Current global food production is sufficient to meet human nutritional needs in 2050 provided there is radical societal adaptation
By Mike Berners-Lee, Cara Kennelly, Rosie Watson, C. Hewitt. 2018
292 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present a quantitative analysis of global and regional food supply to reveal the flows of calories, protein and the micro-nutrients vitamin A, iron and zinc, from production through to human consumption and other end points. We quantify the extent to which reductions in the amount of human-edible crops fed to animals and, less importantly, reductions in waste, could increase food supply. The current production of crops is sufficient to provide enough food for the projected global population of 9.7 billion in 2050, although very significant changes to the socio-economic conditions of many (ensuring access to the global food supply) and radical changes to the dietary choices of most (replacing most meat and dairy with plant-based alternatives, and greater acceptance of human-edible crops currently fed to animals, especially maize, as directly-consumed human food) would be required. Under all scenarios, the scope for biofuel production is limited. Our analysis finds no nutritional case for feeding human-edible crops to animals, which reduces calorie and protein supplies. If society continues on a ‘business-as-usual’ dietary trajectory, a 119% increase in edible crops grown will be required by 2050.
Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47b8b16ac37130cb56560e11eb392575b094e9b6
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In Ecology
Citations in the corpus
- Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (2021, background): “Our data show a global food system characterized by an increase in convenience and processed food, and an increasing globalization of the food supply chains everywhere, while at the same time huge differences exist in the distribution and availability of food 27,28 .”
- Agricultural intensification, dietary diversity, and markets in the global food security narrative (2019, background): “A parallel argument often made by those in the global justice movement is that – given that the world produces more than enough food to feed its population (Berners-Lee et al., 2018; Conway and Toenniessen, 1999) – it is not the scale of production of food that is the main cause of undernutrition, b”