An independent, peer reviewed journal for policy makers and practitioners in agriculture and related industries, assessing the interactions between population growth, resources, the environment and climate change.
Summary
Organic farming represents a promising, if still imperfect, approach to improving the sustainability, quality and health impacts of agriculture. Production standards have become highly codified and regulated to protect consumers and enable producers to benefit from specialist markets. Certified organic farming is now widely adopted in many countries. While the regulations make the concept appear unduly rigid to some, the underlying scientifically-based, agro-ecological understandin…
Summary
The current world population of around seven billion is projected to reach nine billion in forty years or less. The UN projects agricultural output will need to increase by 70% just to maintain current dietary standards – which includes more than one billion malnourished people. Current agricultural production is increasing at a rate insufficient to reach the goal set by the 2009 World Summit on Food Security to reduce by one half the number of malnourished people in the world by …
Introduction
China’s GDP has increased steadily since 1949, reaching 63,646 billion Renminbi (1038 billion US dollars) in 2014 to become the world’s second largest economy (1) (Fig. 1).
In recent years, China’s food security has received attention from researchers and policy makers (2, 3). In 2011, China had 20% of global food production (4). Future trends in grain production, consumption and import will affect food prices in the region (5) and food security is a high priority of …
Policy proposals
Governments, NGOs and other civil society representatives should engage in a comprehensive public debate on how advances in agbiotech, can benefit smallholders in developing countries by producing more sustainable food systems and improving nutrition in view of changing climate and resource scarcity. In particular genome editing in crop and livestock improvement should be accommodated.
Governments across the world should urgently address the issue of how …
