Can we grow more food in 50 years than in all of history?

Science Leader Says Population and Global Warming Make the Job Hard

By NED POTTER, Oct. 5, 2009 How serious is the world’s situation? Bad enough, says a leading Australian scientist, that the world will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in the thousands of years since civilization began, and will have a tough time keeping up. There have been dark predictions –mostly wrong — of worldwide food shortages before. But this one comes from Megan Clark, the head of Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO. Clark is hardly a wild-eyed extremist; she is a former mining executive. In a speech in Canberra last week, Clark said growing population will cause exponentially-rising demand, and a warming climate will make the challenge more difficult. “It is hard for me to comprehend that in the next 50 years we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed over our entire human history,” she said. “That means in the working life of my children, more grain than ever produced since the Egyptians, more fish than eaten to date, more milk than from all the cows that have ever been milked on every frosty morning humankind has ever known.” …