Science Daily: With the caloric needs of the planet expected to soar by 50 percent in the next 40 years, planning and investment in global agriculture will become critically important, according a new report released June 25.The report, produced by Deutsche Bank, one of the world's leading global investment banks, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, provides a framework for investing in sustainable agriculture against a backdrop of massive population growth and escalating demands for food, fiber and fuel.
…The report notes that agricultural research and technological development in the United States and Europe have increased notably in the last decade, but those advances have not translated into increased production on a global scale. Subsistence farmers in developing nations, in particular, have benefited little from such developments and investments in those agricultural sectors have been marginal, at best. The Deutsche Bank report, however, identifies a number of strategies to increase global agricultural productions in sustainable ways, including:
- Improvements in irrigation, fertilization and agricultural equipment using technologies ranging from geographic information systems and global analytical maps to the development of precision, high performance equipment.
- Applying sophisticated management and technologies on a global scale, essentially extending research and investment into developing regions of the world.
- Investing in "farmer competence" to take full advantage of new technologies through education and extension services, including investing private capital in better training farmers.
- Intensifying yield using new technologies, including genetically modified crops.
- Increasing the amount of land under cultivation without expanding to forested lands through the use of multiple cropping, improving degraded crop and pasturelands, and converting productive pastures to biofuel production….
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