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A New Approach to Feeding the World

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For centuries, Minqin Oasis, along the Silk Road in northwestern China, provided a welcome port of call to travelers, serving as a natural barrier against the unremitting dryness of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts. That changed in the 1950s, when Chairman Mao implemented a national plan to boost food production. The resulting cultivation, deforestation, irrigation, and reclamation of the oasis initially boosted food output, but inadvertently degraded the capacity of Minqin’s natural ecosystems to provide freshwater and prevent soil erosion. Without these critical ecological defenses, the fertile land succumbed to encroaching deserts, forcing residents to abandon their homes and farms.1
Decades later and thousands of miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico, nutrient runoff from intensive crop, livestock, and biofuel production in the Mississippi River basin has cut a devastating path through coastal ecosystems and fisheries.2 The result is a dead zone roughly the size of the state of New Jersey.3
Unfortunately, these two examples are not isolated cases. Replicated countless times across the globe, they serve as stark illustrations of the unintended consequences of humankind’s growing demand for food. And they join a parade of ecosystem casualties from modern food production systems, including deforestation (driven by palm oil in southeast Asia and beef and soybeans in the Amazon); wetland draining to make way for arable land; and overfishing, one of the leading local threats to 60 percent of the world’s coral reefs.4
In many ways the modern food production system has been a miraculous success. Dramatic increases in food production over the past 50 years have supported significant improvements in human well-being. Yet, at the same time, the relentless spread of farmland and accompanying massive inputs of chemicals have undercut the capacity of ecosystems to provide the very services that underpin food production, including freshwater, pollination, erosion control, and water regulation (see Box).5-7
Scientists worry that increased food production is masking a time lag between ecosystem degradation and the resulting effects on human well-being. The chipping away at the Amazon, for example, could push the entire region to a tipping point beyond which it experiences widespread dieback and transitions into savanna-like vegetation.8 The resulting changes in forest cover and rainfall could seriously impact both crop production and cattle ranching in the region. As climate change impacts exacerbate food production stresses on ecosystems, it is conceivable that such collapses could become commonplace. The implications for food security are serious, especially in developing countries where 2 billion rural poor depend on healthy ecosystems for sustenance.
It may be tempting to dismiss the latest concerns about food price spikes. After all, at least since Malthus, the “glass half empty” crowd has worried unnecessarily that food production would not keep up with population growth. Yet human ingenuity has always found ways to boost production by creating new varieties of plants, bringing more land into production, inventing new forms of mechanization, or introducing practices such as irrigation.
But this time things are different. As ecosystem services continue to degrade, soil fertility diminishes, and rainfall runoff and soil erosion increase, continuing to rely on improved seeds and chemical fertilizers is likely to yield diminishing returns. And beyond declining productivity of cropland, other worrying trends are converging to threaten food security, including rising populations, climate change, and competing demands for water, land, and crops.
These trends beg an obvious and increasingly urgent question. Can the current food production system feed a growing population in a changing climate while sustaining ecosystems? The answer is an emphatic “no.”
A new approach is imperative and overdue, one in which the world feeds more people—an estimated 9 billion by 2050—with less ecological impact. To be successful, this new approach must address both how we produce and how we use food.
Encouragingly, national governments and international institutions, including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Bank, and agribusiness, have recently woken up to the scale of this challenge, and a wide range of solutions are germinating. Below, we highlight three examples of sustainable solutions that show potential for being scaled up around the world. (...)

The article:
http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/977

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Argomenti Tabù - Crescita demografica, cibo e sostenibilità:

http://ilviandantebevitore.blogspot.it/2011/08/argomenti-tabu-crescita-demografica.html

 
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