Question

In point form only, develop a plan to ensure food security for when the world population reaches 10-12 billion people explaining how each of those 20 points will result in food security. Why would food security be impossible if the population exceeds 10-12 billion people

Answer 1

Food gap is the shortfall in the amount of food available and the population existing gor feeding. With a population close to 10-20 billion, we would have to follow the plan as mentioned below:

1. Reduce food loss and wastage- This can save a large amount of food and help in storage

2. Shift to healthier and sustainable diets which can be consumed sustainably without getting exhausted.

3. Actions to take include eliminating biofuel subsidies and not treating bioenergy as “carbon-neutral” in renewable energy policies and GHG trading programs.

4. Achieve replacement level fertility rates by providing education to girls,expanding access to reproductive health services, and reducing infant and child mortality.

5. Increase livestock and pasture productivity.

6. Improve crop breeding

7. Improve soil and water management.

8. Plant existing cropland more frequently.

9. Productivity gains must be explicitly linked with efforts to protect natural ecosystems from conversion to agriculture.

10. When cropland expansion is inevitable—such as for local food production in Africa and for oil palm in Southeast Asia—governments and investors should support expansion onto land with low environmental opportunity costs.

11. Reforest agricultural land with little intensification potential.

12. Conserve and restore peatlands.

13. Improve wild fisheries management by implementing catch shares and community-based management systems, and removing perverse subsidies that support overfishing.

14. Selective breeding to improve growth rates of fish, improving feeds and disease control, adoption of water recirculation and other pollution controls, better spatial planning to guide new farms and expansion of marine-based fish farms.

15. Reduce enteric fermentation through new technologies.

16. Reduce emissions through improved manure management.

17.  Integrating low-carbon energy sources and efficiency programs into agriculture programs and using renewable energy in nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing.

18. Conducting engineering analyses to identify promising opportunities for reducing water levels, rewarding farmers who practice water-efficient farming, investing in breeding programs that shift to lower-methane rice varieties and boosting rice yields.

19. Reduce emissions from manure left on pasture and can increase support for research into such chemical and biological nitrification inhibitors and incentivize adoption by farmers.

20. Implement realistic options to sequester carbons in soil.