Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare

By E. Cassidy, Paul C. West, James Gerber, J. Foley. 2013

628 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Worldwide demand for crops is increasing rapidly due to global population growth, increased biofuel production, and changing dietary preferences. Meeting these growing demands will be a substantial challenge that will tax the capability of our food system and prompt calls to dramatically boost global crop production. However, to increase food availability, we may also consider how the world’s crops are allocated to different uses and whether it is possible to feed more people with current levels of crop production. Of particular interest are the uses of crops as animal feed and as biofuel feedstocks. Currently, 36% of the calories produced by the world’s crops are being used for animal feed, and only 12% of those feed calories ultimately contribute to the human diet (as meat and other animal products). Additionally, human-edible calories used for biofuel production increased fourfold between the years 2000 and 2010, from 1% to 4%, representing a net reduction of available food globally. In this study, we re-examine agricultural productivity, going from using the standard definition of yield (in tonnes per hectare, or similar units) to using the number of people actually fed per hectare of cropland. We find that, given the current mix of crop uses, growing food exclusively for direct human consumption could, in principle, increase available food calories by as much as 70%, which could feed an additional 4 billion people (more than the projected 2–3 billion people arriving through population growth). Even small shifts in our allocation of crops to animal feed and biofuels could significantly increase global food availability, and could be an instrumental tool in meeting the challenges of ensuring global food security.

Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d0e337c9a45c46e52666ec6636dce65fffaf3a5

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Citations in the corpus

Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security. (2018, background): “Collectively, livestock intensification has resulted in about 36% of the calories produced on global croplands being diverted to animal feed (28), and the rise in livestock numbers have generated large concentrations of animal wastes (see Section 3.”
The paradox of productivity: agricultural productivity promotes food system inefficiency (2019, neutral): “The increasing use of crops for feed in intensive livestock systems results in a further form of inefficiency through trophic losses, with over a third of global calories being used as feed (Cassidy et al., 2013).”
Feed conversion efficiency in aquaculture: do we measure it correctly? (2018, methodology): “These have been calculated for major livestock products [7, 21] and for two aquaculture species (for example, see [22, 23]), but more work is needed.”
Feeding humanity through global food trade (2014, methodology): “To this end, a balanced diet of 2700 kcal/d (including waste [Porkka et al., 2013]) was used as a reference value [e.g., Falkenmark and Rockstrom, 2006; Cassidy et al., 2013].”
Current global food production is sufficient to meet human nutritional needs in 2050 provided there is radical societal adaptation (2018, background): “…explored FAO food balance sheet data (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation, 2016) for calorific flows (e.g. Bajželj et al., 2014; Cassidy et al., 2013; Kummu et al., 2012), and, for example, the effects of changing diet on greenhouse gas emissions (Stehfest et al., 2009; Popp et…”