Sunday, October 16, 2011

Feeding the world while protecting the planet

Seed Daily: The problem is stark: One billion people on earth don't have enough food right now. It's estimated that by 2050 there will be more than nine billion people living on the planet. Meanwhile, current agricultural practices are amongst the biggest threats to the global environment. This means that if we don't develop more sustainable practices, the planet will become even less able to feed its growing population than it is today.

But now a team of researchers from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Germany has come up with a plan to double the world's food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

By combining information gathered from crop records and satellite images from around the world, they have been able to create new models of agricultural systems and their environmental impacts that are truly global in scope. ... The researchers recommend:
  • 1.Halting farmland expansion and land clearing for agricultural purposes, particularly in the tropical rainforest....
  • 2.Improving agricultural yields....
  • 3.Supplementing the land more strategically....
  • 4.Shifting diets...
  • 5.Reducing waste....
A "horn of abundance" in Jean-Baptiste Pigalle's 1765 statue of Louix XV, shot by Vassil, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

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