Scientists have long been concerned about potential food shortages in a world facing climate change and a rapidly increasing population.
A new report from the UN, entitled Assessing Global Land Use, says it’s the amount of food we waste that is truly the issue. It’s not that we lack the resources to feed a growing population, but rather that we waste a whopping one-third of the food we already produce.
Ineffectual pest control and processing methods are partially to blame, as are insufficient crop yields in developing nations – and unsustainable diets in wealthy nations.
According to one of the report’s lead authors, Robert Howarth of Cornell University, Americans ought to reduce their meat consumption by more than half. Christine Costello is a professor at the University of Missouri…
“Life-cycle analysis tells us that animal-based products tend to have much higher greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food, even when normalized by protein, (and) even when normalized by calorie. And so if we ate less of those things and replaced them with lower greenhouse-gas, or lower nutrient-impact, or lower fertilizer-use foods, then we’d have an overall less of a footprint associated with diet.”
If we don’t stop wasting so much of what we produce, an additional 850 million hectares of farmland will need to be created in order to feed the population by the year 2050. That’s an area the size of Brazil that will need to be cleared for crops, destroying countless forests and having a devastating effect on biodiversity.
While new agricultural technologies will undoubtedly play a role in feeding the growing population, we can start simple – by maximizing the land already in use and drastically decreasing wasteful methods.
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Fancy tech will not solve massive land loss, says UN
Photo, posted March 22, 2009, courtesy of Nick Saltmarsh via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Support for Earth Wise comes from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.