Can We Feed Billions of Ourselves Without Wrecking the Planet?
We are now producing more food more efficiently than ever, and there is plenty to go around for a human population of 7 billion. But it is coming at a drastic cost in environmental degradation, and the bounty is not reaching many people.
Sustainable Food Production, a new Earth Institute primer from Columbia University Press, explores how modern agriculture can be made more environmentally benign, and economically just. With population going to maybe 10 billion within 30 years, the time to start is now, the authors say.
The lead author is ecologist Shahid Naeem, director of the Earth Institute for Environmental Sustainability. He coauthored the book with former Columbia colleagues Suzanne Lipton and Tiff van Huysen.
This is an interesting interview with the author. Do you agree (or disagree) with his conclusions?
[Also Covered By]: Phys.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart9h on Tuesday January 11 2022, @07:15PM
> The first priority for most agriculture is profit, but optimising for that only gives you physical efficiency to the limited extent for which economics maps onto how the physical world empirically works.
One problem is that optimizing for profit allows for eventually dumping all your production into the landfill because transport+taxes price is higher than what you could sell it for.
It also makes retailers throw away unsold (usually uglier or about-to-bad) products, because giving it away or selling for too lower a price is detrimental to the profits.