Deepening degradation and scarcity of land and water resources pose a severe challenge to the world's capacity to meet human demands by 2050, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf said on Monday.
FAO report
In the last 50 years, a significant increase in food production combined with demographic pressure and unsustainable agriculture practices have spoiled the land and water systems upon which food production depended, Diouf told a press conference in Rome while presenting a FAO report named “State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.”
“By 2050, due to increasing population and higher levels of food consumption, the global level of food production will have to increase by 70 per cent, while developing countries may need to achieve a hundred per cent increase in food production,” he said. But, according to the report, many land and water systems around the globe now face a concrete risk of gradual breakdown of their productive capacity, thus challenging the capacity of providing sufficient food for the world's population which is expected to reach nine billion by 2050. “The consequences in terms of hunger and poverty are unacceptable,” Diouf stressed while calling for an immediate remedial action.
“Humankind can no longer treat its vital resources, land and water, as if they were infinite,” he said.
According to the FAO report, between 1961 and 2009, the world's cropland grew by 12 per cent, while agricultural production increased by 150 per cent, due to a significant rise in yields of major crops. — Xinhua
