NEW YORK CITY – The United Nations estimates by the year 2100, 11 billion people could populate the Earth. This means by the turn of the century, the world’s population could grow by approximately 4 billion people. A report released by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization suggests, “[t]o meet the food and nutrition challenges of today… and tomorrow, what we eat and how we produce it needs to be re-evaluated.”
This estimate of 11 billion is 800 million more than the June 2013 estimate by the U.N. Much of that increase is due to birthrates in Africa not falling as quickly as expected.
Producing more food is part of the solution, but the future of the world’s food security is not simply a matter of producing more food. Food security in the future will rely on a number of interrelated factors, including population size, climate change, food production, food utilization and prices. Live Science offers several ways for society to feed the Earth’s rapidly growing population.
1. Eat Less Meat
Beef is not a very sustainable food source. According to Jamais Cascio, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future which is a think tank in Palo Alto, California, the amount of carbon emissions generated from the production of cheeseburgers in the United States is equal to the output of greenhouse gases from 6.5 million to 19.6 million sport utility vehicles (SUVs.)
In order to feed a population of 11 billion, people all over the world will have to change the way they eat, perhaps by eating more vegetables. The production of vegetables requires less energy and less meat. Eating less meat could help reduce our carbon footprint thereby helping to mitigate climate change, which affects food production.
2. Eat Fake Meat
Synthetic meat, grown in a lab, could eventually become a viable alternative to real meat. Despite its possible advantages, the cost of producing synthetic meat is prohibitively high at the moment, and it does not taste like real meat. With more research, however, scientists anticipate that the cost of production could eventually come down and the taste could improve.
3. Throw Away Food Less Often
About 56 percent of global food loss and waste occurs in the developed world. People can help eliminate waste by eating leftovers or by not preparing more food than will be eaten.
4. Aquaponics
Aquaponics is a recent development in food sustainability based on an ancient concept. In this system, fish farming and plant farming are combined in water whereby the fish fertilize the plant and the plants clean the water for the fish. The fish and plants could both be eaten, and the cycle would continue, all while using very little land.
5. Vertical Farming
Some countries, such as China, experience a lack of arable land to grow crops on. Growing food in skyscrapers is believed to be a solution to this problem. Vertical farming would allow farmers to grow food in the sky, avoiding the extreme weather events that tend to destroy crops. Vertical farms would also be located in the city, which means that crops would not have to be shifted thousands of miles, helping to eliminate the resulting carbon emissions.
6. Improve Crop Production Worldwide
According to Jason Clay, an expert in natural resources management at the World Wildlife Fund, crop production is not efficient in certain parts of the world. Efforts should be made to help improve crop production in those areas such as making more technology available and educating farmers on better agricultural practices.
– Cavarrio Carter
Sources: Live Science, Springer, CNN
Photo: Discovery News