Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security.

By Navin Ramankutty, Z. Mehrabi, Katharina Waha, Larissa Jarvis, C. Kremen, Mario Herrero, Loren H. Rieseberg. Annual Review of Plant Biology, 2018

805 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The eighteenth-century Malthusian prediction of population growth outstripping food production has not yet come to bear. Unprecedented agricultural land expansions since 1700, and technological innovations that began in the 1930s, have enabled more calorie production per capita than was ever available before in history. This remarkable success, however, has come at a great cost. Agriculture is a major cause of global environmental degradation. Malnutrition persists among large sections of the population, and a new epidemic of obesity is on the rise. We review both the successes and failures of the global food system, addressing ongoing debates on pathways to environmental health and food security. To deal with these challenges, a new coordinated research program blending modern breeding with agro-ecological methods is needed. We call on plant biologists to lead this effort and help steer humanity toward a safe operating space for agriculture.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7ea06974445ebf73b28ac9e4d4e0c2d9620c22c

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Citations in the corpus

The Challenge of Feeding the World (2019, background): “The driving force behind development is sustainable intensive farming, which means the even more effective utilization of agricultural land and water resources [18].”
Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “In conjunction with demographic changes and expected dietary shifts at the global scale (Pingali, 2007), fluctuating crop yields due to climate change impacts and the pressure on cultivatable land to provide not only food, but also feed, fuel, and fiber, increases competition for land and, therefore”
Landscapes that work for biodiversity and people (2018, background): “By creating highly simplified and intensified production systems (21, 40), from corn and soy in U.”
A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures (2022, background): “1 3 globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein 2017; Ramankutty et al. 2018; Yu et al. 2021) (Table 1).”
Adaptation and development pathways for different types of farmers (2019, background): “Addressing consumption patterns where aspirations are not all set to follow the consumerism of the West can similarly play a critical role towards more sustainable food systems (Ranganathan et al., 2016).”