WS MoreOrLess: The future of food

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Future of Food" More or Less, BBC Radio 4 – March 7, 2015

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Overview

This episode of More or Less investigates a bold claim circulating in the media: that in the next 40 years, humanity will need to produce more food than in the previous 10,000 years combined. Prompted by a listener’s question, host Ruth Alexander and reporter Hannah Moore break down the numbers behind this assertion, assess its accuracy, and consult global food experts and statisticians to illuminate the reality behind food production and the future’s challenges.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Origin and Spread of the "More Food Than Ever" Claim

• Listener Inquiry (00:47): Rob Ryan Silver asks about a claim in The Economist that humanity will need to produce more food in 40 years than over the past 10,000, which seemed "improbable."
• Tracing the Claim (01:18):
  • Hannah Moore identifies William G. Lesher (Global Harvest Initiative) as a likely source.
  • The statement has appeared in multiple reputable outlets, but its numerical basis is unclear.
  • Possible influence from earlier calculations by Dr. Megan Clark (CSIRO), who asserted:

    "From 2010 to 2060, a period of 50 years ... was equal to all the food that had been produced since 1500." – Dr. Megan Clark (02:07)

2. Clarifying and Questioning the Calculation

• Graphing Food Production Over Time (02:51–03:39):

  • Dr. Clark says food production curves sharply upward post-1960.
  • Calculating future needs involves assumptions about consumption, population, and waste.
  • She notes an estimated 30% extra food is now needed to account for waste and distribution.

• Statistical Problems (03:39–04:22):

  • Ruth Alexander dispels the myth that more people are alive today than ever before:

    "The dead currently outnumber the living by 15 to 1." (03:52)

  • Accurate population and consumption data is very recent (from ~1800 on); much is speculative for earlier periods.

3. The United Nations Perspective: Crunching the Numbers

• Data and Projections (04:22–04:50):

  • The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) maintains the most comprehensive global consumption datasets.
  • The FAO's projections account for 185 countries using mathematical modeling.

• Developed Countries, Richer Diets, and Waste (04:55–06:20):

  • As nations develop, they eat more and better food, including more animal products.
  • Joseph Schmidhuber (UN statistician) explains:

    "They simply consume more. Not only more protein, but ... more energy, more wheat, more rice, more cereals ... more livestock products ... which essentially means that they consume more maize and more feed grains indirectly." (05:28)

  • With affluence comes greater waste; the UN therefore focuses on calories "available," not "needed."

• The Math Behind the Claim (06:29–07:12):

  • A "very rough" calculation using UN projections finds that in the next 40 years, humanity will produce almost 90% of the calories produced over the previous 10,000 years—a figure close to The Economist's dramatic statement.
  • By 2050, the world’s population could reach 9 billion, with a 60% increase in calorie production required.

• Feeding the World: Not an Impossible Task (07:19–07:51):

  • Past decades show humanity’s ability to meet food demand.
  • Joseph Schmidhuber reassures:

    "Given the fact that in general, we have enough resources globally to meet these demands ... whatever we think people will be able to buy and afford is likely to be produced." (07:33)

4. Historical Context and Predictions Gone Wrong

• Comparisons to Past Predictions (08:11–08:48):
  • Reference to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which predicted mass starvation in the 1970s.
  • Journalist Tom Chivers notes:

    "Since Paul Ehrlich made that prediction, the population has more than doubled to 7 billion. But the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25%." (08:32)

  • Famines have occurred, but not on the predicted scale or in the richest nations.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Debunking the Numbers

  "The dead currently outnumber the living by 15 to 1."
  — Ruth Alexander, addressing misleading population statistics (03:52)

• Measuring Food 'Needed' vs. Food 'Available'

  "As well as eating more, when we get richer, we waste more. They take that into their calculations... that's why they refer to the number of calories available rather than... needed."
  — Hannah Moore (06:07)

• Optimism from Data

  "The human race is very adept at producing food to meet a rapidly growing demand."
  — Hannah Moore (07:22)

  "Whatever we think people will be able to buy and afford is likely to be produced."
  — Joseph Schmidhuber (07:33)

• Historical Perspective

  "Since Paul Ehrlich made that prediction, the population has more than doubled... But the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25%."
  — Tom Chivers (08:32)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:47 — Introduction of listener's query and the main claim.
• 02:07 — Dr. Megan Clark explains the food production calculation.
• 03:39 — Discussion of the data and challenges in calculating historical food and population figures.
• 05:28 — FAO’s Joseph Schmidhuber on changing diets and increased animal product consumption.
• 06:29 — Calculating if the dramatic claim could be true—what the UN’s projections suggest.
• 07:33 — Schmidhuber on confidence in humanity’s capacity to produce food.
• 08:11 — Discussing past failed predictions about population and famine.

