|
|
|
You can get e-magazine links on WhatsApp. Click here
|
|
|
|
|
|
“By 2050, world would need 60% more food & 50% more energy”: FAO chief
|
|
Monday, 19 January, 2015, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
|
|
Berlin
|
|
fiogf49gjkf0d By 2050, the world would need 60 per cent more food, 50 per cent more energy and 40 per cent more water. This was stated by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) director-general Jose Graziano da Silva at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, underway in Berlin as a part of Green Week Observances.
The topic for this year’s forum is ‘The Growing Demand for Food, Raw Materials and Energy: Opportunities for Agriculture, Challenges for Food Security’.
The increasing competition for natural resources and emerging resource bottlenecks mean that global agriculture can no longer operate using a business as usual approach. The input-intensive agricultural development model used for the past 40 years is no longer sustainable, and a paradigm shift in food production is needed.
Graziano da Silva said, “Business as usual would mean a huge and simultaneous increase in the need for food, energy and water in the coming decades. The estimates point to the need to increase food production by 60 per cent by 2050 to feed a population that will top the nine-billion mark.”
He added, “To address the challenge of feeding more people while using less land, water and energy, concerted efforts and investments are needed to support a widespread, globe-spanning transition to sustainable farming systems and land management practices.”
Biofuels: Food first, but opportunities remain “Climate change and increasing competition between food and non-food agricultural products such as bioenergy have made the challenges of feeding the future more complex,” stated the FAO chief.
“But it is important to remember that biofuel has emerged with strength as an alternative energy source because of the need to mitigate fossil fuel production and greenhouse gases – and that need has not changed,” he added.
“We need to move from the food versus fuel debate to a food and fuel debate. There is no question - food comes first,” Graziano da Silva added.
“But biofuels should not be simply seen as a threat or as a magical solution. Like anything else, they could either do good or bad,” he added.
Graziano da Silva said, “Thanks to the experience gained in recent years and the new biofuel production technologies, countries today are better positioned to evaluate the opportunities and risks of biofuel production and to use it when it pays off socially, environmentally and economically.”
“In order to avoid conflicts with food production, mandatory biofuel policies must be flexible and need to be adjusted according to the reality, the ongoing balance of production, and stocks of the different products used,” he added.
Speaking more generally on the contributions a shift to sustainable agriculture could make, the FAO chief said, “The world’s food systems must achieve much greater efficiencies in their use of natural resources, in particular water, energy and land – including reducing food waste.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|