Is it possible to feed the world

Roads, canals, and electric systems require government intervention. But small, distributed infrastructure is important too. For instance, when farmers get the machines to process their crops, like the banana farmers of Talamanca , it drastically reduces food waste, while opening up international markets to small farmers.

Farmers all around the world go into debt to buy the things they need to start a new crop, and then pay it off with the harvest. More on government regulation. Poor countries tend to have a mind-boggling amount of regulation that hampers homegrown businesses.

A lot, actually. But people living in richer countries have tremendous influence over multinational corporations that do business, for better or worse, in poor countries.

We can also be a lot better at sharing our portion of food, by eating less, wasting less, and choosing more environmentally responsible meals.

There are just a small number of corporations that serve as multinational middlemen — buying crops from farmers in one place and selling them to food makers in another place. Jason Clay, a senior vice president at the World Wildlife Fund, has narrowed it down to businesses — get them to act responsibly, he says , and you save the world. The key to getting these companies to commit to sustainability are regular people with reasonable requests, putting strategically targeted pressure on companies.

When big companies make sustainability promises, they do a — and instead of resisting regulation, they begin asking governments to regulate their competitors to level the playing field. This really does have the potential to change the world. The other thing we can do — as I put it here — is to eat with smaller forks. That means changing our diet so that we eat less meat, less food in general, and throw less of it away.

As I wrote:. Right now we live in an upside-down world where the people who get the least food are the ones who are doing the most manual labor. All this can seem overwhelmingly large. And it is. The challenge of feeding humanity is enormous and unprecedented. No species, that I know of, has ever organized itself to ensure that every one of its kind is fed.

We have the means to meet this demand in the short term, and we are in the process of figuring out how to meet it in the long term. Human welfare depends on our figuring this out. So does the welfare of thousands of other species that live alongside us. The good news is that, after studying this for six months, I can say that meeting the challenge seems entirely possible. It requires the rich to eat more responsibly, poor farms to become more productive, and all farms to be continuously improving their sustainability.

To make this possible, governments must provide safety nets and infrastructure, while cutting red tape. All this requires a series of political and social changes that are difficult to implement but almost universally supported. No one is morally opposed to reducing food waste, or to increasing the income of small farmers. In this piece I also make some recommendations for shrinking forks. Learn a killer lentils recipe — not just something edible, but something that excites your friends and family as much as steak does.

Legumes, like lentils and beans, fertilize the soil and provide a good nutritional replacement for meat, which generally has a big environmental impact. Though not always — carbon-negative beef exists and is a great alternative. Correction: This story included a reference to Zaire as a tossed off example of a developing country.

That was a mistake, since the territory previously known as Zaire is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. Grist regrets the error and the writer has been sentenced to remedial third-grade geography. We aim to inspire more people to talk about climate change and to believe that meaningful change is not only possible but happening right now.

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Nikki Burch. Grist is the only nonprofit newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice. Nathanael Johnson Technology. Many farmers have also gotten smarter about water, replacing inefficient irrigation systems with more precise methods, like subsurface drip irrigation. It would be far easier to feed nine billion people by if more of the crops we grew ended up in human stomachs. Though many of us consume meat, dairy, and eggs from animals raised on feedlots, only a fraction of the calories in feed given to livestock make their way into the meat and milk that we consume.

For every calories of grain we feed animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef. Finding more efficient ways to grow meat and shifting to less meat-intensive diets—even just switching from grain-fed beef to meats like chicken, pork, or pasture-raised beef—could free up substantial amounts of food across the world.

Because people in developing countries are unlikely to eat less meat in the near future, given their newfound prosperity, we can first focus on countries that already have meat-rich diets. Curtailing the use of food crops for biofuels could also go a long way toward enhancing food availability. Production will have to far outpace population growth as the developing world grows prosperous enough to eat more meat.

In rich countries most of that waste occurs in homes, restaurants, or supermarkets. In poor countries food is often lost between the farmer and the market, due to unreliable storage and transportation. Consumers in the developed world could reduce waste by taking such simple steps as serving smaller portions, eating leftovers, and encouraging cafeterias, restaurants, and supermarkets to develop waste-reducing measures.

Of all of the options for boosting food availability, tackling waste would be one of the most effective. These solutions require a big shift in thinking. For most of our history we have been blinded by the overzealous imperative of more, more, more in agriculture—clearing more land, growing more crops, using more resources.

We need to find a balance between producing more food and sustaining the planet for future generations. This is a pivotal moment when we face unprecedented challenges to food security and the preservation of our global environment. The good news is that we already know what we have to do; we just need to figure out how to do it.

Addressing our global food challenges demands that all of us become more thoughtful about the food we put on our plates.

We need to make connections between our food and the farmers who grow it, and between our food and the land, watersheds, and climate that sustain us. Building a world fed by sustainable agriculture is a daunting task. But farmers, scientists, engineers, retailers, business leaders and governments are all coming together to ensure we have enough food in the future. And I will certainly be thinking about what changes I can make on an individual level to join the effort.

These are Greg Foot's personal views and reflections. Follow the Food investigates how agriculture is responding to the profound challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and a growing global population. Follow the Food traces emerging answers to these problems — both high-tech and low-tech, local and global — from farmers, growers and researchers across six continents.

See global airing times. Follow the Food. Creating robot farmers. Preserving precious dirt. Giving waste a second chance. Slowing the ageing process. Making smarter choices. Image copyright: Getty Images. Around the BBC.