Have We Hit Peak Food?

Better motion : what are we doing about elevation food ? The worldly concern off peak wheat in 2004 , summit eggs in 1993 , and peak dairy fashion back 1989 — all according to arecent study inEcology and Societythat lead to the worrying determination we could be running out of nutrient .

The study see at how the yield of 27 renewable and non - renewable resources changed in the past half century . Over a dozen of the resources were solid food - link up , and all of those — with the exception of farmed Pisces — top out in the past . “ Peak ” here means when yield gain stopped accelerating . The world production of say , soybeans , may go on to farm , but the rate of maturation has slowed .

What the numbers mean is that we ’ve exhausted all of the well-fixed solutions for grow more intellectual nourishment in the populace . We ’re farmed the fertile lands . We ’ve created powerful fertilizers and pesticides . We ’ve made genetically modify harvest . What ’s next ?

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The authors suggest that , so far , yield have been propped up by convert timber and prairie to farmland — an obviously unsustainable solution . “ [ C]onstraints on production may not be alleviated unless there is disruptive origination , ” they write . That “ tumultuous instauration ” would most likely be in the mannikin of new crop . scientist are already trying to domesticize new crops like thepotato bean and Kernzathat can thrive in our hot and drier succeeding worldly concern .

Perhaps even more intriguingly , scientists are also trying to genetically mastermind our existing harvest to be more efficient . For example , about 3 percent of plant have a more effective atomic number 6 - fixing outgrowth called C4 . C4 plants are mostly ones adapted to living in the resource - short desert , so they include a lot of cacti but also corn . They ask less water and fertilizer to turn . “ One of the peachy holy grails in agriculture is to take a C3 industrial plant , like rice or wheat , and turn it into a C4 plant , ” Natural History Museum chief botanistSandra Knappsaid in aninterview on BBC .

But the authors of this current study are bullish about these theoretical technical answer for food . That may be because there ’s an subsist solution in front of us : Stop emaciate intellectual nourishment . Jonathan FoleytellsSmithsonianthat 30 to 40 percent of food grow for man ends up uneaten . We can worry about the future tense , but we should make the problems in the present . [ Ecology and SocietyviaSmithsonian ]

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