Congratulations to Sheggen Fan and colleagues for their seven steps. These are very important, although they do not fully address the overwhelming issues that are driving global food insecurity: these are the emerging shortages of arable land, fresh water, oil, nutrients, fish, technology and reliable climates. Also the issue cannot be solved without attention to the two big demand-side drivers of population growth and growing demand for protein food. There must also be attention to the fundamental wiorldwide market failure which is making agriculture so unattractive for farmers or others to invest in or young people to take up as a profession. If all seven recommendations were implemented immediately, there would still be hunger, inequity and growing food insecurity.
Recommendations like (5) pose challenges of their own: increasing the dependency of smallholder agriculture on fertilisers and fossil fuels will(a) increase rates of land degradation and groundwater overexploitation (b) increase rates of climate change and (c) hook third world farming systems on inputs that will inevitably run out during this century. Smallholder farmers, who grow more than half the world's food, need all the help they can get - but it has to be sustainable help, not simply converting them to a failing system.
The IFPRI proposals underline the necessity to completely rethink both world farming systems and the human diet.

How silly not to talk about curbing population growth! Like seven steps to cure alcoholism without stopping alcohol consumption.

With JulianC’s post as an addendum, the article makes quite a bit of sense - it does much to lessen the parcel of deficiencies.

More than half the world’s people are now urbanized, many of them utterly desperately poor; but of these latter a great many have migrated from outside the cities where conditions, on average, are even worse.

Away from the cities,out there, bare subsistence on their own produce and with no real income to make purchases, is too often a fact of life; as is deterioration of soil productivity and accessibility to water, accompanied by escalating demands from increasing numbers.

JulianC concludes “-- the IFPRI proposals underline the necessity to completely rethink both world farming systems and the human diet”.

Indeed, but also needed is acknowledgment that the fundamentals of our diet have developed over the course of a couple of million years, and diverging from them has its cost in the long term; and that without fostering a reduction in human fertility, all the listed necessities are pie in the sky.

The call to critically look at the biofuel subsidies and mandate, number one on the list, is essential. The world is currently taking about six percent of the grain harvest for biofuels for no good reason.

The SMH April 16th 2011 reported‘ Food-producing countries must relax export controls and divert production away from biofuels to prevent millions more people from being driven into poverty by higher food prices, the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, has warned.’
And in the Australian ‘The World Bank has called for the relaxation of laws requiring crops to be blended into petrol, saying that they are contributing to the global food price crisis.’

The E10 mandate in NSW is typical of what Zoellick is talking about. Until second generation ethanol is available sometime in the future, this mandate must be filled by ethanol converted from grain starch.

There is a perception that the ethanol used in this mandated E10 is made from waste and therefore not impacting world food supply and price. On the ABC 7.30 report 14/04/2011,“Currently, Australian ethanol is made from waste wheat or sugar cane“.With respect to waste wheat this is incorrect.

Currently about 450000 tonnes of wheat starch, directly impacting world food supply and price is being used to make the ethanol the NSW E10 mandate demands. It will take about 1 million tonnes of wheat starch processed from about 1.5 million tonnes of wheat to completely fill this mandate.

The concerns set out by the World Bank are only one of the problems associated with using grain as an ethanol feedstock. It abates little if any CO2, requires massive subsidies, the variability of grain supply and price cannot be married to a fixed ethanol demand as we see today and so on. It is the worst possible ethanol feedstock.

For the foreseeable future the E10 mandate can only be filled with grain ethanol. It must be abandoned until second generation biofuels are available. The subsidies wasted on the support of grain ethanol should be diverted to second generation biofuel research and development to bring them to fruition earlier.

Michael...."How silly not to talk about curbing population growth! Like seven steps to cure alcoholism without stopping alcohol consumption.

Look! Mich...The growth of human-beings is all the reasons to what we see to day. Dont worry! they know it too. There just wondering what to do about the problem...........and good people that are realists, have put some interesting idea,s, that not one of us or our base line of continuation.......... excepted some minor adaptations, thats going to come anyway..........I mean! Are we to think we can grow and grow and grow!..........theres a price to pay, and its not a big one:)

STOP HAVING CHILDREN! Its that easy! 1 year...all can have one/two....... or five years, only if you can pay for it yourselves......How easy is that?

All right! you all love to breed! We know that:) But are you going to live with the fact, that what you breed, will have no-where to go?

300 hundred million starving to death, as I type this..........

And you think your children, that you say you love, is some-how going to miss the bullet?.........

Its your world:)

Good luck.

LEAP

<< How silly not to talk about curbing population growth! Like seven steps to cure alcoholism without stopping alcohol consumption. >>

Absolutely right Michael.

But I’d state in considerably stronger terms –

It is just bizarre that so much thought could be put into this subject by these authors, without there being a single mention of the ever-increasing demand for food via rapid population growth!

Are they incapable of seeing the enormous elephant in the tiny little living room, or are they somehow incapacitated by their funding sources or superiors from mentioning population growth?

It is just bizarre.

Oh yeah, I said that.

Hold on, it is worse than bizarre – it is counter-intuitive!

In striving to increase and secure food supplies while not addressing the demand side of the equation, they are actually just feeding the ever-growing demand.... in more ways than one.

They are facilitating population growth! This will take us further out of balance and into an even more precarious situation, where the demand will be bigger and any further improvements in food supplies will be that much harder to achieve.

While the seven steps outlined in this article are good, there needs to be JUST AS MUCH effort put into stopping population growth, and then taking it into a gentle decline, so that we can be assured that food supplies will more than match demand, in an ongoing manner.

These seven points WILL GET US NOWHERE if we don’t put just as much effort to stopping population growth.

We need a holistic approach, not a hopelessly ONE-SIDED approach.