We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger

Holt-Giménez, Eric; Shattuck, Annie; Altieri, Miguel A.; Herren, H. R.; Gliessman, Steve

doi:10.1080/10440046.2012.695331

Cited by 174 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Current global caloric production greatly exceeds that needed to supply the world's population, yet social, political and economic factors prevent many people from accessing sufficient food for a healthy life [15,16,60,61]. A focus solely on increased yields will not solve the problem of world hunger.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Agriculture today places great strains on biodiversity, soils, water and the atmosphere, and these strains will be exacerbated if current trends in population growth, meat and energy consumption, and food waste continue. Thus, farming systems that are both highly productive and minimize environmental harms are critically needed. How organic agriculture may contribute to world food production has been subject to vigorous debate over the past decade. Here, we revisit this topic comparing organic and conventional yields with a new meta-dataset three times larger than previously used (115 studies containing more than 1000 observations) and a new hierarchical analytical framework that can better account for the heterogeneity and structure in the data. We find organic yields are only 19.2% (+3.7%) lower than conventional yields, a smaller yield gap than previous estimates. More importantly, we find entirely different effects of crop types and management practices on the yield gap compared with previous studies. For example, we found no significant differences in yields for leguminous versus non-leguminous crops, perennials versus annuals or developed versus developing countries. Instead, we found the novel result that two agricultural diversification practices, multi-cropping and crop rotations, substantially reduce the yield gap (to 9 + 4% and 8 + 5%, respectively) when the methods were applied in only organic systems. These promising results, based on robust analysis of a larger meta-dataset, suggest that appropriate investment in agroecological research to improve organic management systems could greatly reduce or eliminate the yield gap for some crops or regions.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A focus solely on increased yields will not solve the problem of world hunger. Increased production is, however, critical for meeting the economic needs of poor farmers who make up the largest portion of the world's chronically hungry people [21,39,60], and agroecological methods provide lowcost methods for doing so (e.g. [54]).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In deciding the future trajectory of agriculture, we must balance the known harm caused by our current, high-input agriculture system with the potential costs and benefits associated with a transition to alternatives. Yield is only one factor within a set of complex socio-economic forces that determine what management practices growers adopt, how much land is dedicated to agricultural production, and how much food is available and accessible for the hungry [5][6][7][8]. Yield, however, has continued to be a focus in the debate surrounding the adoption of alternative, less environmentally and socially damaging agriculture practices [9].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

System-level approach needed to evaluate the transition to more sustainable agriculture

Ponisio

Kremen

2016

Proc. R. Soc. B.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Research into refining diversified farming techniques has been severely underfunded relative to industrial agriculture [119,120]. The mixed success of the European policies highlights that we must invest in more analytically rigorous, agroecological and socio-economic research oriented at honing diversification practices for specific crops and regions where they are needed most [36,61,121]. At the same time, we should move away from waiting for the definitive science to show what system maximizes yield, and instead look ahead to which social and environmental outcomes we want for our agriculture systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most notably, though the primary goal of our food system is to feed people, yield is only one factor within a set of complex socio-economic forces that determine how much food is available and accessible for the hungry [23,[61][62][63][64][65]. Although agriculture produces a food surplus at the global scale, two billion people today are either chronically-hungry or malnourished [63,[66][67][68].…”

Section: Feeding the Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversification, Yield and a New Agricultural Revolution: Problems and Prospects

Ponisio

Ehrlich

2016

Sustainability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:The sustainability of society hinges on the future of agriculture. Though alternatives to unsustainable, high-input industrial agriculture are available, agricultural systems have been slow to transition to them. Much of the resistance to adopting alternative techniques stems from the perceived costs of alternative agriculture, mainly in terms of yields. The general assumption is that agriculture that is less harmful to people and wildlife directly will be indirectly more harmful because of yield losses that lead to food shortages in the short-term and agricultural extensification in the long-term. Though the yield gap between industrial and alternative forms of agriculture is often discussed, does industrial agriculture actually produce the highest yields? In addition, to what aspects of the food system is yield relevant? We review the evidence for differences in crop yields between industrial and alternative systems and then evaluate the contribution of yields in determining whether people are fed, the land in production, and practices farmers will adopt. In both organic and conservation agriculture, different combinations of crops, climate and diversification practices outperformed industrial agriculture, and thus we find little evidence that high input systems always outperform alternative forms of agriculture. Yield, however, is largely irrelevant to determining whether people are fed or the amount of land in production. A focus on increasing yields alone to feed the world or protect biodiversity will achieve neither goal. To promote sustainable agriculture, we must move past focusing on these oversimplified relationships to disentangling the complex social and ecological factors, and determine how to provide adequate nutrition for people while protecting biodiversity.

show abstract

We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger

Cited by 174 publications

References 7 publications

Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap

Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap

System-level approach needed to evaluate the transition to more sustainable agriculture

Diversification, Yield and a New Agricultural Revolution: Problems and Prospects

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About