Feeding the World Population

Fri, Jul 5, 2013

By publisher

2 MIN READ

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A Science journal outlines what world leaders must do to ensure a sustainable food development for the growing world population

|  By Chinwe Okafor  |

THE need to ensure sustainable food supplies for the world’s growing population is the thrust of a recent paper published by the journal of Science. The authors of the paper said that policymakers should focus on sustainable food development rather than food production. Camilla Toulmin, director, International Institute for Environment and Development and co-author, said the world needs  new and more sophisticated policies that are clearer about what sustainable intensification can achieve.

“To feed the world’s growing population, we must do more than simply produce more food per unit area in ways that exert less pressure on the environment. We must also ensure that food is diverse and rich in micronutrients, and that we make the right choices when allocating land for farm production or biodiversity. We must ensure that sustainable intensification contributes to other important goals for rural development, such as climate-resilient livelihoods for poor farmers, and we must revitalise agricultural extension services and use modern communications tools to ensure that these farmers can participate,” Toulmin said.

The authors outlined five areas of policymaking that national or international communities should  channel their efforts to in order to pursue a sustainable intensification: biodiversity and land-use, animal welfare, human nutrition, rural economies and sustainable development.

 They also said that world leaders should have a rethink on how to feed the increasingly popular policy goal of “sustainable intensification”, which aims at producing  more food per unit area in ways that exert less pressure on the environment. “This is important  because it is a very simple definition and it ignores other radical changes that are also required to tackle waste, improve governance and resilience, and reduce the resource-intensity of consumption,” said the authors.

— Jul. 15, 2013 @ 01:00 GMT