Global food self-sufficiency in the 21st century under sustainable intensification of agriculture
By A. Beltran-Peña, L. Rosa, Paolo D'Odorico. Environmental Research Letters, 2020
232 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Meeting the increasing global demand for agricultural products without depleting the limited resources of the planet is a major challenge that humanity is facing. Most studies on global food security do not make projections past the year 2050, just as climate change and increasing demand for food are expected to intensify. Moreover, past studies do not account for the water sustainability limits of irrigation expansion to presently rainfed areas. Here we perform an integrated assessment that considers a range of factors affecting future food production and demand throughout the 21st century. We evaluate the self-sufficiency of 165 countries under sustainability, middle-of-the-road, and business-as-usual scenarios considering changes in diet, population, agricultural intensification, and climate. We find that under both the middle-of-the-road and business-as-usual trajectories global food self-sufficiency is likely to decline despite increased food production through sustainable agricultural intensification since projected food demand exceeds potential production. Contrarily, under a sustainability scenario, we estimate that there will be enough food production to feed the global population. However, most countries in Africa and the Middle East will continue to be heavily reliant on imports throughout the 21st century under all scenarios. These results highlight future hotspots of crop production deficits, reliance on food imports, and vulnerability to food supply shocks.
Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22129e869051c330b1ac57c4b6594f60f7260ed1
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantitative assessment of agricultural sustainability reveals divergent priorities among nations (2021, unknown): “Moving forward, agriculture is still facing the challenge of increasing productivity to meet growing societal demands for food, fiber, and energy.(9) This challenge is further complicated by its potential impacts on diets and nutrition, climate change, and environmental degradation.”
- Adapting agriculture to climate change via sustainable irrigation: biophysical potentials and feedbacks (2022, background): “Feeding the growing and increasingly affluent human population requires doubling global food production by 2050 [1] as well as reducing foodwaste and shifting diets [2–8].”