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Global Goal: More Food on Smaller Carbon Footprint

Can global agriculture feed a growing planet and still maintain today's carbon footprint?

That was the key question during a day-long seminar held Wednesday by Global Harvest Imitative (GHI), a consortium of agribusiness companies looking at ways to eliminate the global productivity gap by sustainably doubling agricultural output to feed the planet's expected 9 billion population by year 2050.

An all-star lineup of global Ag experts shared insights and released new findings from studies on sustainability and agricultural production. A five-part study, commissioned by GHI, is being looked at as a blueprint for developing the policies and systems necessary to sustainably meet growing demand.

One chapter of the study, entitled The Business As Usual Scenario, was authored by Jason Clay, Vice President of Markets for the World Wildlife Fund. Clay poignantly concludes that if we are to maintain a living planet for our grandchildren, then we will need to "freeze the footprint of food."

"We're using resources faster than they can be regenerated," says Clay. "We have got to produce twice as much food on the same amount of land with the same amount of resources or we are going to be in a great deal of pain. We need to begin to manage this planet as if our lives depended on it."

Clay says some answers will come from improved genetics, especially in tropic and tree crops, as well as teaching farmers to manage inputs better. Farmers who have the worst yields must be educated. "The world's best producers produce at levels 100 times higher than average farmers," he says. "Moving the middle and the bottom producers up will do more than moving the top."

Instead of clearing and converting natural habitat, we need to rehabilitate degraded land, Clay suggests. "We have hundreds of millions of hectares that can be brought back into production. We have shown in our own research that it is cheaper to rehabilitate degraded soil in Brazil than it is to clear forest."

The world has experienced a 2.5% growth in cereal production per year over the past 40 years, says Michel Petit, a French Academician with Institut Agronomique Mediterranean. That's good, because it is faster growth than world population. "The question is, is this growth sustainable?" he asks. "There are serious environmental consequences to modern agriculture, but modern agriculture can be part of the solution, too."

Looking at key areas of agricultural production around the globe, two patterns emerge: modern, science-based agriculture, such as farms in the United States and Brazil; and smaller, peasant or 'traditional' farming in places like China and India. But we cannot simply say modern farming must be large-scale, he says. "There are 2 billion people living at peasant (small scale) traditional farming levels. The challenge is the sustainable intensification of traditional ag, to transform it into modern agriculture, at any scale."