Ronald Bailey on the World of Plenty Ahead

Four
billion more people than the 7.2 billion now alive could be fed an
adequate diet if current crop production devoted to nonfood uses,
such as animal feed and biofuels, were switched to direct
consumption. This is one the fascinating calculations made in a new
article published in Science by a team of researchers led
by Paul West, a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s
Institute on the Environment. West and his colleagues are looking
for “leverage points” in global agriculture that would reduce
humanity’s impact on the natural world while at the same time
providing more than enough food for the 9 billion or so people who
will be alive in 2050.

West and his colleagues acknowledge that more work is needed to
figure out how to get best practices that they identified widely
adopted. But, as Reason science correspondent Ronald
Bailey writes, the prophets of overpopulation doom and imminent
global famine will likely once again be disappointed.

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