GLOBAL AGRICULTURE is living beyond its means, a major British report warned yesterday, and the world is threatened with a major food crisis within 20 years unless action is taken urgently.
The frailties in global agriculture were exposed during 2007 and 2008 after price increases in grain and other basics added 100 million people to the list of those suffering hunger throughout the world, the authors said.
The world’s population is expected to strike 9 billion by 2050 and plateau thereafter, but the practice for countries – bar India – to consume more meat as they become richer is putting intolerable pressure on resources.
The report, following two years of research by 400 scientists in 34 countries, was drafted by the British government’s office for science and presented in London yesterday by the chief scientific adviser, John Beddington.
Farmers will have to grow substantially more food from roughly the same amount of land – bar tracts that could be brought into use in Russia, while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gases by up to 60 per cent by 2050.
Up to a third of all food grown is wasted, the report warns: in developing countries the losses are caused by poor transport, storage and refrigeration; while in richer countries the wastage most often is caused by the consumer throwing away food.
A typical British family could save £680 a year by cutting out such waste. “While consumers are right to discard food that has passed dates such as ‘use by’, consumers are also interpreting other date marks such as ‘best before’ as meaning that food is unsafe to eat.”
Urging the use of genetically modified plants, the report warns that predictions of organic agriculture meeting all demands at a time when such demand will grow by 70 per cent “may not be achievable”. However, both types must work together and not in competition, it said.
GMO crops and cloned livestock should not be excluded simply on ethical or moral grounds, while there must be more investment in research to find “rigorously established” options in “the light of the magnitude of the challenges”.
“Decisions about the acceptability of new technologies need to be made in the context of competing risks (rather than by simplistic versions of the precautionary principle); the potential costs of not utilising new technology must be taken into account,” said the report.
The lack of equity in the world is shown by the fact that one billion people go hungry daily, one billion more lack the vitamins and minerals necessary for a healthy life, while one billion in the West are obese and “substantially over-consuming”.
The pressure on food stocks could threaten a rise in protectionism, warned Prof Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and a co-author of the Global Food and Farming Futures report.
“But we don’t want 192 self-sufficient countries, or five, or six ‘bread-baskets’. We need something in between,” he said, adding that some countries such as Ethiopia have managed to dramatically increase their food production in recent years.
Prof Jules Pretty of the University of Essex said that Africa, contrary to its international image, has increased food production threefold since the 1960s, while 10 million farmers there have doubled their output sustainably.