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Conclusion

The More or Less team finds that the viral claim—though based on serious exaggerations and speculative math—contains a kernel of truth when UN projections, rising populations, richer diets, and food waste are considered. The show tempers doomsday rhetoric with historical context, statistical skepticism, and a data-driven suggestion that food production, not absolute scarcity, is likely to keep pace with global demand—assuming development and markets remain robust.

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Transcript

[Ruth Alexander]

This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

[BBC Announcer]

Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts

[Ruth Alexander]

hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, the programme which investigates the numbers in the news and in the world around us. And hi, I'm Ruth Alexander. This week we're looking at how much food we'll need to produce to feed the world's population over the next 40 years. Listener Rob Ryan Silver from Maryland in the US emailed us at more or lessbc.co.uk to ask.

[Listener Rob Ryan Silver]

A recent article in the Economist includes the claim that in the next 40 years, humans will need to produce more food than they did in the previous 10,000 put together. This seems improbable. Would you investigate?

[Ruth Alexander]

Let's look back to 10,000 years ago, the dawn of agriculture, when the human diet progressed from just a handful of nuts and berries to bread, pasta, cornflakes.

[Hannah Moore]

I don't think they had cornflakes, Ruth.

[Ruth Alexander]

This is our razor sharp reporter, Hannah Moore. You've been looking into this claim from the Economist.

[Hannah Moore]

I have. It's actually a quote that's been bandied about a lot over the past few years. It's appeared in the Guardian, the LA Times. The person who said it original was William G. Lesher when he was chief executive of the Global Harvest Initiative, an organization that campaigns for environmental standards in farming.

[Ruth Alexander]

So he was talking about the challenge of producing enough food in the future.

[Hannah Moore]

Yes, and it's an arresting claim, but probably inaccurate. I've not been able to find out the basis on which Dr. Lesher calculated this, and he's since left the Global Harvest Initiative. But I've spoken to them and they suggested it may be based on an earlier calculation by the scientist Dr. Megan Clark, when she was chief executive of CSIRO, the Australian government's scientific research agency.

[Dr. Megan Clark]

If you looked at all the food that you were producing year after year after year, we realized that from 2010 to 2060. So a period of 50 years from when we did this work was equal to all the food that had been produced since 1500, since Columbus was sailing around.

[BBC Announcer]

Right.

[Ruth Alexander]

So Meghan Clarke calculated that we'd have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as we did in the past 500.

[Hannah Moore]

And perhaps through the force of Chinese whispers, that's turned into we'll need to produce more food by 2050 than we did in the last 10,000 years. As the guy from the Global Harvest Initiative. And now the Economist has said, well,

[Ruth Alexander]

let's take a closer look at Meghan Clarke's calculation. Then.

[Hannah Moore]

She says the graph that shows how much food we've been producing over time paints a very clear picture.

[Dr. Megan Clark]

Now, when we made that graph, of course, it starts off very small curve, if you think around 1500, but it starts to really curve up around about 1960, really starts to escalate. To make any curve like this, you have to make some assumptions. How much are we going to eat? What are the trends? What's going to happen in various countries? And we know that that's changed over time. We also have to look at waste. You know, we might need to produce now, given that we're shipping our food around the world and we have wastage, we need to produce perhaps 30% more just to be able to feed the world. So we also need to make assumptions on waste.

[Hannah Moore]

But looking closely at how the underlying calculations have been done, we hit a problem. Megan Clocks based her calculations on the idea that there are more people alive today than have ever lived before.

[Ruth Alexander]

Ah, well, that's a statistic we've looked into before ourselves, isn't it? It's not true, actually. The dead currently outnumber the living by 15 to 1. And this grand statistical claim that people are making, it can't be an easy thing to work out. We don't know for certain how many people were on Earth 500 years ago. Really, we only have accurate population data from around 1800 onwards. I mean, the UK census was first taken in 1801, for example, and we don't know how many calories people were consuming.

