Population explosion, that's what we called it. I was born in 1950 and the human population was 2.5 billion. If I live to be 70 (not too unlikely) I will see that number tripled, to 7,500,000,000. Either productivity has to be increased or a lot more land has to be brought into cultivation, which would be disastrous for remaining wildlife habitat.

> [According to] one official at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the task of feeding the world's population in 2050 in itself seems “easily possible”.

> Easy, that is, if the world brings into play swathes of extra land, spreads still more fertilizers and pesticides, and further depletes already scarce groundwater supplies. But clearing hundreds of millions of hectares of wildlands -- most of the land that would be brought into use is in Latin America and Africa -- while increasing today's brand of resource-intensive, environmentally destructive agriculture is a poor option. Therein lies the real challenge in the coming decades: how to expand agricultural output massively without increasing by much the amount of land used.

> What is needed is a second green revolution -- an approach that Britain's Royal Society aptly describes as the “sustainable intensification of global agriculture”. Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilizers or other inputs. Developing nations could score substantial gains in productivity by making better use of modern technologies and practices. [But] science and technology [are not] by themselves a panacea for world hunger. Poverty, not lack of food production, is the root cause. 

> Nonetheless, research can have a decisive impact by enabling sustainable and productive agriculture -- a proven recipe (as is treating neglected diseases) for creating a virtuous circle that lifts communities out of poverty.

from "How to feed a hungry world"  Nature 466, 531–532 (29 July 2010

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