World Grain - July 2012 - 42

FEATURE: FEEDING 9 BILLION PEOPLE BY 2050

John Beddington, chief scientific advisor to the British government, addresses delegates at the Westminster Food and Nutrition Seminar.

the world has ever known, you’re going to see that extra billion there,” he said. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we were starting from something that was reasonably good, but we’re not. You have already got about a billion people in poverty, another billion people in what you might call concealed poverty, having insufﬁcient food to eat,” he said. “A little less than a billion don’t have access to clean water, and are actually neglected. There is also real energy poverty out there as well, getting on for 1.5 billion people who don’t have access to reliable energy sources.” Beddington also predicted increasing volatility in commodity prices. “There is a belief in some parts that in a sense the evil ﬁnancial world is driving volatility in commodity markets,” he said. “I think the jury is out on that in detail, but we do need to monitor it. We need to be thinking about food reserves. We shouldn’t be thinking about some sort of enormous global bank of grain reserves. “The reason for the price spike in 2007-08 was that reserves were at a 40or 50-year low; the ratio of reserves to consumption was down about 14%, the lowest it’s been for about 30 or 40 years. Those are the things that can drive volatility, because as prices go up you don’t
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have the reserves that go into the markets to even out trade.” Beddington stressed the need for what he called climate-smart agriculture. “We have got another billion people coming, urbanization is there, people are more prosperous, climate change is happening as a risk multiplier, and we need to do a number of things,” he said. “We need to be thinking about raising the proﬁle of hunger. That’s important at the political level. We need to focus on agriculture, make the most of new and existing technologies. We’re going to need everything, not just new technologies, but traditional. And we need to be thinking really pretty hard about the consumption patterns.” RAMPING UP PRODUCTION Tom Hind, director of corporate affairs at the National Farmers Union, warned of the danger of thinking about overly remote targets. “There is a risk that the focus on 2050, which has been a focal point in terms of population growth, in terms of demand for food, energy and water, etc., has become a bit of a distraction, because it allows some of the really big decisions that need to be taken to be put off or ignored, either because some people would argue that the mar-

ket will sort everything out (a classic Defra/Treasury economist view that the market will do everything), or just simply adjusting diet and cutting waste will provide all the answers; we don’t need to produce more food,” he said. “And neither of those routes for me is sustainable. “We’ve got a job to do as a farming industry to identify what we see as our biggest 10 research challenges over the course of the next 10 to 15 years.” Research must be applied. “We need to ensure that we’ve got the ability to transfer knowledge onto the farm,” he said. “I think we’ve got a private sector organization that is pretty good in certain sectors, particular in the cereal sector, but we’ve got some massive gaps.” From Professor Tim Benton, champion for the U.K.’s Global Food Security Program and Professor of Population Ecology, University of Leeds, there came a warning that Europe could not ignore the need to produce more. “If we decide to grow less food in Europe, our demand is not likely to go down in the near future. So where does the food come from that we no longer produce?” he said. “Our activities have an international impact on people around the rest of the world as we exist within a global food system, and vice versa. Key questions must be: How do we do sustainable intensiﬁcation? How do we close those yield gaps in Sub-Saharan Africa? And how do we make agriculture climate smart as well?” Problems in food supply would hit the poorest hardest. “In the developed world, we will all notice volatility in prices, but people in other parts of the world might well starve because of it,” he said. “There may well be all sorts of human and political issues to do with resource driven political unrest, even wars, and there is real scope for planetary harm. Even if we are alright, food insecurity in the rest of the world will impact us, and our consumption behavior and production will impact the rest of the
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World Grain - July 2012

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