This paper discusses the challenges of feeding a projected population increase by 2030 while reducing reliance on mineral nitrogen fertilizers, which pose environmental risks. It analyzes agricultural trends and prospects, emphasizing the importance of improved fertilizer-use efficiency technologies and biological nitrogen fixation as alternatives to enhance productivity without proportionately increasing mineral nitrogen use. The findings underscore the potential for innovation and policy support in ensuring sustainable agricultural growth to meet escalating food demands.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2010

Although food prices in major world markets are at or near a historical low, there is increasing concern about food security—the ability of the world to provide healthy and environmentally sustainable diets for all its peoples. This article is an introduction to a collection of reviews whose authors were asked to explore the major drivers affecting the food system between now and 2050. A first set of papers explores the main factors affecting the demand for food (population growth, changes in consumption patterns, the effects on the food system of urbanization and the importance of understanding income distributions) with a second examining trends in future food supply (crops, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, and ‘wild food’). A third set explores exogenous factors affecting the food system (climate change, competition for water, energy and land, and how agriculture depends on and provides ecosystem services), while the final set explores cross-cutting themes (food system econo...

Sustainability, 2016

Future dietary changes will increase the global demand for agricultural resources per person. Food production requires several resources which are interrelated: land, water, nutrients and energy. Other studies have calculated the per capita requirements of only one resource (nitrogen or land). In this paper, we combine several parameters (diets, production systems and nitrogen-land trade-off) in one analysis in order to provide a more integrated assessment of the impacts of the use of agricultural resources for food. We estimated the trade-off between the per capita use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and crop land. With our methodology, we are able to identify separately the impacts of the type of diet and of the type of production system. We use national level data of five countries as examples of global extremes: from extensive to highly intensive systems, and from very basic diets to very affluent diets. The present differences in diets and production systems result in large differences in the per capita use of resources which ranges from 3 to 30 kg of nitrogen fertilizer use per person, and from 1800 to 4500 m 2 of arable land use per person. As the results show, in 2050, the average per capita availability of crop land will not be enough to produce food for affluent diets with present production systems. Our results are useful to assess future requirements of nitrogen fertilizer for the limited land available on the planet.

Agricultural Research & Technology: Open Access Journal, 2017

The use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is of great importance for global food supply, but it is also causing large environmental problems. The amount of fertilizer needed on a global scale is affected by the size of the population (more people more food), the type of their diets (luxurious diets require more resources) and the agricultural production system (intensive systems use more fertilizer than extensive systems). In the coming decades, global population will increase, diets will change and a strong intensification of agriculture is expected. In this paper, we assess how the changes in all these factors will affect future needs of fertilizers on both a global and a national scale. We developed a model that describes the various relations among population density, diets and production systems, and validated the outcomes with historical country level data. The variations over the globe are large. The model shows that in the regions with low population densities not much change in nitrogen applications is to be expected. On the other hand, in densely populated regions, with high population growth rates and expected changes in diets, the needs for synthetic nitrogen show an exponential increase. By using existing projections with respect to population growth and dietary changes, by 2050 over 70% of the global population will live in countries where an exponential increase of the nitrogen application is needed to feed the people. This may result on large impact for the global environment.

2011

Washington DC, IFPRI, …, 2001

overnment officials and representatives of aid agencies are continually making decisions about how to spend their resources. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that each decision to be made represents a fork in the road, and each investment is a step in the direction of a future that will bring a healthy, sustainably produced diet to more people-or to fewer. This report shows just how, and how much, certain policy decisions and social changes will affect the world's future food security. It projects the likely food situation in 2020 if the world continues on more or less its present course, and it then shows how alternative choices could produce a different future. Even rather small changes in agricultural and development policies and investments, it turns out, can have wide-reaching effects on the number of poor and undernourished people around the world. A world of less poverty, greater food security, and a healthier environment is possible, but it will not come about without explicit policy steps in that direction. 2020 Global Food Outlook is the latest in a series of world food projections based on a model developed at IFPRI beginning in 1992.The model has been updated and expanded periodically since then as a way of painting an everclearer picture of the global food situation in 2020. More details about the simulations in this report are available in a comprehensive monograph titled Global Food Projections to 2020: Emerging Trends and Alternative Futures. Our thanks go to Rajul Pandya-Lorch for her intellectual support and editorial guidance during the preparation of this report and to Heidi Fritschel for editorial assistance. 2020 GLOBAL FOOD OUTLOOK 1 C oncern about the world's future food security seems to run in cycles. In the mid-1990s world cereal prices rose dramatically as cereal stocks fell sharply, and some observers foresaw a starving 21st century world unable to meet growing food demands from a deteriorating natural resource base.Worries eased in the late 1990s as global cereal production hit record levels in response to high prices and falling stocks, while declining incomes due to the East Asian economic crisis reduced the demand for food commodities. As cereal prices plummeted in response, the policy focus in much of the world shifted from concern over long-term food supply and demand problems to concerns about subsidy provision to financially distressed farmers.

