How can we feed 11 billion people?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The world’s population is set to grow from 7.7 to 11 billion by the end of this century. The challenge is to produce enough food to feed this number of people. In the 1960s the Green Revolution provided answers to similar problems – but the projected population growth of the future is on a much greater scale than before, and so new measures are required. In east Africa they’re working to reduce the amount of food that’s lost before it even gets to market – globally this stands at around 30 per cent. In the United States scientists are working to improve the natural process of photosynthesis – to make plants themselves function more efficiently. And in India they’re working to preserve genetic diversity – conserving rice varieties that can flourish in salt water or in conditions of drought.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 60 seconds. We choose to go to the moon. |
| 0:03.0 | We can't land here. |
| 0:06.0 | Everyone is sitting there not knowing what has happened. |
| 0:10.0 | We might not make it. |
| 0:12.0 | 13 minutes to the moon, from the BBC World Service, coming soon. |
| 0:21.8 | This is the inquiry on the BBC World Service with me Kate Lamble. |
| 0:26.0 | Each week one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. |
| 0:41.0 | In 1798 in a small leafy village in Surrey England, a Christian minister called Thomas Malthus sat thinking. |
| 0:49.7 | He'd been mulling over his work, the baptisms and the funerals he'd been carrying out over the last few |
| 0:55.3 | years and he'd come to a realization. There were many more children being born than people dying. |
| 1:05.0 | The population of the country he decided had to be increasing. |
| 1:10.0 | Then the minister started to wonder about all the crops that would need to be grown |
| 1:15.2 | to feed all these extra mouths and he imagined a time when the earth could no longer |
| 1:20.2 | support the number of people living on it. |
| 1:25.0 | Malefus's prediction became famous, |
| 1:28.0 | but it never came true. |
| 1:31.0 | Over 200 years later, in April this year, an American professor, Chris Barrett, gave a speech at the United Nations in Rome. |
| 1:40.0 | He warned that resources like land and water are becoming more limited. |
| 1:44.8 | And he called food security, our ability to give everyone on the planet nutritious meals, |
| 1:50.4 | the defining global challenge of the century. |
| 1:53.2 | The prospect of failing to meet the food security challenge |
| 1:57.5 | is nothing short of an existential crisis |
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