Food/Intro

Many people believe that we are soon to face a global food shortage. Population is rising rapidly, with a billion people added in less than ten years. 40% of farming land has been depleted  and rainforests have been cut down to make more room for farming. Farmers are moving into cities at the rate of over a million a week ^[1], and our appetite for meat is growing^[2]. These trends means that food demand is rising, but there are fewer farmers to supply it, while the basis of our agricultural production is under strain. It would indeed seem that we are heading for a food crisis.

But this story misses a key point: there are far better ways to produce food than the ones now in wide use. While it is true that conventional plough agriculture and monoculture is driving the world towards a food crisis, there are ways to grow food using very little land, very little labour and no pollution. The aim of this page is to explore these methods and show how they can comfortably sustain a growing population. Any food shortage is really a shortage of applying this know-how to food production.

It is possible, with current know-how, to create a food-production system that can provide tens of billions of people with abundant, local, nutritious, tasty food, textiles and wood, while economizing water, restoring soil, building communities, saving energy, creating pleasing landscapes, preserving wilderness, stopping diseases, needing virtually no inputs and benefiting not just people, but the rest of the biosphere as well.

Abundance of agricultural resources

The world's agricultural system currently produces ample food for everyone — over 2700 calories per person per day ^[3]. Agricultural productivity has consistently grown faster than population, with a 17% increase in calories per person in the past 30 years despite a 70% increase in population.

Food production depends on time, incentive, genetic diversity of seeds and livestock, soil (or nutrients), water, land and access to technology and to information. Of these, none has a hard limit except for land —

This planet currently has 138 trillion m² of arable land  for growing crops and 335.7 trillion m² of pasture for raising livestock ^[4]. This can be greatly expanded if necessary by irrigating deserts and introducing sustainable farming practices that rehabilitate soil. (For example, 3 billion m² of land in Niger was reclaimed for farming recently^[5].)

However, improving food supply has much more to do with increasing the yield of existing farmland than creating new farmland ^[6]. This is because the system of agriculture makes a huge difference to the amount of land needed; the average Canadian requires over 12,000m^{2 [7]}, while permaculture systems regularly produce enough food for a person on less than than 400m². If we could increase the average productivity of our 138 trillion m² of farmland to just one-tenth this level, we could grow enough food for 34.5 billion people, about five times the current world population.

To sustain a growing population in a way that is viable in the long-term, what we need is sustainable intensification ^[8][9][10]. This refers to a method of agriculture that gives higher yields than industrial monoculture, has less impact on the environment, uses less water and requires fewer inputs. Happily, sustainable agricultural practices also tend to be more productive than non-sustainable ones. An analysis of 286 sustainable farming projects in the developing world found that yields doubled for most plants ^[11].

Sustainable intensification is being implemented all over the world, with a 50% increase in four years ^[12], and with entire countries like Cuba and Bhutan moving to sustainable systems. Several sustainable, yet intensive, food-production methods are explored below.