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2010

Food security in 2050 will not be easy to achieve due to a number of real and evident but little understood and greatly unsolved challenges. Improving crops and agricultural practices is an ongoing and indispensable aspect of these efforts. Yet, on a global scale and from a systems perspective, these are insufficient to reduce the substantial risk of potential system collapses due to excessive stress on the production ecosystems or transgression of the "planetary boundaries."

Agricultural Economics, 2013

Understanding the capacity of agricultural systems to feed the world population under climate change requires projecting future food demand. This article reviews demand modeling approaches from 10 global economic models participating in the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). We compare food demand projections in 2050 for various regions and agricultural products under harmonized scenarios of socioeconomic development, climate change, and bioenergy expansion. In the reference scenario (SSP2), food demand increases by 59-98% between 2005 and 2050, slightly higher than the most recent FAO projection of 54% from 2005/2007. The range of results is large, in particular for animal calories (between 61% and 144%), caused by differences in demand systems specifications, and in income and price elasticities. The results are more sensitive to socioeconomic assumptions than to climate change or bioenergy scenarios. When considering a world with higher population and lower economic growth (SSP3), consumption per capita drops on average by 9% for crops and 18% for livestock. The maximum effect of climate change on calorie availability is −6% at the global level, and the effect of biofuel production on calorie availability is even smaller.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

Domain Indicator Unit Min. 25th Median 75th Max Weighted Mean Weighted SD Weighted by Environment, production, and natural resources Greenhouse gas emissions Food systems greenhouse gas emissions kt CO2eq (AR5)

The world has been making progress in improving food security, as measured by the per person availability of food for direct human consumption. However, progress has been very uneven, and many developing countries have failed to participate in such progress. In some countries, the food security situation is today worse than 20 years ago. The persistence of food insecurity does not ref lect so much a lack of capacity of the world as a whole to increase food production to whatever level would be required for everyone to have consumption levels assuring satisfactory nutrition. The world already produces sufficient food. The undernourished and the food-insecure persons are in these conditions because they are poor in terms of income with which to purchase food or in terms of access to agricultural resources, education, technology, infrastructure, credit, etc., to produce their own food. Economic development failures account for the persistence of poverty and food insecurity. In the majority of countries with severe food-security problems, the greatest part of the poor and food-insecure population depend greatly on local agriculture for a living. In such cases, development failures are often tantamount to failures of agricultural development. Development of agriculture is seen as the first crucial step toward broader development, reduction of poverty and food insecurity, and eventually freedom from excessive economic dependence on poor agricultural resources. Projections indicate that progress would continue, but at a pace and pattern that would be insufficient for the incidence of undernutrition to be reduced significantly in the medium-term future. As in the past, world agricultural production is likely to keep up with, and perhaps tend to exceed, the growth of the effective demand for food. The problem will continue to be one of persistence of poverty, leading to growth of the effective demand for food on the part of the poor that would fall short of that required for them to attain levels of consumption compatible with freedom from undernutrition.

2014

9 billion by 2050 (UN, 2010). Such population growth imposes profound challenges in meeting future food requirements. According to FAO projections, a 70 % increase in food consumption is expected, driven by the above‐mentioned large increase in world population, but also by a relevant increase in PC kcal consumption. Globally, diets are also changing rapidly, with a clear tendency towards an increasing consumption of meat. For 2050, FAO has estimated meat consumption to be around 4.65 billion ton. More specifically, it is projected that by 2050, 2.3 times more poultry meat and between 1.4 and 1.8 times more of the meat of other livestock products will be consumed as in 2010 (FAO, 2009). This increase in meat consumption can be attributed to assumed increases in income and relates to the increase in average calorie intake. The world’s average daily calorie availability is projected to rise from 2 789 kcal per person per day in 2000 to 3 130 kcal per person in 2050, a 12 percent incre...

