Feeding nine billion: the challenge to sustainable crop production

Gregory, P. J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4118-4833 and George, T. S. (2011) Feeding nine billion: the challenge to sustainable crop production. Journal of Experimental Botany, 62 (15). pp. 5233-5239. ISSN 0022-0957 doi: 10.1093/jxb/err232

Abstract/Summary

In the recent past there was a widespread working assumption in many countries that problems of food production had been solved, and that food security was largely a matter of distribution and access to be achieved principally by open markets. The events of 2008 challenged these assumptions, and made public a much wider debate about the costs of current food production practices to the environment and whether these could be sustained. As in the past 50 years, it is anticipated that future increases in crop production will be achieved largely by increasing yields per unit area rather than by increasing the area of cropped land. However, as yields have increased, so the ratio of photosynthetic energy captured to energy expended in crop production has decreased. This poses a considerable challenge: how to increase yield while simultaneously reducing energy consumption (allied to greenhouse gas emissions) and utilizing resources such as water and phosphate more efficiently. Given the timeframe in which the increased production has to be realized, most of the increase will need to come from crop genotypes that are being bred now, together with known agronomic and management practices that are currently under-developed.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/31997
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Centre for Food Security Life Sciences > School of Agriculture, Policy and Development > Department of Crop Science
Publisher	Oxford University Press
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