By 2050, our planet might need to feed 9 billion people. How do we improve Earth’s food systems – the way food is grown, harvested, transported, and distributed – to meet that challenge? The first step is to observe and measure the way we farm now, according to a group of 25 food and agriculture experts, who have proposed building a global network to collect information about food systems worldwide.
Sean Smukler: To improve the system we have right now, we need to know what works where, and why.
Sean Smukler is an agricultural ecologist at Columbia University and a co-author of the July 2010 article published in the journal Nature. He said creating a common system of measurements – for example, how many calories a farming region can provide per person, or how much energy is expended per unit of food – will help move the world toward farming methods that can feed 9 billion people.
Sean Smukler: We’d really like to provide people with better information to discuss things like organic or conventional production – things that are commonly debated today with so little information.
He said that evaluating food systems is not just about how much food is grown. It’s also about the farm’s effect on nearby nature and water, energy use, and how it impacts peoples’ lives.
Sean Smukler: We want to be able to know how to transition effectively to a vibrant, healthy, equitable, and environmentally sustainable global food system.
Smukler and his co-authors want the data collectors to agree on the most important measurable aspects of the food system – whether it’s food and nutrition security, human health, the economic prosperity that farming brings to a region, the impact on the environment, as well as the impact on the community. He said that today, there are many organizations collecting data about global agriculture. But the problem is that each organization is measuring different aspects of farming.
Sean Smukler: We’re really envisioning a decentralized data collection process. We don’t want to have everyone stop monitoring the data they are currently collecting. Right now, although there’s not a common set of metrics, we think it’s possible to get everyone to agree on this minimum data set.
In other words, Smukler and his co-authors want the data collectors to agree on the most important measurable aspects of the food system – whether it’s food security, human health, the economic prosperity that farming brings to a region, the impact on the environment, as well as the impact on the community.
Sean Smukler: What we’re concerned about is more than just production – meaning, the yield available. We’re concerned about environmental outcomes like greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, or impacts to biodiversity. Or social and economic outcomes would be something like the social cohesion of the community, or distribution of jobs in an agricultural landscape, or the returns to a farm in terms of profit.
The data will be collected from areas that are representative of different climates and farming conditions – for example, farming in California is drastically different from farming in Kenya. Smukler said once the data is collected, it will be entered into computer models that will be able to apply the information to other areas of the world that haven’t been directly studied.
Sean Smukler: We want to be able to tell people, if you choose this type of management in this location, these are the results you’re going to get.
Dear Mr. Smukler,
You are a nut job. Farmers around the world are in possession of the metrics you’re interested in.
They are the stewards of the land and communities that they live in.
You want them to share with you, their local knowledge, their trade secrets, their ability to control the land…with an unknown, naïve academic.
The ONLY first step in feeding 9 billion is BIRTH CONTROL. Either the rest of the world will figure out what the West has known and practiced for decades, or Nature (ala Malthus) will step in — on Everybody.
There is a very good way. PermaCulture. Bill Mollison is a genius and if people traded locally, designed according to PermaCulture design principles, enrgy, water, food, and human well being will be secured. Not only are the ‘green revolution’ poisoning our earth, it leaves soils depleted and poor, easily eroded and blown away, so when I see large mono-culture crops and unsustanable long haul transport and artificially ripened fruit etc. I ponder the health of that 9 billion people, especially if they are satisfied with food grown on teh other side of the planet and the unsustainable means of import and export subsidies. Anyway. What i am basically saying is that people cannot remove themselves from the impact to the environment by thinking themselves out of this situation. Every possible piece of land is being occupied at present, we are growing populations and a awakening Western Culture being adopted by the sleeping giants, Africa and China. Almost stepping out of ‘poverty/oppression to enticip[ation of ‘the life’ we have painted as idillic. Now we need to find solutions that look at everything as connected and that unsustainable farming be transformed to ecologically supportive food production. Because without the ecology that suports life on all complex forms, we can forget to feed an increasing poppulation by thinking or statisticising about it. People need a real wake up to the reality that people are starving already and the wealthy are wasting food and mother earth’s atmosphere feeding their own industries and profits.
