If current trends continue, by 2050 there won't be enough food to feed the world, study says

If the world's population continues to grow at its projected rate, and crop yields remain as expected, by 2050 there won't be enough food to feed the world, Population is expected to grow from 7 billion today to 9.6 billion in 2050, but a University of Minnesota study "found that crop yields haven’t been rising at a sufficient pace to meet projected demand by 2050," Brad Plumer reports for The Washington Post. The study was published in PLOS One, the journal of the Public Library of Science, which describes itself as "organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public."

(Chart by PLOS One: "The study takes a careful look at historical improvements in crop yields for corn, rice, wheat and soybeans...yields per acre have been growing fairly constantly in all four areas," Plumer writes. "The solid lines show what would happen if this growth continued. The dashed lines above show how productivity would need to grow even more rapidly ... to satisfy expected demand and double global food production by 2050 in a sustainable manner, without razing more forests.")

Jonathan Foley, an agricultural expert and one of the authors, told Plumer, “In many parts of the world, we haven’t seen enough investment in agriculture because of economics or policies or institutions." But another problem could be that farmers are reaching a limit on how much yields can keep rising. Foley said, “We can sometimes bust through these walls with technology, genetics, better seeds. But at a certain point we run up against fundamental physiological limits for plants. If billion of years of evolution can’t figure it out, are we going to be able to? That I don’t know.”

If crops yields don't improve quickly enough, food prices could increase, or new farmland will be needed, which means clearing away more forests, and possibly accelerating climate change, Plumer writes. In a 2009 essay for Scientific American, Foley argued that the world should focus on five things: Stop razing forests and savannas for farmland — by, for instance, shifting away from crop-based biofuels; focus on boosting yields where it’s technologically doable, especially in Africa; figure out how to use water and fertilizer more efficiently everywhere; reduce the amount of meat in our diets; and cut down on the enormous amount of food waste worldwide. (Read more)