Increasing productivity is the key

Before the arrival of the first Green Revolution, around a billion people were suffering from hunger and undernourishment. After a short-lived minor improvement to the situation at the beginning of the nineteen-nineties, this number has, sadly, regained its relevance once again. According to figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the number of hungry people in the world rose by 105 million in 2009 alone, to reach a total of 1.02 billion. But this certainly doesn’t mean that the Green Revolution was a failure, particularly if you consider that the world population has more than doubled since 1960, rising from around 3 billion people then to today’s 6.8 billion. In fact, over the last fifty years, agriculture has succeeded in producing enough food to nourish an additional three billion people and more. The foundation for this achievement was a remarkable increase in productivity.

Here’s an example from Germany: at the beginning of the nineteen-fifties, about 3.8 hectares of land were needed to produce ten tonnes of wheat. Nowadays, the same amount is being harvested from an average of 1.3 hectares: in other words, land-use efficiency has almost trebled. Although the overall efficiency gain, taken on a global scale, has been smaller, it is still impressive: in 1960, a hectare yielded enough food for 2.4 people on average; in 2005, the corresponding figure was 4.1 people.

More recently though, the productivity gains have been less pronounced – and this is a serious problem. A prognosis by the United Nations suggests that – assuming moderate birth rates – the world’s population will have increased to eight billion people by 2025, and even to as many as 9.1 billion by 2050. So on top of solving the current problem of hunger, there will be almost three billion people to feed in addition. Only after 2050 is the global population expected to start shrinking again, as a consequence of the increasing average age. Professor Matin Qaim of the Institute of International Food Economics and Rural Development at the University of Göttingen stresses that agricultural production will have to double by 2050 if all of these people are to obtain the food they need. Demand for wheat is likely to increase by half again (to around three billion tonnes a year); and that for meat by about 200 million tonnes (to 470 million tonnes). If food production is to keep up with population growth, cereal yields will have to increase by 3.3 percent each year for the next 20 years: the present rate of increase lies at only around two percent. “Agriculture simply has to become more productive if it is to feed a substantially bigger population and at the same time, rise to the significant environmental challenges it faces”, warned FAO Secretary-General Jacques Diouf at an Expert Forum in Rome in mid-October 2009. The FAO is pushing for substantial increases in public investment into agricultural research, as well as for a broad acceptance of new technologies, agricultural systems and crops. In other words – within the next forty years, we will need a second Green Revolution.

Innovation breakthroughs aren’t urgent simply because of the anticipated drop in the available agricultural area per head of population. There are three further mega-trends in global agricultural market structures that will be just as influential:

1. the increasing need for biomass as a renewable alternative to finite fossil fuel reserves, not only to produce energy, but also to produce basic materials;
2. the increasing demand for animal-derived protein that goes along with rising incomes, and
3. climate change – both as a threat to future harvests in today’s fertile agricultural regions, and as an imperative to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

All of this means that there can be no future if we continue to rely on yesterday’s methods and practices. As the Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer CropScience, Prof. Friedrich Berschauer, emphasizes: “If we are to meet the challenges facing food production and use our resources to make cultivation as efficient as possible – against the background of a steadily-increasing world population – then we will need intensive agricultural research.” This research must find ways of improving resource management such that significantly higher yields can be obtained in future from the same area of cultivated land.

The use of crop protection agents and fertilizers must become more efficient. Even today’s highly-effective crop protection agents are only able to elevate the yields of cereals, rice, maize, potato, soybean, cotton and coffee to 72 percent of the theoretical maximum: crops still suffer from losses to pests, weeds and diseases. If we were to succeed in closing this yield gap, then considerably more food could be produced without having to extend the area under cropping. Only by achieving this we will relieve the threat to virgin forest, nature reserves and wild biotopes posed by the expansion of agricultural land. It follows then that intensification – if it can be achieved without damaging the environment – can also bring ecological advantages.

Researching to increase efficiency
If, in contrast, agricultural technologies were to stagnate at today’s current standards, then further virgin natural biotopes would certainly have to fall under the plough. If local populations cannot obtain enough food, their efforts to produce it will not stop at the borders of today’s nature protection areas. The FAO predicts that 90 percent of the global increase in food production required by 2050 will have to be achieved through higher yields and more intensive production, and only the remaining ten percent of it through an extension of the agricultural area.

