SASKATOON – Farmers and scientists are expected to be severely tested by a world food demand that’s likely to double in the next 30 years.
World Bank agriculture specialist Alex McAlla told University of Saskatchewan researchers that worldwide cuts to agricultural research may make the yield boost miracle of the past three decades difficult to achieve in the next 30 years.
“The long-run challenge is very real and to some extent we’re muddying that water by focusing on the short-run price issue,” said McAlla, who thinks while the present surge in world grain prices may crest after next year, long-term demand will continue to grow.
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He said not even the built-up plant breeding knowledge that makes doubling present yields possible will solve the problem of how to feed eight billion people in 2025.
Any increased yields are going to have to be achieved using “sustainable production,” he said. “That’s the real intellectual challenge.”
McAlla said past agricultural research has focused too much on plant breeding and not enough on farming systems.
“We don’t know as much as we should about soil systems. We don’t know an awful lot about ecology,” he said.
Running out of time
And since it’s a long time lag between starting research and seeing applicable results, scientists have some catching up to do.
A raging debate continues about whether the world’s burgeoning food demands can and will be met.
On one side sits Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, who argues Chinese demand alone will strip the world of any future grain surpluses, causing serious food shortages that he says are only a few years away.
On the other is Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, who believes heavy, intensive, chemically reliant agriculture can easily meet the billions of extra mouths to be fed.
McAlla said this chasm of radically differing expectations about food production has a shared assumption at its base: That food demand is indeed going to double.
“I think no matter whose numbers you read or whose situation you study, the challenge 20 or 30 years out is real and we should start preparing for it now,” McAlla said.
