Managing the world’s resources to cater for a growing population is one of the biggest challenges being faced by the food scientific community, according to a leading expert.
Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government and director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, used the desertification of the Loess Plateau in China in the 15th century as a metaphor of today’s predicament.
“Unlike the Han people, who moved east, we don’t have another region to move to. This is our planet and any destruction of that planet leaves us with an ever increasing problem”, he said.
The world’s food production resources were being mismanaged, with no plans to cater for the predicted growth in world population to nine billion by the middle of the century. “We need to be going to the UN and telling them we need action to conserve eco-systems,” he urged.
The rapidly improving economies of countries such as South Africa, China and Brazil meant the populations justifiably had the same expectations of food standards as in the West.
Each challenge of managing food resources, such as water, health and climate change was like a cog in a wheel – with each component having an impact each other. “The fact is we have mismanaged the earth and we are depleting resources at a faster rate than nature can replete them”, he added.
The scientific community needed urgently to switch to new renewable resources and away from oil which was “yesterday’s resource”.
Eleven sets of international data analysing sea levels and temperatures since the 1860s proved the impact of climate change. “This is the biggest existential threat to our planet”, asserted Sir King.
He said the scientific community needed urgently to come up with smarter ways of using the world’s resources to produce food.
