Where will the food come from? Today, we use about a third of the planet’s land surface for agriculture, according to Jason Clay, a senior vice president at the fund who prepared the analysis. But when you subtract the areas that are already “taken’’ - deserts, mountains, lakes, rivers, cities, and highways - the figure rises to about 58 percent of the land. Take out the national parks and other protected areas, and food production already consumes 70 percent of available space. At current growth rates, Clay says, we will be nearing the planet’s capacity by 2050.
For every square inch of unclaimed land to be converted to farming would be an irreversible ecological disaster. But even if you are entirely deaf to green arguments, the problem is fundamental and unavoidable: At some point, the amount of land devoted to agriculture must stop expanding, because there is only so much land.
What we must do, then, is freeze the footprint of food - find a way to roughly double the productivity of farming, so that we can produce twice as much food on the same amount of land. It is a daunting technological and social challenge, and one that does not have a single solution, according to Clay’s report on the idea in a recent issue of Nature.
The most powerful tool is one that makes some environmentalists uncomfortable: genetics. The tools of modern biology have brought tremendous improvements in some crops, like corn, by breeding in traits like faster growth and increased resistance to drought and disease. But of the 10 crops that produce about three quarters of the world’s food, only one is on track to double production by 2050.
A consortium including the World Wildlife Fund and BGI, a genome research group based in China, will be working through a list of “orphan crops,’’ such as cassava, banana, and peanuts, which are widely used for food, but which have not had their DNA sequenced. Such information would make breeding useful traits faster and more efficient.
