FAO: The World Needs 70% More Food by 2050

World food production must increase by 70 percent in 2050 to feed a projected extra 2.3 billion people, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said early this week. The demand for cereals, both for food and animal feed, is projected to reach some 3 billion tons by 2050. This means that cereal production would have to grow by almost a billion tons (2.1 billion tons today). FAO said that meat production would also have to grow by over 200 million tons by 2050. The demand for food is expected to grow as a result of rising incomes as well as population growth.

Despite the fact that 90 percent of the growth in crop production is projected to come from higher yields and increased cropping intensity, FAO estimated that "arable land will have to expand by around 120 million hectares in developing countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America." The agency also noted that "biofuels could also increase the demand for agricultural commodities, depending on energy prices and government policies."

FAO Assistant Director-General Hafez Ghanem, said, that the agency "is cautiously optimistic about the world's potential to feed itself by 2050." He however stressed that " feeding everyone in the world by then will not be automatic and several significant challenges have to be met." The FAO will organize an expert forum in Rome on 12-13 October 2009 to deliberate upon strategies on "How to Feed the World in 2050".

The discussion paper is available at http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_papers/HLEF2050_Global_Agriculture.pdf