Environment and Development

2015
Rajesh Bhattacharya
Lecture III
Population, Food Security and Sustainability
Ref: Foley, Jonathan A., et al. "Solutions for a
cultivated planet." Nature 478.7369 (2011): 337-342.

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Reverend Thomas Malthus ( 1766 1834): An

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

Growth
Rising real wages
Higher standard of living
Explosion of population
(because of a decline in the
rate of infant mortality)
Population growth outstrips
the growth of food supply
Food prices rise
Real wages fall to bare
subsistence level
Infant mortality rate rises.

Population Growth: 1,2,4,8,.

Food Supply Growth: 1,2,3,4,5.
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Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb

(1968)
People eating, people washing, people sleeping.
People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People
thrusting their hands through the taxi window,
begging. People defecating and urinating. People
clinging to buses. People herding animals. People,
people, people, people. (Ehrlich in Delhi).
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the
1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to
death in spite of any crash programs embarked
upon now.

He was proved wrong as India was undergoing a green revolution that time

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Malthussian pessimism is wrong

Food production has increased much faster than
population even though there was an explosion of
population growth in the 20th century.
There are substantial yield gaps in various parts of the
world which can be closed to increase food
India & China, yields rose, so did in many other
production. Eg.,
developing nations
Global population will grow, but likely to plateau at
some 9 billion people by 2050.

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Changes in the global production of crops and animals since 1961, relative to 1961 levels.
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Changes in the global production of crops and animals since 1961, relative to 1961 levels.
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Challenges in the 21st century

Crop production needs to roughly double
a) To meet demand from additional population
b) To cover nutritional needs of more than 1 billion
of people who are hungry and more than 2 billion
who are malnourished today.
c) Increased income of consumers everywhere
(India, China, in particular) will lead to increased
demand for meat and dairy products, thus food
as feed for animals.
d) A significant part of agricultural output is
expected to go into biofuel production.
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Challenges in the 21st century (Contd.)

Between 1985 and 2005, after accounting for the
increase in harvested land , average global crop yields
increased by only 20%.
Between 1965 and 1985, yields increased by 56%.
Yields are now rising less quickly than before.
Globally, only 62% of crop production is allocated to
human food, 35% to animal feed, and 3% for bioenergy,
seed and other industrial products.
Land devoted to raising animals constitutes 75% of
the worlds agricultural land.
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Source: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/

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Expansion of agriculture
Agriculture is mainly expanding in the tropics, where 80% of
new croplands are replacing forests (55% intact forests,
28% disturbed forests).
European Union: Worlds largest net importer of agricultural
products, grown on an agricultural area larger than the
territory of Germany.
Global Land Grab: international investors are increasingly
leasing or buying farmland in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America for food and fuel production.including india
Clearing tropical forests is also a major source of greenhouse
gas emissions and is estimated to contribute about 12% of
total anthropogenic CO2 emissions
Tropical forests are major sources of biodiversity and carbon sinks

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Expansion of Cropland: Brazil

Worldwide, croplands and pasture have already cleared or

converted 70% of the grassland, 50% of the savanna, 45% of the
temperate deciduous forest, and 27% of the tropical forest
biome.
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Tropical lands typically provide average crop yields around 50% lower than those in
temperate regions with the notable exception of oil palm, sugarcane, and South
American soybeans yet release nearly two times more carbon for each unit of land
cleared.
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1st problem: Expansion

2nd problem

Intensification of agriculture

Agricultural intensification has been

responsible for most of the yield increases of
the past decades.
In the past 50 years, the worlds irrigated
cropland area roughly doubled, while global
fertilizer use increased by 500%(over 800% for
nitrogen alone).
70% of global freshwater withdrawals are
devoted to irrigation.
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Environmental impact of agriculture

Expanded and intensified agriculture has contributed to
environmental damage-- climate change, biodiversity
loss and degradation of land and freshwater.
Agriculture is responsible for emitting more
greenhouse gases than all our cars, trucks, trains, and
airplanes combinedlargely from methane released
by cattle and rice farms, nitrous oxide from fertilized
fields, and carbon dioxide from the cutting of rain
forests to grow crops or raise livestock. (Jonathan
Foley, A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World).
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Solution 1: Stop expanding agriculture

