Researchers present strategy to fight famine
At the moment, worldly food production is not doing as well as it could: one billion people go to bed hungry every night. At the same time the agricultural sector contributes enormously to the environmental problem, for example through greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication, and water issues. These problems will only get worse as time goes on - by 2050 the world population will increase by 2 billion people.
Experts are convinced that the food supply can be made sustainable. In 2011 an international research team, in cooperation with Bonn University, presented five measures regarding a sustainable food supply. Now the measures are more detailed: a published article in the magazine Science shows which regions need to apply which measures in order for this idea to work.
Our goal, for example, is to increase crop yields through better cultivation methods and technology. In regions like Germany these kinds of measures would have little effect because growers in this region are already close to yielding 80 to 90 percent of the crops. What Germany is able to do is possible under current soil and climate conditions. In other parts of the world it is a different story: in some regions growers could harvest ten times as much as they are now if they were able to improve their crops.
Researches also want to make sure that rainforests are no longer being cut down to make arable land and pasture land. Brazil is at the top of this list: one third of the worldwide rainforest was lost here between 2000 and 2012. Indonesia comes in at number 2, with a loss of 17%. The effects of this include loss of biodiversity, accelerated climate change and a expansion of deserts - this would throw even more people into living with chronic hunger.