A new report says that the world will need to more than double food production over the next 40 years to feed an expanding global population. But as the world’s food needs are rapidly increasing, the planet’s capacity to produce food confronts increasing constraints from overlapping crises that, if left unchecked, could lead to billions facing hunger.

The UN projects that global population will grow from today’s 7 billion to 9.3 billion by mid-century. According to the report released last week by the World Resources Institute (WRI), “available worldwide food calories will need to increase by about 60 percent from 2006 levels” to ensure an adequate diet for this larger population. At current rates of food loss and waste, by 2050 the gap between average daily dietary requirements and available food would approximate “more than 900 calories (kcal) per person per day.”

The report identifies a complex, interconnected web of environmental factors at the root of this challenge – many of them generated by industrial agriculture itself. About 24% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, encompassing methane from livestock, nitrous oxide from fertilisers, carbon dioxide from onsite machinery and fertiliser production, and land use change.

Industrial agriculture, the report finds, is a major contributor to climate change which, in turn is triggering more intense “heat waves, flooding and shifting precipitation patterns”, with “adverse consequences for global crop yields.”

Indeed, global agriculture is heavily water intensive, accounting for 70 per cent of all freshwater use. The nutrient run off from farm fields can create “dead zones” and “degrade coastal waters around the world”, and as climate change contributes to increased water stress in crop-growing regions, food production will suffer further.

Other related factors will also kick in, warns the report: deforestation from regional drying and warming, the effect of rising sea levels on cropland productivity in coastal regions, and growing water demand from larger populations.

Yet the report points out that a fundamental problem is the impact of human activities on the land itself, estimating that:

“… land degradation affects approximately 20% of the world’s cultivated areas”.

Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated. This is no accident.

Last week, a new World Bank report examining five different food commodities – corn, wheat, rice, soybean, and palm oil – confirmed that oil prices are the biggest contributor to rising food prices. The report, based on a logarithm designed to determine the impact of any given factor through regression analysis, concluded that oil prices were even more significant than the ratio of available world food stocks relative to consumption levels, or commodity speculation. The Bank thus recommends controlling oil price movements as a key to tempering food price inflation.

The oil-food price link comes as no surprise. A University of Michigan study points out that every major point in the industrial food system – chemical fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery, food processing, packaging and transportation – is dependent on high oil and gas inputs. Indeed, 19% of the fossil fuels that prop up the American economy go to the food system, second only to cars.

Back in 1940, for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used, 2.3 calories of food energy were produced. Now, the situation has reversed: it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce just one calorie of food energy. As food writer and campaigner Michael Pollan remarked in the New York Times:

“Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.”

But high oil prices are here to stay – and according to a UK Ministry of Defence assessment this year, could rise as high as $500 per barrel over the next 30 years.

All this points to a rapidly approaching convergence point between an increasingly self-defeating industrial food system, and an inexorably expanding global population.

But the point of convergence could come far sooner due to the wild card that is the catastrophic decline in honeybees.

Over the last 10 years, US and European beekeepers have reported annual hive losses of 30% or higher. Last winter, however, saw many US beekeepers experiencing losses of 40 to 50% more – with some reporting losses as high as 80 to 90%. Given that a third of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, particularly bees, the impact on global agriculture could be catastrophic. Studies have blamed factors integral to industrial methods – pesticides, parasitic mites, disease, nutrition, intensive farming, and urban development.

But the evidence specifically fingering widely used pesticides has long been overwhelming. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), for instance, has highlighted the role of neonicotinoids – much to the British government’s chagrin – justifying the EU’s partial ban of three common pesticides.

Now in its latest scientific warning put out last week, the EFSA highlights how another pesticide, fipronil, poses a “high acute risk” for honeybees. The study also noted large information gaps in scientific studies preventing a comprehensive assessment of risks to pollinators.

In short, the global food predicament faces a perfect storm of intimately related crises that are already hitting us now, and will worsen over coming years without urgent action.