PermaCulture Design works on all levels, Ecological, Social, Economic, Cultural and Spiritual and integrates us back into a living planet with responsibility shared amongst all. But this is hard to do when we’ve known nothing else and we have so many others things keeping us from it.
Unsustainable Monoculture using chemicals and synthetic fertilisers polute the ecosystems we all depend on for life and we are like the frog in the boiling pot. We should be spending our time educating people about taking charge of their little piece of earth and growing food, communilly, regionally and not kill mother earth for the almighty dollar. I wish you peace and good luck. Know where your food comes from, know where your water comes from… really know… and then considder how good it is for mother earth. If not. Well. Now your concious…
Love
Harry
The way to ensure adequate food supplies is through private ownership and control of farms. All subsidies and regualtions must be thrown into the dustbin. Farmers that own their property will be efficient overall and as the market forces direct, will produce what folks want and need. Any attempts at central control will produce what the Soviet Union’s agricultural programs did. Poverty and starvation. Right now, it is estimated that the earth can support 29 billion people. We are not going there as natural forces will cause human population to stabilize long before that. Once again, the answer is to get government out of the equation and for all of us not to mind other folks business.
I’m humored that this article provoked such political responses.
I don’t believe that science and politics shouldn’t be tangoing, but they are every day…
I think it is very useful to think in terms of “margin of error” when we speak of increasing levels of “effectiveness” or “efficiency” to solve a particular problem. Consider the following:
Put 2 people in a canoe and it is stable. In fact, those 2 people can be fairly relaxed because it would take a significant effort on their part to capsize the canoe. But, put 6 people in the same canoe and, all it takes is the slightest miscalculation on the part of even a single person, and the canoe will capsize. Of course, carrying 6 people across the river in one canoe trip is certainly more efficient than carrying just 2 people.
Now, this article is talking about ways to feed 9 billion people. I am sure it can be done. However, the systems, procedures, etc. that will be developed / used to accomplish this task will have to be very efficient. Much more so than those used today. In other words, there will be a smaller margin for error.
It makes me very nervous to think that we will increasingly have to depend on “canoes filled with 6 people” to meet the challenges that a rapidly increasing global population creates.
Scrap any and all central control and planning.
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We have no technical problems feeding several times the population of earth. We do have economic and political problems.
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Contrary to belief, there is no food shortage, only a quality food and authentic ingredient food shortage and it is already world wide and no one even noticed.
Start reading food labels people!
There is no need for ANY food label to contain 20-50 chemical and filler ingredients, our ancestors NEVER cooked that way!
Less bank and government regulations on farms, less taxes too. Make it profitable once again to be a farmer.
And I hate to admit this due to my corn and soy allergies but just keep adding cheap food fillers to extend the pre-processed foods.
You got to get soy and other “cheap cow food fattening grains” into the human foods, and make it taste more like a fatty beef burger and keep charging the same as for beef for it…Oh forget that we already do that.
Mankind will never wake to realize he is buying a $3 beef burger that actually has 5 cents of beef in it or even that their children’s breakfast cereal is 60% cheap soy.
Keep telling the public how good the benefits of Soy is good for them, if they don’t mind their male children developing breasts due to the estrogen hormone identical
properties of soy.
I am over 50 now and when I was very young about 10 yrs old, farmers knew best as it was their life, I recall one farmer saying the Government was giving out easy loans if they would grow soy but the farmers I knew said soy was worthless, almost a weed and they wouldn’t feed it to their own cattle for feed but since weeds grow easy and the loans were easy, they mostly all went with the flow to save the family farms.
The government began studies on how to use this cheap filler as food fillers.
Even the FDA approved it to be in our food. They said it was healthy for women to eat soy but said nothing about the effects on young boys.
This makes me believe we are already suffering a grand food shortage as more soy is added to all food labels and food manufacturers keep their profits high by adding filler grains and soy to what used to be good food.
If all else fails I suppose we could go the SOYlent green route.
(forgive my pun on Soylent green but I just had too)
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