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UK urged to lead on future food
Richard Black, bbcnews
The UK should plough £2bn ($3.3bn) into crop research to help stave off world hunger, says the Royal Society.

It says the world's growing population means food production will have to rise by about 50% in 40 years and the UK can lead the research needed.

Approaches it endorses include genetic modification, improved irrigation and systems of growing crops together that reduce the impact of diseases.

It says that rising yields have brought "complacency" over food supplies.

Earlier in the year, the G8 pledged to spend $20bn (£12bn) improving food security for the developing world.

Professor Sir David Baulcombe: ''We have to look at all the options that we have''

The Royal Society's report, Reaping the Benefits: Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Global Agriculture, concludes that science has to have a significant role if the food supply is to be maintained in 2050, when the world population may have reached nine billion.

The Green Revolution that created new high-yielding strains of crops such as rice and maize in the 1950s and 60s reduced hunger and improved food security, it says, but a new push is needed quickly.

"We need to take action now to stave off food shortages," said Professor Sir David Baulcombe from Cambridge University who chaired the study.
"If we wait even five to 10 years, it may be too late.

"In the UK we have the potential to come up with viable scientific solutions for feeding a growing population
(21 Oct 2009)
The Royal Society report can be accessed here.

World must use GM crops, says UK science academy
Gerard Wynn, Reuters
The world needs genetically modified crops both to increase food yields and minimize the environmental impact of farming, Britain's top science academy said on Wednesday.

The Royal Society said in a report the world faced a "grand challenge" to feed another 2.3 billion people by 2050 and at the same time limit the environmental impact of the farm sector.

The world will have to increase food output by 70 percent and invest $83 billion annually in developing countries by mid-century, the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization said earlier this month.

"The problem is such an acute one, doing that sustainably without eroding soil, overusing fertilizers is an enormous challenge," said the chair of the Royal Society report, Cambridge University's David Baulcombe.

"There isn't a lot more land to use," he told Reuters. "And from the point of expense and using fossil fuels, we want to use less fertilizer."
"The food supply problem is likely to come to a head 10, 20, 30 years from now," he said, adding this didn't leave much time given the research lead time to develop new crops...
(20 Oct 2009)

Feed the world
Tristram Stuart, Financial Times
The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry
By Paul Roberts
Bloomsbury £12.99, 390 pages

The Food Wars
By Walden Bello
Verso £7.99, 186 pages

The Constant Economy: How to Create a Stable Society
By Zac Goldsmith
Atlantic £16.99, 200 pages

The Environmental Food Crisis: The Environment’s Role in Averting Future Food Crises
Edited by Christian Nellemann
UN Environment Programme, 104 pages (free)

The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Food Security for the 21st Century
By Alex Evans
Chatham House, 59 pages (free)

Modern methods are so much better than the old ways,” growled Frank Gervais, an 80-year-old farmer I worked for in my teens in a remote part of southern France. “C’est mieux!” he repeated in his broad accent, wagging his finger to rebuke me for my romanticised notions of pre-industrial farming, before tractors emptied the fields of labourers.

I visited Frank again this year. His only grandchild has moved away, and his village now has only eight full-time inhabitants. I asked Frank if he had any regrets that the small, rocky hill-farm he has cultivated for eight decades might soon be abandoned or absorbed into a larger farm. But Frank, who spent most of his adult life doing back-breaking manual labour, is the most adamant advocate of progress I have met. “Before”, he told me, “we sweated all day and lived on potato soup with pig lard. Now my granddaughter is hoping to become a vet: what is there to regret?”

The competing claims of small, labour-intensive farms and large, fossil-fuel intensive agri-business is just one of the battles now raging over how the world will feed itself in the future.

The situation looks grave. There are 6.7bn people on earth; by 2050 there will be a further 2.5bn mouths to feed, on current growth trends. Nearly 1bn people are already malnourished. Aquifers and rivers have been sucked dry to irrigate parts of the world parched by global warming, and the rich show no sign of relinquishing gastronomic luxuries to alleviate the hunger of others.

Rather, as the world’s affluent grow in number, particularly in China, desire for more meat and dairy products has diverted cereals to feed animals, further straining food supply. Volatile oil prices afflict farmers’ bottom lines; and now, with the advent of subsidised biofuels, when oil prices rise, food becomes more attractive as an alternative fuel, leaving less to nourish the poor.

This has long been a controversial subject. Now, five new publications wade into the fray, each with theories about the problem’s sources and potential solutions...
(17 Oct 2009)

Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger?
Editors, New York Times
With food prices remaining high in developing countries, the United Nations estimates that the number of hungry people around the world could increase by 100 million in 2009 and pass the one billion mark. A summit of world leaders in Rome scheduled for November will set an agenda for ways to reduce hunger and increase investment in agriculture development in poor countries.

What will drive the next Green Revolution? Is genetically modified food an answer to world hunger? Are there other factors that will make a difference in food production?

Paul Collier, economist, Oxford University
Vandana Shiva, activist and author
Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of nutrition and public policy, Cornell
Raj Patel, Institute for Food and Development Policy
Jonathan Foley, University of Minnesota
Michael J. Roberts, economist, North Carolina State University...
(26 Oct 2009)

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (two-part audio interview, download Part 1)
David Montgomery and Thomas Allen, One World Report
We go now from green to brown. That is, from green-designed houses to the rich, brown soil beneath our feet. Well it’s rich and brown for now. But that dirt may not be rich and fertile much longer. This according to Dr. David Montgomery, author of the book, “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.” Dr. Montgomery lives in Seattle and talked with our own Tom Allen about why we need to stop taking our soil for granted. Because according to history, the way civilizations have treated the soil has determined how long they’ve survived.

For millennia farmers have plowed the soil and for millennia it has blown away or washed into the sea. Soil depletion has been the end of many a civilization. Ours will be no different says Dr. David Montgomery, geomorphologist at the University of Washington and author of "Dirt: The erosion of civilizations." But what will get us he, says, will be when we can no longer use fossil fuels for tillage and fertilizer. The solution, found in part two of this two-part series, is to rebuild the life of the soil through intensive horticulture. Two five-minute segments.
(24 Sept 2009)
From Tom Allen:
This is a two part radio series of an interview I did with Prof. David Montgomery on Sept. 3, 2009. Each segment is 5 minutes long. Either can be heard independently of the other but the two together offer a more complete understanding. Broadcast two consecutive weeks on KBCS-FM, Bellevue, Washington as part of the weekly One World Report.
You can download Part 2 of the interview here.

FAO World Summit on Food Security
Climate-L.org
The FAO World Summit on Food Security will discuss putting into place a more coherent and effective system of food security, including rules and mechanisms to ensure adequate incomes for farmers, mobilizing investments into agricultural infrastructure and access to inputs, and a mechanism for early reaction to food crises. The Summit agenda will also include roundtables on: financial and economic crisis and food security; global governance of food security; agriculture and the Copenhagen conference on climate change; support measures for farmers; and an early reaction fund for food security.
All the background briefing documents for the summit can be accessed from this page.
(Oct 2009)