The Rising Demand For Food Production

The world population of 7.2 billion in mid-2013 is projected to increase by almost one billion people within the next twelve years. It is projected to reach 8.1 billion in 2025, and to further increase to 9.6 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100. This assumes a decline of fertility for countries where large families are still prevalent as well as a slight increase of fertility in several countries with fewer than two children per woman on average.

In October 2011, the United Nations announced that the world's population had reached 7 billion. By the year 2050, the UN predicts that the population will increase to about 9.6 billion. Our rapidly growing population has many concerned about whether or not the Earth can sustain more than 7 billion people. Many people are worried about what the human carrying capacity is and what will happen if we exceed that. Others believe that we will continue to be able to support population growth through innovations in technology. Erle C. Ellis, a professor of geography and environmental studies, holds this belief and presents it in his article "Overpopulation Is Not the Problem".

We currently have no known means of being able to feed 10 billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system. Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next 40 years, we will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of the past 10,000 years combined. Yet food productivity is set to decline, possibly very sharply, over the coming decades due to climate change; soil degradation and desertification, both of which are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world; and water stress. By the end of this century, large parts of the planet will not have any usable water.

One of the widely discussed issues, nowadays, we must tackle sooner rather than later is scarcity of food on our planet. Today our population growth is rising , and as Jonathan Foley says “ In 2050 there will be nine billion people in Earth “. Our planet does not have sufficient amount of food to feed whole world’s population. It is obvious that, the planet has a problem with the food supply to 2050 and to rectify this problem we need to stop expanding land, increase crops on land that we already have, use water efficiently, use less animal products, and to save food- as Jonathan Foley suggests in “ Feeding Nine Billion “. I feel fearful, but I do not want to change my habits.

Our planet’s carrying capacity for prehistoric Homo sapiens was probably near 100 million. However, without their Paleolithic ways of life and high-tech technologies, the population would be much less - possibly a couple tens of millions. The advance of agriculture allowed even larger population growth to occur, demanding for even greater land-use practices to earn more nourishment from land. At some point, their farming systems could have supported a couple billion people. The world population is currently almost at 7.5 billion, but with our technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.S. has estimated that the people born after we reach nine billion could be sustained if necessary expenses in food policies and anti-poverty

Agricultural practices throughout the ages have evolved dramatically. Having started off as simple pastoral management and shifting cultivation, these methods have been altered substantially in the name of “progress”, primarily in the US and other industrialized nations. Through this progression the energy inputs and outputs has been drastically altered. The industrialized food system as we know it is much more complex today than the simple agricultural practices used thousands of years ago. Today, the industrialized agricultural system is dependent on extraordinary amounts of fossil fuel inputs in order to maintain its complexity. Energy is needed for growing, processing, packaging, distributing, preparing and disposing of food. With the

Population is expected to reach 9 billion in 2030. At the same time agricultural land is becoming scarcer and poorer in quality. Furthermore, the environmental impact of intensive agriculture and the effects of climate change are threatening food security in many regions of the globe. Further, shortage of fossil fuels will have dramatic effects on the performance of intensive agriculture. There is an urge to develop more ecological agricultural practices both to meet the need to preserve agroecosystems health and to deal with the reduced availability of “cheap” energy from fossil fuels. (Gomiero, T., Paoletti, M., & Pimentel, D. 2008).

Seven Billion. This number may not be that large when we are applying it to a population of bacteria. But when it comes to people on Earth, the number becomes a little more daunting. In a world full of poverty and environmental destruction, people start to wonder, how many people is too many? This question may seem only newly relevant as we have become more aware of climate change and human effects on the health of our planet, but the truth is this question has been raised for hundreds of years. In fact, in 1789 Thomas Malthus rose awareness of the issues of population growth when he anonymously published his essay. In Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, the author discusses why and how a population needs to be checked. Malthus brings up great points for his era but fails to predict one of the main reasons why a population needs to be checked.

The United Nations predicts that the population will go up by at least two billion people by the year 2050. Eighty percent of this new population will be in sub-Saharan Africa and in South and Southeast Asia. These are the areas where climate change will be the most felt. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that the world’s food supply is in trouble because there has been crop yield drop for corn, wheat, and rice. There are also some places the crops have stopped growing altogether. Climate change’s biggest threat could be on the world’s food supply. Something must happen should to help this issue at hand. This is where the debate of modern technology, such as genetically modified crop, should be used to help the oncoming food dilemma.

Food is one of the basic necessities in humans’ lives, and it is undeniably considered to be the most important one of all. Evidently, the importance of having sustainable food resources that can also accommodate large populations is most desirable and has existed for more than 12,000 years ago when humans first begin to farm. The development and the desire of commercial farming that we have today are a direct result of the increasing demands in global food supplies due to the increasing world populations, which has been growing at an alarming pace since 1950s with the astonishing rate of 100 percent between 1959 (3 billion) and 1999 (6 billion).

It was recorded in the year 2011 that the worlds population reached approximately 7 Billion. However, when studying the current birth rate, experts have predicted that by the year 2050 the worlds population will reach more than 9 billion. Leaving agriculturalist and scientist concern on how to help feed the over 9 billion that would soon populate the earth. This leaves many factors to blame for the contribution to population growth. The first factor would have to be the life expectancy rate of humans nowadays. Medical advantages and technology have made it possible for humans to live a longer life. The next factor, and most important is agriculture. In order to thrive in future generations, we must find a way to provide food to consumers without harming their health or the environment. That is why within the next 34 years we must produce twice as much food that we currently receiving in order to provide for our populations growth.

One of the problems facing our world is population. It began about ten thousand years ago when the humans settled and began farming. The farming provides more food for the people thus making the population grow. Now we are about 6 billion in population and in a few years we will be around 10 to 11 billion. Therefore, our population will

In this day and age, our world is being consumed by the rapid growth of the world’s population. From the beginnings of time with cave men thousands of years ago up until the Industrial Revolution, the number of people living on this planet never passed a billion, and was always growing at a slow pace. When the Industrial Revolution hit the population skyrocketed to over 7 billion people. The growth of population has not slowed down since then, and more technological advances are popping up everyday to help balance the rapid growth. The amount of people in the world is literally growing each and every day. As the population grows we put more demands on our planet to provide for the billions and billions of people inhabiting it. The world

Economically there are two approaches to the debate on how much the human population can grow. One debate is the natural science approach which is adopted by biologists, chemists and physicists. The natural science approach stands by the fundamental idea that earths capacity to supply is fixed and human population is constrained by physical limits and of scarce natural resources. They state that human biological requirements don’t change. For example; everyone on the planet today needs 2000-2500 calories per day to be healthy, this is the same amount of calories our ancestors would have needed 1000 years ago, however, the earth is now vastly more populated than 1000 years ago, consequentially, there will come a time when there

On top of this the world’s population already having over 6 billion people, with 2 billion estimated to be living without basic life needs, is growing at around 75 million annually. Agriculture must be top priority with the growing risks of climate change and the growing population. Agriculture is currently already under immense pressure to deliver higher yields with population growth and higher demands for consumers. The future of population growth and climate change will see the need for even more supply from agricultural products to deliver for people worldwide. Climate change will make this a far more difficult task to accomplish. The demand for agricultural products is expected to increase by around 50% by 2030. Climate change may potentially slow down or reverse the progress toward a world without hunger.