[Hannah Moore]

But my investigations led me to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Now, what the number crunchers there don't know about what food we're growing and eating isn't worth knowing. They've been producing yearly data on the world's food consumption for the past 50 years. They also make projections on how much food will be available to us in the future, surveying 185 countries and doing some clever mathematical modeling to fill in the gaps.

[Ruth Alexander]

So what do they think about how much food we're going to have to produce over the next 40 years?

[Hannah Moore]

Well, they've observed that as countries develop, become richer and improve farming methods, people eat more and they eat better food.

[Ruth Alexander]

So the more food available, the more we'll eat. I suppose it's a bit like having a packet of biscuits in the cupboard. If they're there, you'll want them and eat them better.

[Hannah Moore]

To have the willpower in the shop in the first place.

[Ruth Alexander]

True. But back to the UN's food experts.

[Hannah Moore]

They say that between 1961 and 2009, the world's population doubled by but food production tripled. Here's statistician Joseph Schmidhuber.

[Joseph Schmidhuber]

In fact, as countries become wealthier, we see two effects. One effect is that they simply consume more. Not only more protein, but they also consume more energy, more wheat, more rice, more cereals, more oilseeds. And in addition to this, they consume more livestock products, which at the end of the day in today's livestock production systems essentially means that they consume more maize and more feed grains indirectly through livestock products.

[Ruth Alexander]

So Joseph's saying the amount of meat being eaten across the world is increasing, and that that means we need to produce more feed for the animals that get used for meat.

[Hannah Moore]

But as well as eating more, when we get richer, we waste more. They take that into their calculations at the un and it's for that reason they refer to the number of calories available rather than the number of calories needed.

[Ruth Alexander]

Ah, well, thinking back to the claim in the Economist, it was said that in the next 40 years, humans will need to produce more food than they did in the previous 10,000.

[Hannah Moore]

Yes, but Joseph's saying that we'll end up producing more than we need. If you crunch the numbers the UN way, which, official as it is, does involve some heroic assumptions, it seems the Economist's claim could actually be not far off the truth. A rough, very rough calculation based on UN projections suggests there'll be over 1,000 trillion calories available from all the food in the world over the next 40 years. That's about 90% of the calories that were available over the past 10,000.

[Ruth Alexander]

And that's based on the idea that countries will get richer and so people will consume more and that there'll be more people living on the planet in 2050 too. About 9 billion of us, in fact.

[Hannah Moore]

Yes, the UN expects us to produce 60% more calories over the next 40 years or so than we do today.

[Ruth Alexander]

So they don't think we'll struggle to feed 9 billion people?

[Hannah Moore]

No, the evidence of the last 40 years shows that the human race is very adept at producing food to meet a rapidly growing demand. Here's Joseph Schmidt Huber again.

[Joseph Schmidhuber]

Given the fact that in general, we have enough resources globally to meet these demands, to meet the effective demand, I would say that whatever we think people will be able to buy and afford is likely to be produced.

[Ruth Alexander]

So to sum up, the economists made it sound like there was a drastic challenge ahead, but the UN food experts are much more sanguine. We'll probably produce more food over the next 40 years or so than we have in the past 10,000, in large part because we'll want to. But this concern about how we're going to feed ourselves in the future isn't new.

[Hannah Moore]

That's right. Paul Ehrlich, the American author of the book the Population bomb, predicted in 1968 that in the 1970s hundreds of millions, millions of people would starve to death because of the world's fast growing population. He imagined 4 billion people would die, including 65 million Americans.

[Ruth Alexander]

But it didn't work out like that. As Tom Chivers, a journalist with the UK's Daily Telegraph, points out, since Paul Ehrlich made that prediction, the population has more than doubled to 7 billion. But the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25%.

[Hannah Moore]

And there have been famines, but none in America.

[Ruth Alexander]

That's all we have time for. Thank you for listening. If there are any statistics you'd like us to investigate, do please email us like Rob did at more or lessbc.co.uk. we love reading your comments and suggestions too, and you can get a free download of this program. Listen to past editions and read articles we write at our website, BBC.commoreorless

[Listener Rob Ryan Silver]

there

[BBC Announcer]

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