Posted October 24, 2017 03:02 pm
By Lee Shearer  |  lee.shearer@onlineathens.com

UGA Professor: Today’s Students Will Live to See Food Shortages

University of Georgia students will see food shortages in their lifetimes, UGA professor David Berle predicts.

It’s impossible to tell how a future of food scarcity might play out, or how deep that scarcity could be, Berle said in a recent talk in the auditorium of UGA’s Odum School of Ecology.

A 2011 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated world food production would have to increase by as much as 70 percent to feed the expected world population of about 9 billion in 2050, Berle said.

Scientific and demographic studies have also predicted water shortages.

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A revision of the report suggests agricultural production may not have to increase that much, but it’s clear change is coming, Berle explained.

Various solutions have been proposed, but none of them is a magic bullet, and some may not even be good ideas, according to Berle, a professor of horticulture who helped begin and now oversees the student-run organic UGArden on university land near the State Botanical Garden of Georgia.

Indoor farming is energy-intensive, for example, and vertical agriculture — or wall growing — still requires the delivery of water and nutrients to plants.

Some companies and people tout the use of genetically-modified crops, but it’s unclear how much if any more yield genetically-altered plants can provide.

Cutting back on food waste is another proposed solution, but one with uneven applications. Some have estimated we throw away up to 50 percent of food in the United States. But in less wealthy parts of the world, waste is much less.

Growing food locally is a good idea, but that also can only go so far, Berle said. Many of the foods we eat aren’t suitable for growing in the local climate.

Climate change is also altering growing conditions in many places.

The still-growing organic agriculture movement is a bright spot.

A few years ago, when the idea of growing crops with minimal use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers and pesticides began taking hold, studies showed that organic farming was less productive.

But more recent studies show, said Berle, that organic farming can come close to high-output farming in yield.

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