It is not that we lack answers. Last year, the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change chaired by former chief government scientist Prof Sir John Beddington – who previously warned of a perfect storm of food, water and energy shortages within 17 years – set out seven concrete, evidence-based recommendations to generate a shift toward more sustainable agriculture.

So far, however, governments have largely ignored such warnings even as new evidence has emerged that Beddington’s timeline is too optimistic. A recent University of Leeds-led study found that severe climate-driven droughts in Asia – especially in China, India, Pakistan and Turkey – within the next 10 years would dramatically undermine maize and wheat production, triggering a global food crisis.

When we factor into this picture soil erosion, land degradation, oil prices, bee colony collapse, and population growth, the implications are stark: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself – if we don’t change course, this decade will go down in history as the beginning of the global food apocalypse.

• Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday announced a USD 20 billion plan to prepare for rising sea levels and hotter summers expected as a result of climate change in the coming decades.
The ambitious proposal – which could become the benchmark for other cities dealing with climate change – could reshape Lower Manhattan’s waterfront, with the possible addition of a “Seaport City” out of the East Side.
The more than 400-page plan, which follows widespread destruction wreaked by Superstorm Sandy last year, included about 250 recommendations ranging from new floodwalls and storm barriers to upgrades of power and telecommunications infrastructures.
The plan also contained prosaic ideas, such as building up beaches and using sand dunes and plantings as natural buffers to storm surges flooding.
Also read: Honolulu, Oslo most expensive cities for summer travel
While some smaller provisions of the complex, long-term plan are already underway, others would require approval or action from the state or federal government.
A report commissioned by the city and issued alongside the proposals found that over the next 40 years, the number of sweltering summer days could double or even triple, making New York City as hot by mid-century as Birmingham, Alabama, is now.
By then, the sea level surrounding New York City could also rise by 2 feet (60 cm) or more.
Bloomberg’s plan aims to ensure that the subway, transit, sewer and water, healthcare, energy and food distribution systems would continue to function for the city’s 8 million people well into the future.
New York City could “do nothing and expose ourselves to an increasing frequency of Sandy-like storms that do more and more damage,” Bloomberg said in remarks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“Or we can make the investments necessary to build a stronger, more resilient New York – investments that will pay for themselves many times over in the years go to come” he said.
New York City is surrounded by 520 miles (835 km) of coastline – more than Miami, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco combined – and even a small rise in sea level would endanger lower-lying homes and businesses.
Sandy killed more than 100 people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, knocked out power to millions and cost New York City an estimated $19 billion in damages and lost economic activity. Bloomberg said a storm of Sandy’s strength would cost nearly five times that amount if it hit the city in the middle of this century because of rising sea levels.
The implementation of the plan would be “an important step toward improved resilience for the City,” said Mark Way, head of Sustainability Americas Swiss Re, whose catastrophe model was the basis for the city’s analysis.
FLOODWALLS, DUNES AND TIDAL BARRIERS
In addition to new walls, dune systems and tidal barriers, the plan envisaged  USD 1.2 billion in loans and grants to help owners make buildings more resilient to floods and proposed changes to the building code.
The plan also proposed the creation of new rules for how soon utility companies must restore power after a natural disaster. And the city would devise a plan to provide fuel when supplies are disrupted and to diversify energy sources.
Some elements of the plan are likely to be implemented this year, but others would stretch out in to decades – well beyond the 200 days that Bloomberg will remain in office.
“This is a call to the next administration and the next administration after that,” said Chris Ward, former executive director of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.
To fund the plan the city would draw on money that has already been allocated for capital improvements and on post-Sandy federal relief funds approved by the US Congress.
But the funds may fall at least USD 4.5 billion short, and the city will have to delay, scale back or eliminate some proposals if it can’t fill the gap, the plan’s authors said.
Some thought the plan was more expensive than needed.
Jeroen Aerts, a professor of environmental risk management at the VU University in Amsterdam and an adviser to New York City who last month co-authored a study on New York’s flood defense options, had expected the mayor to propose a plan estimated at $11.6 billion.
“I think Bloomberg chose a more expensive solution because he wants to add value to the city. He wants to involve developers and private companies” Aerts said.

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