Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century

By Michele Calloway. 2000

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Review: Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century By Vaclav Smil Reviewed by Michele Calloway Southern Illinois University, USA Smil, Vaclav. Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 360 pp. ISBN 0-262-19432-5 (hardcover). US$32.95 The question as to how to feed the world has been greatly debated for decades. Vaclav Smil has tried to reach the middle ground between those who believe that human ingenuity will provide boundless food supplies and those who feel we are near maximum human population. He outlines strategies in agriculture and food consumption to provide for continued population growth. A Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Manitoba, Canada, Smil has written numerous works on the topics of agriculture, energy and the environment. In the area of agriculture, Smil emphasizes the importance of improving soil conditions, and the reduction of erosion and post harvest losses. He advocates increased use of the techniques of conservation tillage, contour plowing, and the covering of soil with crop residues, along with continued research into fertilization and proper crop rotations. Smil states that only our continuing mismanagement will weaken our food production capacity Smil advocates an omnivorous diet, due to the efficient way animal proteins are converted to energy by human. He makes the case that the most efficient animal proteins would be dairy, eggs, poultry, pork, and non- carnivorous fish. Our priority, according to the author, should be to maximize feeding efficiencies of livestock in order to reduce their impact on the environment. This would include improving the processing of feeds, and continued improvement in supplementation of feeds in order to improve conversion efficiencies. The author asserts that, there is not accurate data on the amount of food that people actually use and need. Smil concludes that inaccuracies in these two areas of human food consumption greatly impact any calculations that one could make regarding the number of people the earth can feed. Instead of waiting for accurate numbers Smil wants to promote general dietary guidelines to encourage a rational diet. Feeding the World is a thorough and well-written treatment, of what will

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Health Professions

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Citations in the corpus

Future protein supply (2011, background): “As a result of animal metabolism, 6 kg of plant protein is required to yield 1 kg of meat protein, on average (Smil, 2000; Pimentel & Pimentel, 2003).”
Sustainable Consumption of Food: A Framework for Analyzing Scenarios about Changes in Diets (2005, background): “A number of authors have de- scribed the inefficiency of resource use involved in converting grain to livestock when the grain could instead be eaten directly (Cohen 1995, Kendall and Pimentel 1994, Smil 2000).”
Organic agriculture cannot feed the world (2008, methodology): “Those analyses (Buringh and van Heemst, 1979; Smil, 2001, 2004) are based on the performance of OA systems as practiced in C19 before the widespread use of inorganic fertilizers and when the world population was around 1 billion.”
Growth in global materials use, GDP and population during the 20th century (2009, background): “Above all this can be attributed to considerable efficiency gains in biomass conversion, such as improvements in the harvest index of cultivars and more efficient livestock conversion (see e.g. Smil 2000).”
Biofuels: Efficiency, Ethics, and Limits to Human Appropriation of Ecosystem Services (2010, background): “…rose, consumers in developing countries not only increased per capita consumption of staple foods, they also diversified their diets to include more meat, dairy products, and vegetable oils, which in turn, amplified the demand for grains and oilseeds (Smil 2000; Brown 2005; FAO 2008a; UNEP 2009).”
Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on The influence of human demography and agriculture on natural systems in the Neotropics Globalization and Land-Use Transitions in Latin America (2008, background): “A shift from traditional agriculture and particularly grazing pastures to modern agriculture represents a large increase in per hectare food productivity (Smil 2000).”
The interconnected challenges for food security from a food regimes perspective: Energy, climate and malconsumption (2013, neutral): ““This gain has been due largely to a more than eightyfold increase of external energy inputs, mostly fossil fuels, to crop cultivation” (Smil 2000:4).”
On the merits of plant-based proteins for global food security: Marrying macro and micro perspectives (2011, background): “Although the actual protein conversion factor depends on the type of animal under consideration, as well as on the conditions (such as the prevailing diet and climate), on average, animal metabolism requires 6 kg of plant protein to yield 1 kg of meat protein (Pimentel and Pimentel, 2003; Smil, 2000”
Long-term global availability of food: continued abundance or new scarcity? (2008, background): “How much energywouldit cost? The energy requirements of agricultural growth can be moderated by raising the water and nutrient use efficiencies of farming (Smil, 2000).”
Food sustainability: Diverging interpretations (2004, background): “The issues mentioned above apply even more to food production and consumption than to other human activities, because food provision is in fact the human activity with the single largest environmental impact ( Smil, 2000”