Science magazine reports that world food demand is expected to more than double by 2050. This is a job for technology; Luddites need not apply.
The most obvious solution would be high-yield farming, which means the use of chemical agents as well as genetically modified crops. Both, of course, are the bane of the backward-looking, anti-science crowd that tends to place bugs above man.
But influential thinkers are making the intellectual case for high-yield farming, one them being Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace.
“There’s a misconception that it would be better to go back to more primitive methods of agriculture because chemicals are bad or genetics is bad. This is not true,” says Moore, who supports the Center for Global Food Issues, which understands that “Growing More Per Acre Leaves More Land For Nature.”
“We need to use the science and technology we have developed in order to feed the world's population, a growing population,” Moore believes. “And the more yield we get per acre of land the less nature has to be destroyed to do that … It's simple arithmetic. The more people there are, the more forest has to be cleared to feed them, and the only way to offset that is to have more yield per acre.”
Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution and another supporter of the Center for Global Food Issues, has pointed out that organic farming won’t provide the additional food necessary to meet demand because it requires more acreage for conventional farming to produce the same amount of crops.
“We aren't going to feed 6 billion people with organic fertilizer,” he said. “If we tried to do it, we would level most of our forests and many of those lands would be productive only for a short period of time.”
Feeding a swelling global population will also require continued technological development in irrigation and gene-splicing that produces crops that can grow in Third World nations where droughts are often devastating and irrigation impractical.
Eco-activists will fight both just as they will oppose high-yield farming. But they offer no solutions, only exaggeration and fear. Technology, however, offers something they never will: regular meals for a hungry world.