Today's technologies can feed tomorrow's world providing food availability rather than production doubles in the next 25 to 50 years, DEFRA’s chief scientific adviser has said.
Sir Bob Watson, who was knighted in the New Year’s Honours for his government service, has said enough food is being produced to feed the planet but one in seven go to bed hungry every night.
The world’s food waste must be reduced and new technologies invested in by governments around the world if we are to secure food for the future, Sir Bob has said.
In developing countries, 18 per cent of food is wasted before it gets to the market, whereas in the USA and the UK most food is wasted in retail foodservice, homes and government. In both developed countries and developing countries the total amount wasted is somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent.
Sir Bob argues that if we can reduce that percentage the challenge of meeting food security will be that much easier.
“We can address the hunger of today with today’s technologies by emphasising agro-ecological policies coupled with decreased post-harvest loss,” he has explained.
Sir Bob has also called for governments to do more to research advances such as genetic modification.
“The technologies will just sit on the shelf without a major change from governments around the world,” he has said. “We’re clearly not recognising that we have to bring economic environments and social issues together.
“We need to understand advanced biotechnologies may well be critical in the future but we need to understand the risks and the benefits, which means we must study genetic modification to make informed decisions.
"We need to inform international trade, we need to increase investment both in the public and the private sector, we need to do more research.”
From a UK perspective, the emissions from a directly agricultural perspective are around seven per cent, compared with a global average of more like 15 per cent. But, if you look at the entire food sector, UK emissions are closer to 20 per cent.
This shows the food sector is an important area for getting to grips with greenhouse gas emissions in the UK.
DEFRA has launched a major research program to find out what is happening with emissions in the food industry to better reduce them in the future.
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