Feeding the world proves to be a growing challenge

You are currently viewing Feeding the world proves to be a growing challengeDarrell Hoemann/The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting
Feeding Nine Billion: A Path to Sustainable Agriculture keynote speaker Andrew Revkin, New York Times columnist, Pace Academy: “Peak food?”on Tuesday, September 30, 2014.

By Claire Everett/CU-CitizenAccess.org — More than 300 researchers from around the world gathered at the University of Illinois this week for a major conference on how to feed a global population that is expected to rise to 9 billion people by 2050.

Organized by The Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment at the University, the conference kicked off at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center with a welcome speech by New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin. The conference was held Tuesday through Thursday at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The problem of feeding the world is bigger than just providing enough food, Revkin said.

It also includes issues such as waste, ethics and diversity in the food system.

“Remember, food isn’t just about growing more food,” he said. “It’s about fewer mouths, mouths that get adequate nutrition but not too much—It’s all that interface.”

Over consumption can be a problem too, Revkin said.

Researchers refer to the idea of feeding the maximum population as “peak food,” analyzing the concept using the 2050 benchmark.

“Peak food is kind of a question mark after that,” said Revkin, who writes in the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog. “Obviously, it really is a question – it’s how do we limit harm to the environment and ourselves.”

Revkin also said that “diseases of affluence roughly take away as many life years as diseases of poverty.”

“Think about diabetes, heart disease, cancer, versus malnutrition, gastro-intestinal stuff,” he said.

Funding research is also a challenge

While health research funds have reached roughly $70 billion, funding for other research to solve these problems has not kept up.

Research and development interests in energy have not increased much since the 1970s, hovering between $10 billion to $15 billion, according to data from the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

And funding specifically for agriculture research is considerably less.

“To get something big and revolutionary done takes tens of millions of dollars for a number of years,” Revkin said. “Agriculture… we’re just not there yet in terms of making this a priority.”

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