Many regions cleared for agriculture in the tropics have
low yields compared with their temperate
counterparts.
Regions of tropical agriculture that do have high yields
areas of sugarcane, oil palm and soybeanstypically
do not contribute much to the worlds total calorie or
protein supplies, especially when crops are used for
feed or biofuels.
However, such crops do provide income, and thereby
contribute to poverty alleviation and food security to
some sectors of the population.
So make agri less economically viable by increasing jobs outside agriculture
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Solution 2: Close yield gaps

A yield gap is the difference between crop yields
observed at any given location and the crops
potential yield at the same location given current
agricultural practices and technologies.
Large yield variations exist across the world.
If yields reach 95% of their potential for 16
important food and feed crops, food production
would increase by 58%. If yields reach 75% of
their potential, production would increase by
28%
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In past 50 years, per capita food production has increased approximately twofold in
Asia (in China, by a factor of nearly 3.5), 1.6-fold in Latin America. In Africa, per capita
production fell back from the mid-1970s and has only just reached the same level as
in 1961.
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Major Crops

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Poverty and Yield Gap

A yield gap may also exist because the high costs of inputs or
the low returns from increased production that make it
economically suboptimal to raise production to the
maximum technically attainable.
Poor transport and market infrastructure raise the prices of
inputs, such as fertilizers and water, and increase the costs
of moving the food produced into national or world
markets.
Where the risks of investment are high and the means to
offset them are absent, not investing can be the most
rational decision, part of the poverty trap.
We can increase maximum yield of key crops by genetic
improvements. However it is controversial.
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Solution 3: Increase agricultural

resource efficiency
Globally, agricultural regions are characterized by
hotspots of low nutrient use efficiency and
large volumes of excess nutrients (in areas like
China, Northern India, the USA and Western
Europe).
Only 10% of the worlds croplands account for 32%
of the global nitrogen surplus and 40% of the
phosphorus surplus.
Targeted policy and management in these regions
could improve the balance between yields and
the environment.
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Solution 4: Diet change, reduction of

waste
Compare calories available if all crops were consumed by
humans based on todays allocation of crops to food,
animal feed, and other products for 16 staple crops.
Shifting 16 major crops to 100% human food could
increase food availability by 28%.
The conversion efficiency of plant into animal matter is
about 10%; thus, more people could be supported
from the same amount of land if they were
vegetarians.
While radical diet change may not possible or desirable,
we may at least shift from grain-fed to pasture-fed
animal.
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Wastage in developing world

Roughly 30 to 40% of food in both the developed and
developing worlds is lost to waste.
In the developing world, losses are mainly due to absence
of food-chain infrastructure and the lack of knowledge
or investment in storage technologies on the farm.
In India, 35 to 40% of fresh produce is lost because
neither wholesale nor retail outlets have cold storage.
Even with rice grain, which can be stored more readily, as
much as one-third of the harvest in Southeast Asia can
be lost after harvest to pests and spoilage.

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Wastage in the developed world

Food is relatively cheap: no incentives to avoid waste.
Consumers accustomed to purchasing foods of the
highest cosmetic standards; hence, retailers discard
many edible, yet only slightly blemished products.
The food service industry frequently uses super-sized
portions as a competitive lever, whereas buy one get
one free offers have the same function for retailers.
Litigation and lack of education on food safety have
lead to a reliance on use by dates, whose safety
margins often mean that food fit for consumption is
thrown away.
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Makeup of total food waste in developed and developing countries. Retail, food
service, and home and municipal categories are lumped together for developing
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countries.

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Agrarian Structure in developing countries

and food security
90% of farmers worldwide farm on <2 ha, producing food
where it is needed in much of the developing world.
80% of the hungry live in developing countries with 50%
being smallholders.
Sustainable increase in yield can be compatible with
smallholder cultivation.
One study of 286 agricultural sustainability projects in developing
countries, involving 12.6 million chiefly smallholder farmers on 37
million hectares, found an average yield increase of 79% across a
very wide variety of systems and crop types. One-quarter of the
projects reported a doubling of yield (Godfray et al, 2010).

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Conclusion: Farmers and Food

Security
Many rural farmers and other food producers live near the
margin of being net food consumers and producers and will
be affected in complex ways by rising food prices, with
some benefitting and some being harmed.
Expanded trade can provide insurance against regional
shocks on production such as conflict, epidemics, droughts,
or floods.
Expansion of food production and the growth of
population both occur at different rates in different
geographic regions, global trade is necessary to balance
supply and demand across regions.
Conversely, a highly connected food system may lead to the
more widespread propagation of economic perturbations.
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