FOOD: Future shortage

Growing populations, falling energy sources and food shortages will create the “perfect storm” by 2030, UK government’s chief scientist Professor John Beddington has said in BBC .

The world faces a permanent food crisis and global instability unless countries act now to feed a surging population by doubling agricultural output, a report drafted for ministers of the Group of Eight nations has warned.

The policy document, prepared by the G8’s Italian presidency for its first ministerial meeting on agriculture and seen by the Financial Times, says “immediate interventions” are needed.

It warns that global agriculture production must double by 2050 for the world’s fast-growing population to have enough to eat and to deal with the effects of climate change. Otherwise, the report says, the food crisis of the past two years in much of the world “will become structural in only a few decades”.

The report says that further food crises will have “serious consequences, not merely on business relations but equally on social and international relations, which in turn will impact directly on the security and stability of world politics”.