We don’t need more food, we need to stop wasting the food we have. Failing to do so could mean losing an area of the land the size of Brazil to agriculture by 2050.
So says a new UN report, Assessing Global Land Use.
Smart production technologies like GM crops and vertical farms may be important for feeding the world, but first we need to stop wasting a third of the food that we produce. The way to do this is through pest control, better warehousing and less wasteful processing and consumption, says Stefan Bringezu of the Wuppertal Institute in Germany, a lead author of the report.
Roughly 5 billion hectares of land is used for agriculture. Of that, one-third is used to grow crops and two-thirds for pasture. Meanwhile, cities are expanding at the expense of farmland, and cropland is advancing at the expense of pastures and forests, resulting in a huge loss in biodiversity.
At the same rate,by 2050, with an extra two billion people on Earth, a further 850 million hectares will be destroyed, the report estimates – an area the size of Brazil.
But this could largely be avoided. Poor nations need to increase farm yields, while rich nations cut meat consumption – in the case of Americans by about 60 per cent, says another lead author, Robert Howarth at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. “There is just not enough land on Earth for everyone in the world to eat like Americans and Europeans.”
The report also recommends restoring degraded land, limiting the expansion of cities, reducing the amount of food crops that never get eaten, and curbing the expansion of biofuels. If not, forest will disappear, biodiversity will be reduced, and there will be more hunger and social chaos. Food prices are already on the rise, sparking bread riots. “The so-called Arab Spring was induced by soaring bread prices,” says Bringezu.
The report notes a massive takeover of global agriculture by a handful of corporations – with 10 seed corporations, five grain traders and 10 pesticide manufacturers responsible for more than half of total sales. Are they part of the problem or part of the solution? “Both,” says Bringezu.
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