The UN estimates one-in-seven people do not have enough food to eat today, and analysts say nourishing the anticipated 9 billion earthlings by mid-century poses a clear challenge – especially for finding a balance between production and the ecology.
The solution is “beyond individual companies, it’s probably even beyond individual countries,” said Joachim Lammel, a lead researcher for the Norwegian-based Yara fertiliser company.
The UN estimates one-in-seven people do not have enough food to eat today, and analysts say nourishing the anticipated 9 billion earthlings by mid-century poses a clear challenge – especially for finding a balance between production and the ecology.
The solution is “beyond individual companies, it’s probably even beyond individual countries,” said Joachim Lammel, a lead researcher for the Norwegian-based Yara fertiliser company.
“It’s not a question of lack of technical knowledge, it’s absolutely doable. But it requires that more focus and attention is put behind this challenge,” Lammel said in an interview with EurActiv.
Machinery, nutrients, pesticides and irrigation technology helped feed the post-war baby boom, and continuing advances could lift yields in parts of the world expecting the biggest population growth in this century, namely Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
But such farming has consequences for the environment.
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization forecasts a 70% rise in global agricultural demand by 2050 – and a doubling of need in low- and middle-income countries – while warning that climate change, unsustainable water use and deteriorating soil quality threaten future food production. In another warning about looming resource threats, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says in a new report that intensified farming to feed a more crowded planet will threaten freshwater supplies.
Wary Europeans
Such concerns resonate among the public and policymakers in Europe.
A Eurobarometer poll released last week showed that 90% of those surveyed believed agricultural pesticides and fertilisers have a large or moderate impact on water quality, and 77% believe overuse of water on farms has an impact on supplies.
The survey shows that concern about agricultural chemicals is nearly universal in Greece, France and Slovenia.
The evolving debate over the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) centres in part on how to balance environmental protection and future food needs.
The European Commission has proposed CAP reforms beginning in 2014 that would encourage farmers to take 7% of their land out of production and reserve it for conservation purposes – so-called ecological focus areas.
Yet some farmers’ advocates say any policy that would cut cultivatable land does not make sense given the coming spike in global demand.
“If we are to respond to world food security in general, or European food security, and produce more or less the same amount of food that we have produced so far, we would have to increase our productivity by that same percentage in order to meet the same volumes or volume quality,” said Pekka Pesonen, secretary-general of the Copa-Cogeca organisation of farmers and agricultural cooperatives.
“This is not possible in the short run, and especially when we see a fairly difficult political climate in Europe against productivity improvements.”
An organic solution?
Proposed incentives to encourage farmers to switch from single crops and large-scale production to crop rotation and diversification - techniques already used by organic farmers - also raise questions about the impact on production.
A study by researchers at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands shows that organic farming produces significantly lower yields – on average 20% lower – than crops grown with conventional methods.
While the report highlights greater environmental benefits of organics, it points out that it would require larger amounts of land devoted to farming to yield the same amounts as conventional farming.
Organic farmers manage some 9.3 million hectares in the EU, or 5% of farmland, according to the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture in Frick, Switzerland.
Lammel, head of product and application research and development for Yara, sees benefits in the EU executive’s efforts to encourage the ecological focus areas in conventional farming.
Better land management, crop care and waste reduction can help address future demands and reduce the need to clear more land for farms, Lammel said, adding that European farm technology and knowledge can help developing regions with the highest population growth.
“We see a huge potential in the world outside Europe because there are so many farmers who do not employ current knowledge and technology,” the researcher said.
“Very often you find in Africa, there is a lot of land which is used very inefficiently and if the people would get access to knowledge and technology, they could double, triple or quadruple their yields very easily,” Lammel said. “Research and innovation [can help] develop further from the current yield level.”
