Dr Carberry believes the world's food crisis
will soon dwarf the issue of climate change.
Image: iStockphoto

The world demand for food and fibre will double within a single lifetime, eclipsing climate change as the world's next great challenge, experts told the National Agrifood conference in Sydney on 24 September.

The director of the CSIRO Sustainability Agriculture Flagship, Dr Peter Carberry, unfolded a view of food resources that dwarfs the world's climate change crisis - Dr Carberry says most people will have grown up and gone about their working lives while the world’s ability to meet its food and fibre needs in aggregate was largely taken for granted.

World hunger - a persistent failure of humanity - was usually viewed as a problem of development, distribution and equity of access – not one of global demand outstripping the ability of the world’s natural resources to meet global demands for food, feed, fibre and perhaps fuel. Agricultural research aimed at productivity gains was often seen as a matter of private interest – not global need.

However, the world may need to roughly double its food and fibre production between 2010 and 2050. This increased demand is built up from growth in world population, growth in per capita demand and shifts in diet composition associated with economic development and the conversion of agricultural biomass to bioenergy.

Dr Carberry said that during the Green Revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s food production more than doubled when new agricultural technologies were combined with expanded agricultural inputs, particularly land, irrigation water, energy for mechanisation and mineral fertilisers. The 21st Century Agricultural Revolution was going to have to repeat this feat, but this time with much greater constraints in terms of expansion of farming land, irrigation, energy and nutrients – and it is going to have to be done while reducing the greenhouse gas load on the global atmosphere and in the context of uncertainty generated by the prospects for climate change.