Food Security

How to feed a growing world population

While the world population is rising year on year, the arable land available worldwide remains practically the same.

The world's population is continuing to grow rapidly, and will probably breach the seven billion threshold by 2012. It is likely to reach eight billion by 2025. Experts are also predicting a decline in the amount of farmland available per capita: United Nations forecasts show that the amount of land per capita that can be used to produce food in 2050 will be only 30 per cent of the figure in 1950. This means that more and more people will have to be fed from an acreage that is at best constant. Consequently, the primary aim of Bayer CropScience's specialists in crop protection research is to increase yields of crops such as cotton, rice, maize, rapeseed and soya. Bayer CropScience sees biotechnology as an essential part of this process.

Rising prices - growing demand

Growing prosperity and associated changes in diet, such as higher consumption of meat in China and India, are driving demand for crops ever higher and leading to competition between their use as food and in animal feed. At present, it takes more than 7 kilograms of animal feed to produce one kilogram of beef. Rising energy prices also have consequences for the farming sector: for example, machinery and energy costs account for about 60 per cent of production costs in the European wheat sector. "Strong import demand from Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East has triggered a rise in prices for arable crops, dairy products and meat, and there is competition for land to grow renewable raw materials", commented Prof. Dr. P. Michael Schmitz of the Institute for Agricultural Policy and Market Research at Justus Liebig University in Gießen.

Driving the green revolution forward

Efforts to combat poverty in developing countries and secure food supplies for a burgeoning population by means of modern agricultural techniques started in the 1960s. This was known as the first green revolution. One of the achievements of this movement was to breed improved varieties of wheat that have been in cultivation in India since the early 1960s and are producing higher yields. Significant progress has also been made in seed breeding, engineering, fertiliser use, modern irrigation systems and chemical crop protection. Once again we face major challenges that require a second green revolution. This is the only way in which the nine billion people who will in a few decades inhabit our world can reliably be fed.

[ last update: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 ]