Land Resources for Nature and Global Food Production

As the international community focuses on climate change as the great challenge of our era, we have been largely ignoring another looming problem — the global crisis in agriculture, food security and the environment.  Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race:  we depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight. But we are demanding more and more from our global agricultural systems, pushing them to their very limits. Continued population growth (adding more than 70 million people to the world every year), changing dietary preferences (including more meat and dairy consumption), rising energy prices, and increasing needs for bioenergy sources are putting tremendous pressure on the world’s resources. And, if we want any hope of keeping up with these demands, we’ll need to double the agricultural production of the planet in the next 30 to 40 years.