Harvard Business Review on feeding a growing world
A 2016 op-ed in the Harvard Business Review, titled “Global Demand for Food Is Rising. Can We Meet It?”, cited estimates that food demand could grow by 59% to 98% by 2050. At the same time, climate change, water scarcity and under-investment make production harder.
The authors argued that clearing more land, especially in the tropics, costs too much in biodiversity and carbon. The better path, in their view, is “sustainable intensification”: growing more on existing farmland with precision tools such as variable-rate fertilising, advanced irrigation and optimised rotations. These tools can also limit groundwater depletion and soil damage from over-fertilisation.