Introduction
Background
Over the past 80 years, the global population has increased from 2 billion to 7 billion. In the next 40 years, it is predicted to rise to 9 billion or more. With the emerging challenges of climatic change and reduced agricultural production across the globe, the challenge remains on how to feed a population of 9 billion or more people adequately.
Justification
The growing population creates a necessity for increasing global food production capacity. However, increasing food production presents challenges due to the decreasing soil fertility and climatic change, among other challenges. By noting that the world population will continue to rise amid various challenges in ensuring the availability of sufficient food supply and reserves, it is necessary to develop appropriate measures for ensuring food security for the rapidly expanding population.
Defining Food Insecurity
Food insecurity has a direct correlation to malnutrition, which is an enormous contributing factor to undernourishment-related ailments. Radimer (2002, p.860) defines food security as the accessibility to adequate and healthy foods by all people at all times to foster their healthy living. Drawing from this definition, food insecurity occurs in situations of limited access to safe food, which has sufficient nutritional values, through socially acceptable mechanisms.
Thesis Statement
Nations that seek to maintain healthy populations place a critical emphasis on food security. However, challenges that require solutions are encountered in this noble endeavour. This paper investigates these challenges and measurements that are most effective in feeding the rapidly expanding global population.
Preview
Over the past few decades, global world food production had been in pace with population growth (FAO 2003). This consistency was attributed to the then growing food production technologies such as the development of new drought-resistant varieties through advances in biotechnology, mechanisation, and substitution of rain-dominated agriculture with irrigation and interventions in improving or replacing the depleted soil fertility (Borlaug & Dowswell 2008). However, with an expected population rise to hit the 9billion mark in the next 40 years, food insecurity is a major problem that is likely to afflict many nations across the globe.
Problem Statement
Following the risks that are posed by global warming, which influences food production levels across the globe, the global population will encounter the challenge of inadequate availability of food. Thus, nations have to address the problem of feeding the increasing global population amid the challenges of the production of adequate food.
Solution
To resolve the problem of food insecurity, and with reference to the escalating global population, future food production will have to grow by more than 100% in the next 50 years. To help in reducing problems such as climatic change due to global warming, which leads to low food production, increased food production has to be done in an environmentally friendly and sustainable manner. For future generations, FAO (2003) informs that cereals that have a projected increase in production by 50% by 2030 will continue dominating the list of the most demanded foods. However, in developing nations, especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa where no green revolution has ever occurred, the supply of cereals will remain lower than demand, thus triggering an increase by over 150 million tonnes (Borlaug & Dowswell 2008, p.8).
This observation means that to ensure food security, placing more emphasis on increased production in nations that expect higher demand than supply will be an important solution to the problem of food insecurity.
To feed the rising global population, three possible strategies need to be considered. These plans include increasing the area under cultivation, increasing the net yields, and raising the annual frequency of cropping. The land is a constant resource. Hence, increasing population exerts pressure on the limited land through colonisation of new lands and utilisation of the current cropping land in building settlements. This situation suggests that increased food production will require more effective utilisation of the land that is currently under cultivation to yield higher production. In fact, Borlaug and Dowswell (2008, p. 9) confirm that an increase of about 85% of food production across the globe will be realised from land that is presently under agriculture.
Therefore, raising crop yields and the cultivation frequency are the most feasible ways of ensuring food security in the coming years. Implementation of these strategies requires a commitment by governments in facilitating the appropriate intervention for their success in resolving the problem of food insecurity now and in the future.
Implications
Feeding a growing world population by putting in place strategies for increasing the frequency of cultivation and cropping implies that the incorporation of better technologies of food production is inevitable. Borlaug and Dowswell (2008, p.3) support this assertion by claiming that the world possesses the necessary technology of feeding even more than 9 billion people sustainably. However, accessibility to these technologies is limited and in some situations, uninsured due to poverty, IP rights restrictions, and governmental regulations. For instance, genetic modification of the existing crop varieties can offer an important opportunity for increasing cropping rates through the creation of crops with lower maturity period.
However, different nations limit the adoption and application of this technology to ensure food sufficiency through restrictions on IP rights of technology developers and different opinions on its appropriateness in fostering environmentally and healthy food for human consumption.
The contribution of genetic modification in ensuring sustainable production through reduced costs of production is evident in many nations. For instance, in the US, in 2002, upon using genetically modified seeds such as maize, soybeans, and cotton, the nation saved more than 21, 000 tonnes of pesticides (Borlaug & Dowswell 2008). In developing nations, increasing production levels implies committing more resources in reducing reliance on rain-based agriculture. For instance, through irrigation, different nations can increase their food production levels by mitigating the risk of poor rain patterns due to global climate change. Irrigation can become even more effective, and hence a low-cost approach for increasing crop yield when used in conjunction with greenhouse technology.
Conclusion and recommendations
With projections that the world’s population will hit the 9 billion mark by the next 40 years, nations are in dire need of mechanisms of resolving the problem of low food production. The paper has focused on scrutinising the challenges and possible strategies for feeding a growing world population. In my opinion, increasing the land that is under cultivation is a viable option, but impractical due to land encroachment by the increasing population. Thus, feeding the increasing global population requires an increase in the frequency of cultivation and/or raising yields per acreage.
It is recommended that science, as opposed to ideologies or emotions, should guide people in terms of developing and implementing policies for increasing food production. Therefore, it will become possible to embrace technologies such as genetic modification of organisations to facilitate increased production using disease and pest-resistant seeds and seedlings. Where IP rights restrict accessibility to alternative technologies for increasing crop yields, it is important for nations to consider developing policies that create a room for purchasing such rights so that more technology can become available to the public. This way, people can increase food production from the current land acreage across the globe. They will increase the frequency of cropping through the utilisation of crops that have a lower maturity time.
References
Borlaug, N & Dowswell, C 2008, ‘Feeding a World of One Billion People: A 21st Century Challenge’, Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, vol. 15 no. 6, pp. 3-23. Web.
FAO 2003, World agriculture: towards 2015/2020: FAO perspective, FAO, Rome, Italy. Web.
Radimer, K 2002, ‘Measurement of household food security in the USA and other industrialised countries’, Public Health Nutrition, vol. 5 no. 3, pp. 859-864. Web.