How To Feed The World

Dr. Norman Borlaug, who helped create wheat strains in the 1960s that increased the production of farms throughout the world by ten fold, turned 90 last week. This "food hacker", and his fellow agricultural researchers, by launching the "Green Revolution", have done more to feed the world than anyone else before or since. He recently published an essay on the future of the world food supply entitled We can feed the world. Here's how.

Comments

Re:make 10 times more food

[PainKilleR-CE]

make 10 times more food and you'll have 10 times more people.

However (and as was partially stated in the article), in countries with modern food production (which yeilded the 10-fold increase 50 years ago) population growth has generally levelled off to a sustaining rate, rather than increasing the population 10-fold.

Personally I think there is no moral obligation to turn every acre of land over to food production.

The moral obligation referred to in the article is that of reducing or maintaining the amount of land needed for food production in order to preserve as many acres of land not currently used for this purpose as possible. In other words, there is a moral obligation NOT to turn every acre of land over to food production.

The food shortages in the world today have very little to do an overall lack of food.

You're right, they have little to do with an overall lack of food, but rather with a localized lack of food in third world countries. Mexico, much of South America, and much of Africa are seeing more and more land cleared for farms because they do not have modern food production. They also aren't using proper crop rotations, so the land is losing most of its nutrients. In other worlds, areas in which people are already starving are also moving rapidly towards their own equivalent of the US' dust-bowl.

The US and other high-yield countries can continue sending food to these countries, or we can give them the means to use their own farmland to produce more food of their own. As long as they're not paying for the food we ship to them now (which most aren't), the long-term costs of improving their farming methods is significantly lower than sending them food every year. The added benefit is that better farm yields can lead to economic improvements, which lead to more imports of other goods and possibly, eventually, improvements in other areas of production within those countries, pulling them out of third world status.