Lifting food production would show real world leadership

The prediction by the United Nation’s food agency that food production will have to increase by 70 percent over the next 40 years to feed the world’s growing population should send shivers down the spine of central and regional government decision makers, and environmentalists.

The UN is saying that simply to produce enough food to prevent future starvation, governments will have to invest in, and farmers will have to produce, more food on existing land, as well as bring more non productive land into production.

It will involve greater habitat change, the adoption of rather than resistance to forward thinking science, practices and technologies, and ever greater farming intensification.

All at a time when throughout the developed world more and more constraints are being placed on production in the name of conservation, climate change and environmentalism.

At present the world is agonising over making changes to slow down the threat of climate change, yet walking alongside it within the same timeframe is the just as frightening danger of world starvation.

When the world gathers in Copenhagen in December in an attempt to edge closer to reaching global agreement and co-operation in combating climate change, will the world rise to the challenge of reconciling putting limits on agricultural production while addressing hunger and starvation.

It is an area where New Zealand could really show world leadership in a way that will make a difference, rather than practice tokenism by being the first off the blocks in reducing on-farm greenhouse gas emissions

Hilton