Another fact: food commodities will only be traded at prices affordable to low-income groups if they are produced in sufficient amounts. The extraordinarily high prices for commodities (cereals, maize and soybean, but also milk and milk products) seen recently – mainly in 2008 – have shown the sort of extremes of variability that even minor shortages of agricultural commodities can cause in global markets. And it’s poor people in the world’s least developed countries who suffer most from these fluctuations.


Efficient water use
Using our precious water supplies more efficiently will also be a priority. This applies particularly to irrigated crops grown in tropical and subtropical regions. Water is already the limiting factor for food production in many regions of the world. There has been an increasing tendency over the last two years for countries that are relatively poorly equipped with agricultural land in relation to their populations (examples include Saudi-Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, but also China) to buy-up the rights to millions of hectares of productive land in the more extensively agricultural countries of Africa. In doing so, and in claiming the food produced on this land, they are importing a considerable amount of the locally-available water. This requisitioning of land, which has been described as a new form of colonialism by non-governmental organizations, indicates how serious the governments of net-importing countries already judge the situation to be.

High-quality seed of varieties with improved characteristics is likely to play an important role in securing the future supply of food. Broad-scale implementation of innovative technologies, such as hybrid breeding and plant biotechnology, would go a long way towards increasing and securing the harvests of our most important crops. For example, varieties of crop plants whose resistance to drought or extreme temperatures has been strengthened – through gene technology or by other means – could contribute to securing the harvest in the face of climate change. Researchers in the Australian state of Victoria have run successful field trials of genetically-manipulated wheat lines that are capable of delivering stable yields under conditions of water stress. In the 2006/07 season, drought in Victoria destroyed an estimated 70 percent of the wheat harvest. Climate scientists predict average temperature increases for the Australian continent of between one and six degrees Celsius by 2070, accompanied by reduced precipitation. The German Association of Biotechnology Industries (DIB) expects the first drought-tolerant wheat variety to be brought onto the market in five to ten years. For maize, this could happen in two to five years. Authorities in the USA have already received a registration application for drought-tolerant maize.

Plant biotechnology is also likely to contribute to a resource-efficient increase in the productivity of food from animal husbandry. In future, ruminants might be fed more easily-digestible grasses with modified fructan and lignin contents. This would reduce the amount of climate-damaging digestive gases they produce, and at the same time, increase energy yield. Even by 2020, the world’s population is expected to be consuming 120 million tonnes more milk than it did ten years ago. It will therefore be essential to increase the efficiency of milk production if methane emissions by the world’s milking herds are to be reduced, or at least kept under control. A cow capable of producing ten litres of milk a day emits about 40 grammes of methane for every litre. If productivity is raised to 30 litres of milk a day, then the emission rate sinks to 15 grammes per litre, because the proportion of the cow’s total food intake expended on basal metabolism decreases, thus improving efficiency.For a four-fold increase in
the amount of milk, a cow only needs a 2.8-times greater energy ration in its feed. Increasing income levels in developing countries mean that more and more
people expect to be able to consume
animal-derived foods, so this type of efficiency gain is essential if the environmental and climatic impacts of animal husbandry are to be kept under control.

The twin pressures of climate change and dwindling fossil energy resources will propel agriculture to the forefront in supplying the world’s population with renewable energy and sustainable supplies of raw materials. Forecasts indicate that between 20 and 30 percent of the agricultural surface might be dedicated to producing biomass by 2025. It follows then that this area will either be lost to food production – or at best only available to a limited extent. This means that biomass production also desperately needs innovative approaches if the conflict between the tank and the plate is to be relieved.

Profiting from technical progress
Before any of this can happen, political change is urgently needed if biotechnological innovations are to be put to good use in agricultural practice in Germany and the rest of Europe. Encouraging agricultural research within the framework of state-financed innovation programmes is only half the story: policy must allow the results of research to be put into practice. European law stipulates that strict testing criteria must be met if registrations are to be granted: but agriculture and consumers will only be allowed to profit from technical progress if these criteria are applied in a consistent, scientific way. If Europe continues to block plant biotechnology, we will be denying ourselves one of the most promising tools available for creating a sustainable improvement in the supply of food, energy and raw materials.