Feeding the planet: an unprecedented confluence of pressures anticipated

The report from the UK government's Foresight team, The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global sustainability, published in January 2011, explores the pressures on the global food system between now and 2050, and identifies the decisions that policy makers need to take today and in the years ahead in order to ensure that the future global population can be fed sustainably, and underlines the need for the public health and food supply sustainability agendas to be harnessed together. The global population is now 6.8 billion and is estimated to reach over 9 billion by 2050. Not only is the world's population expanding but it is also undergoing rapid development, and with this comes increasing demand for protein rich foods, especially meat and dairy products. As economies strengthen, the so- called diseases of affluence are often found alongside chronic malnutrition, in India for example, making the public health challenges particularly complex. The Foresight report concludes that, without change, food production will continue to degrade the environment and compromise the world's capacity to produce sufficient food in a sustainable way, as well as contributing to climate change and destruction of biodiversity. The report also emphasises that the use of new technologies as a partial solution, such as genetic modification and livestock cloning, should not be excluded a priori on ethical and moral grounds. But the question remains 'what should be done in terms of dietary advice?' This paper considers some of the issues.