In the next 50 years, the world’s farmers must produce more food than farmers have grown in the entire 10,000 years since agriculture was invented.
At the same time, farmers must also produce energy crops to cushion the ballooning costs of fossil fuels, and they must supply more raw products for industrial goods, including more plastics and textiles.
Somehow, they must also achieve all this without being able to plow up more acres, and without despoiling the acres already under cultivation.
“Plant science is creating a multitude of new uses for agricultural products, and it’s just in time,” Howard Minigh of Belgium, president of CropLife International, told the ABIC 2007 plenary session in Calgary on Monday.
“But can we do it all?” Minigh asked.
That question hovered over the present-ations of world-class speakers throughout the morning.
“There’s a perfect storm coming, and it’s going to hit us in the next five to eight years,” said John Oliver of Maple Leaf Bio Concepts, and former president of Dow Elanco in Canada.
Agriculture will be needed to help reduce the risks of global warming and climate change, even though the world is already steaming down a path that, Oliver said, makes even the direst warnings of former U.S. vice-president Al Gore look conservative.
This past summer, a Briton swam in open water near the North Pole, Oliver said. By 2020, Japanese scientists are predicting the Northwest Passage will be navigable for shipping year round.
Oliver foresees a healthcare crisis too, especially in the industrial world where the obesity epidemic means the next generation is likely to have shorter lives than their parents, and are therefore expected to clog the health-care system at the same time. Solving that healthcare crisis will require new generations of food and pharmaceutical products.
As well, the world will look to agriculture for new sources of energy, Oliver said, and it will require farmers also to produce their crops with less and less fresh water.
Over-riding all these challenges is the need to feed a population that is expected to approach 9 billion by the year 2050, an increase of nearly 50 per cent from today.
Simplistic solutions won’t work, said Dr. C.S. Prakash, global expert in the agriculture of developing countries, based at Tuskegee University in Alabama.
To prevent worsening global hunger, Africa must triple its food production by 2050, Latin America must increase its production by 80 per cent, and Asia must grow 70 per cent more food. Even North America must produce 30 per cent more food, Prakash said. “We must remember, we already have 740 million who are essentially starving.”