Declining food prices are a thing of the past, and the world must reform its agricultural system to prepare for increasingly volatile prices, the UK government’s Foresight Programme said today.
“There’s a very large risk of quite substantial increase of food prices over the next 30 or 40 years,” said Charles Godfray, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, at a press conference discussing the report (PDF).
Farmers will have to produce more from their land by harnessing recent innovations, including biotechnology, to feed the 9 billion people who are expected to populate the world by 2050, the report states. It also warns that protectionist trade policies will make price spikes contagious, but greater transparency will help dampen the effects of demand and supply challenges to the global food system.
Caroline Spelman, the environment minister, said the report would inform the UK government’s policies. Other governments are also taking the issue seriously, she said, with the recently concluded Green Week in Berlin showing there is “political will to address this [issue] both in the developed and developing world”.
She also highlighted the upcoming G20 meeting in Cannes, France, where France has placed food security and increasing the transparency of the food system at the top of the agenda.
Foresight released the report, The future of food and farming: challenges and choices for global sustainability, in collaboration with the Government Office for Science after two years of research into agricultural supply and demand systems.
The effort, which compiles data from some 400 experts from 35 countries, began after food prices suddenly rose after decades of decline in 2007 and 2008. The spike at the time was relatively modest but still tipped some 100 million of the world’s poor into hunger, said Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK.
“It was very obvious from 2007-08 that the food supply was under stress,” said John Beddington, chief scientific adviser to the UK government. “The problem is the world has not really been linking food, water, climate change, and energy.”
This report aims to do just that, using modeling by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington, DC-based think tank, that takes into account the economics of the food system, climate change and global water cycle.
Many of the conclusions of the report hare not new (see Nature’s Special). They include: sustainable intensification of agriculture, reducing waste, reinvigoration of extension services, prioritizing the needs of women farmers, and allowing small holder farming to co-exist with larger operations.
Image: photo by James Rintamaki via Flickr under Creative Commons.