This chapter sketches out the possible evolution of world food and agriculture to 2050 in terms of key variables: production and consumption of the main commodity groups; and the implications for food and nutrition in developing countries. It presents a view of how these variables may evolve over time, not how they should evolve from the normative perspective of solving problems of nutrition and poverty. The chapter's contents are based on food and agriculture projections to 2015, 2030 and 2050, prepared in the years 2003 to 2005 and published in 2006 (FAO, 2006 -hereafter referred to as the Interim Report [IR]). The main findings from Chapter 1 of the IR (Overview) are attached as Annex 1.2.

Over the next decades mankind will demand more food from fewer land and water resources. This study quantifies the food production impacts of four alternative development scenarios from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Special Report on Emission Scenarios. Partially and jointly considered are land and water supply impacts from population growth, and technical change, as well as forest and agricultural commodity demand shifts from population growth and economic development. The income impacts on food demand are computed with dynamic elasticities. Simulations with a global, partial equilibrium model of the agricultural and forest sectors show that per capita food levels increase in all examined development scenarios with minor impacts on food prices. Global agricultural land increases by up to 14% between 2010 and 2030. Deforestation restrictions strongly impact the price of land and water resources but have little consequences for the global level of food production and food prices. While projected income changes have the highest partial impact on per capita food consumption levels, population growth leads to the highest increase in total food production. The impact of technical change is amplified or mitigated by adaptations of land management intensities.

2009

In the first half of this century, global demand for food, feed and fibre is projected to increase by some 70 percent while, increasingly, crops may also be used for bioenergy and other industrial purposes. New and traditional demand for agricultural produce will thus put growing pressure on already scarce agricultural resources. And while agriculture will be forced to compete for land and water with sprawling urban settlements, it will also be required to serve on other major fronts: adapting to and contributing to the mitigation of climate change, helping preserve natural habitats, and maintaining biodiversity. At the same time, fewer people will be living in rural areas and even fewer will be farmers. They will need new technologies to grow more from less land, with fewer hands.

PloS one, 2018

Sustainably feeding the next generation is often described as one of the most pressing "grand challenges" facing the 21st century. Generally, scholars propose addressing this problem by increasing agricultural production, investing in technology to boost yields, changing diets, or reducing food waste. In this paper, we explore whether global food production is nutritionally balanced by comparing the diet that nutritionists recommend versus global agricultural production statistics. Results show that the global agricultural system currently overproduces grains, fats, and sugars while production of fruits and vegetables and protein is not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of the current population. Correcting this imbalance could reduce the amount of arable land used by agriculture by 51 million ha globally but would increase total land used for agriculture by 407 million ha and increase greenhouse gas emissions. For a growing population, our calculations suggest that...

2001

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires This important analysis demonstrates that big changes are possible. The solutions on our menu would allow the world to sustainably increase food production and reduce excess consumption. Governments, the private sector, farming organizations, and civil society must urgently come together in a determined alliance in order to deliver on the promise of a sustainable food future. We cannot afford to wait.

2006

Chemistry International, 2021

Maintaining a plentiful and high-quality food supply is essential to enable humans to survive and flourish in the coming decades. In 2019/20, an estimated 2.71 Gt of food grains have been produced worldwide. This fundamental food source is alone enough to supply sufficient nutritional kilocalories for the entire current global population. And nutrition is supplemented by the many other crops, livestock and sea food that are part of the overall food system. Yet, in the same year, it is estimated that around 821 million people, more than one tenth of the 7.6 billion people in the world were chronically hungry. There are many reasons for this. Waste—the FAO estimates that around one third of food produced is wasted—is certainly one, but also important are the inequities in the food production and supply system. While much can and should be done to correct these two critical problems, sustainable agriculture remains as the core feature of a healthy food supply.

• Explore
• Papers
• Topics

• Features
• Mentions
• Analytics
• PDF Packages
• Advanced Search
• Search Alerts

• Journals
• Academia.edu Journals
• My submissions
• Reviewer Hub
• Why publish with us
• Testimonials

• Company
• About
• Careers
• Press
• Help Center
• Terms
• Privacy
• Copyright
• Content Policy