By 2050 there will be another 2.5 billion people on the planet. How to feed them? Science's answer: a diet of algae, insects and meat grown in a lab, perhaps? So says a news news report from the Guardian.
Surprised? Read on...
With over 2.5 EXTRA human beings on earth likely by 2050 (an extra India and China!), the UN says we will have to nearly double our food production and governments say we should adopt new technologies and avoid waste.
Fine, with over one billion chronically hungry people already, there's little more virgin land to open up, climate change will only make farming harder to grow food in most places, the oceans are overfished, and much of the world faces growing water shortages.
Dear, oh, dear, have you ever listened to anything to more pessimistic than my rattling above! But the sad fact is, most of what are stated above are, or will become, true.
Fifty years ago, when the world's population was around half what it is now, the answer to looming famines was "the green revolution" – a massive increase in the use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers. It worked, but at a great ecological price. We grow nearly twice as much food as we did just a generation ago, but we use three times as much water from rivers and underground supplies.
Now, this cannot be done once over, because we do not have these natural resources in the humungous quantities they are required.
So!
Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.
This, whether or not you like it, will be a mix of algae, artificial greening, insects and deserts.
If that did not depress you enough, I wonder what indeed will.
Surprised? Read on...
With over 2.5 EXTRA human beings on earth likely by 2050 (an extra India and China!), the UN says we will have to nearly double our food production and governments say we should adopt new technologies and avoid waste.
Fine, with over one billion chronically hungry people already, there's little more virgin land to open up, climate change will only make farming harder to grow food in most places, the oceans are overfished, and much of the world faces growing water shortages.
Dear, oh, dear, have you ever listened to anything to more pessimistic than my rattling above! But the sad fact is, most of what are stated above are, or will become, true.
Fifty years ago, when the world's population was around half what it is now, the answer to looming famines was "the green revolution" – a massive increase in the use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers. It worked, but at a great ecological price. We grow nearly twice as much food as we did just a generation ago, but we use three times as much water from rivers and underground supplies.
Now, this cannot be done once over, because we do not have these natural resources in the humungous quantities they are required.
So!
Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.
This, whether or not you like it, will be a mix of algae, artificial greening, insects and deserts.
If that did not depress you enough, I wonder what indeed will.
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