Abstract
The world produces sufficient food to meet the need of everyone at present. Yet, despite of our continued efforts, progress in eradicating hunger has been slow in general. The world is still a home of 805 million chronically hungry people and the vast majority of them live in developing countries. One in every nine people on the planet suffers from chronic hunger, and one out of every four children under age five in developing worlds are stunted. Looking at the future, the world would likely face serious challenges in future food security. Present world population of 7.2 billion is predicted to exceed 9 billion by 2050, and the per capita average food consumption would exceed 3,000 kcal/day by 2050 from 2,770 kcal/day in 2005/07. To meet the rapidly increasing food requirements, the world food production needs to be increased by 60% worldwide by 2050. If the world fails to achieve this target, there would be a high risk of food shortage, food riots, social and political unrest, and other negative consequences as witnessed during the food price crisis in 2007-08. On the other hand, there are number of serious challenges and uncertainties which would negatively influence future food production and productivity increase such as very limited arable land expansion potential, increasing scarcity of water resources, negative impacts of climate changes and increasing competition on the use of land and water between food crops and bio-energy crops. FAO predicts that it would be possible to increase food production by 60% by 2050 on the assumption that nearly 90% of food production increase should come from existing arable lands through yield increase and agricultural research. Therefore, agricultural research and education is expected to play an extremely important role in feeding the world in the future and achieving world peace and stability.
