evolved into an agricultural superpower, feeding around 1.2 billion people globally.

Source: Genetic Literacy Project (GLP). Read the comprehensive article here
Image: Credit JaeHoon KIM from Pixabay