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.

Again the roaring elephant in the room is population growth outstripping arable land and natural resources. Farming must increase food production in the next decades and this in turn will be harder without sufficient fresh water and fertilizers. What we really need is a global challenge on family planning. The taboo must be faced. Malthus may have got his timing wrong, but his scenario of populations growing geometrically and food production growing arithmetically is quite true. We have had some technological reprieves, but there are limits to growth.

Yes. Well said VivKay.

I'd agree that trying to "solve" food shortages without looking at population control is plain silly.
At best we could get another 50 years before the next crisis if we keep breeding exponentially.
One thing we have to sort out is inequality: The middle class don't breed like rabbits and have some capacity for food resilience and charity. So long as the top 5% of income earners take 50% of the wealth by "skimming" the economy then resources will be mis-spent. The financial system that rewards greed, produces nothing, yet takes a large whack of GDP is a massive tax on the real economy and a large impediment to real economic investment. The parasites must be shed!

I am a primary producer and licensed excise paying food first bio diesel producer as well as producer other bio-fuels.

My opinion steps two and five are the only in the seven steps have any credibility. The major cause of poverty is wealth. Wealthy people have a disproportionate cut of the productive pie. Wealthy people are generally personally not productive, they are parasites.
I agree, unless we curb population growth the whole exercise is pointless. The only thing that will curb population growth apart from mass vasectomies is education. It is important to keep the bureaucrats and the ickydumics (no it is not a spelling mistake) from attempting to solve the problem.

What are some of the things I would do?

The starters at have a global currency! Just think how many parasites that would get rid of.
Curb personal wealth. In addition to a minimum wage I would set a maximum wage that is linked to sustainable productivity. This would curb obscene wealth and ease poverty by carving up the productive pie more fairly.
Restrict government activity to the essentials. For example, health, education, security, infrastructure and the like.
Don't stuff up good productive land and water with suburbs and coal gasification projects.
Get out of the cities and go bush.

The reality is no matter what you say or I or the ickydumics say, apathy will dictate that nothing will happen until such time that the starving barbarians invade from over the horizon

Have a look at this map of world poverty... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Basically the more red, the more poverty... But the surprise is that it is a map of FERTILITY - how many children are being born.

You know how our government seems unable to fund hospitals, schools and roads, and this is with our population failing to produce enough children to replace ourselves... imagine the problems of fundiong these essential services if the population was not declining, but trippling every twenty years... no wonder they are poor. Worse than schools and hospitals, they somehow they also need to find more farmland too!

50 years ago, perhaps we could have ended poverty. But now there are so many more poor that the problem is so much bigger. For example, there are 60 million shanty-town dwellers in India alone, and only 20 million Australians... Let alone Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, New Guinea... What about Africa? Sth America? etc etc...

Why is China becomming so rich and powerfull? The one-child policy. It means they can finally afford to catch up with the infastructire and education that nations need to get ahead and build wealth.

I don't like the 'one child policy', but Thailand and surging Iran (Think nuclear power) also have zero-population growth due to marketing, free contraception and free choice. It's not really the feminist idea that educating women reduces population growth (think Iran, they're not keen on educating women)...

...continued

...continued

What succeds is explaining to people that too many kids leads to poverty, and long-lasting free contraceptive implants. Eventually compulsary education and urbanisation also drive down birthrates, because they make kids expensive. This tends to come along at the same time as education for all, which creates the feminist myth that only educating women decreases birthrates... it does, but that's only a small part of the picture.

On the other hand, why is the 'aging population' such a bad thing here in Australia? Surely it means we are living longer, and isn't that a good thing?

The problem is not an 'aging' population, it is that we are suiciding... failing to produce enough kids to replace ourselves.

Here we need to give tax reductions for kids so middle class parents can afford the kids we want. Those on welfare are pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow because of the welfare bribes to have lots of kids.

Meaning that single mums are pressured into having more kids than they can look after. And the payment incentives which ensure that few get married, as this reduces their welfare paynments.

Also making divorce fairer, because Australian men don't want to become dads... because they are afraid of having their kids stolen by divorce lawyers.

Have a look at this map of world poverty... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

Basically the more red, the more poverty... But the surprise is that it is a map of FERTILITY - how many children are being born.

Too low population growth = initial wealth, but leads to a bust and long, painfull decline, like Japan.

Too high population growth = poverty.

You know how our government seems unable to fund hospitals, schools and roads, and this is with our population failing to produce enough children to replace ourselves... imagine the problems of fundiong these essential services if the population was not declining, but trippling every twenty years... no wonder they are poor. Worse than schools and hospitals, they somehow they also need to find more farmland too!

50 years ago, perhaps we could have ended poverty. But now there are so many more poor that the problem is so much bigger. For example, there are 60 million shanty-town dwellers in India alone, and only 20 million Australians... Let alone Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, New Guinea... What about Africa? Sth America? etc etc...

Why is China becomming so rich and powerfull? The one-child policy. It means they can finally afford to catch up with the infastructire and education that nations need to get ahead and build wealth.

I don't like the 'one child policy', but Thailand and surging Iran ) also have zero-population growth due to marketing, free contraception and free choice. It's not really the feminist idea that educating women reduces population growth (think Iran, they're not keen on educating women)...

What succeds is telling people that too many kids leads to poverty, and handing out long-lasting free contraceptive implants. Eventually compulsary education and urbanisation drive down birthrates, because they make kids expensive. This tends to come along at the same time as education for all, which creates the feminist myth that only educating women decreases birthrates...

On the other hand, why is the 'aging population' such a bad thing here in Australia? Surely it means we are living longer, and isn't that a good thing?

The problem is not an 'aging' population, it is that we are suiciding... failing to produce enough kids to replace ourselves.

Here we need to give tax reductions for kids so middle class parents can afford the kids we want. For example income splitting between the parents and kids.

Those on welfare are pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow because of the welfare bribes to have lots of kids. Meaning that single mums are pressured into having more kids than they can look after. And the payment incentives which ensure that few get married, as this reduces their welfare payments.

Australian men don't want to become fathers. Men don't celebrate buck=s nights anymore, and Kings Cross is full of hen's nights. We have the highest rate of vasectomy in the world.

Every man knows that marriage means long years of hard work, followed by divorce. And divorce means that his kids are fed to the lawyers. So men are simply saying 'No!' to marriage and fatherhood. Tragically, city offices are full of single 30-something professional women who can't get a husband.

So we need also to make divorce fairer, because Australian men don't want to become dads... because they are afraid of having their kids stolen by divorce lawyers.