Global Food Challenges
Summary
The main challenge facing global food production include: declining land resources, water scarcity due to increasing demand for water for competing uses, increasing climatic variability, rapid population growth, higher energy demands for fertilizers and transport, and changes in diets.
One of the first signals of economic development is a shift in diet to include more meat consumption. This is of particular concern for the global food supply because the energy efficiency of producing meat is much lower than for basic crop production. As will be shown in subsequent chapters, meat production also requires far more water than crop production and has significantly higher environmental impacts than crop production.