Halving Losses Feeds a Billion

 This informs us that by simply adopting best practice uniformly will add food for one billion new mouths. This is very reassuring. Now we add in the conversion globally to the biochar protocol and the prospective total elimination of fertilizer as a result and we set the stage for global optimization of agriculture itself. Ensuring manpower availability allows just that.

What I am saying is that the same land base is able to support plausibly twice what it is now doing. And this all is without the Eden Machine reclaiming deserts and moose salmon cattail culture claiming all the boreal forest.

As I have posted in the past, I think it is possible to support one hundred billion on a fully terraformed Earth. The details are buried in this blog but the support for that position is here.

For this to happen, it is only necessary to ensure that every child is raised inside an ethos of ecological responsibility and with the skills needed to enhance the biome he is locally part of.

Halving the food losses would feed an additional billion people

by Staff Writers

Aalto, Finland (SPX) Oct 11, 2012

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Halving_the_food_losses_would_feed_an_additional_billion_people_999.html

More efficient use of the food production chain and a decrease in the amount of food losses will dramatically help maintaining the planet's natural resources and improve people's lives. Researchers in Aalto University have proved a valid estimation, for the first time, for how many people could be fed with reducing food losses.

The world's population is an estimated seven billion people. An additional one billion can be fed from our current resources, if the food losses could be halved. This can be achieved if the lowest loss percentage achieved in any region could be reached globally.

- There isn't enough clean water everywhere on Earth. Significantly more agricultural land cannot be cleared as well as certain raw material minerals for fertilizers are running low. At the same time, a quarter of the amount of calories in produced food is lost or wasted at different stages of food production chain, which results in unnecessary resources loss, says Matti Kummu, post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University.

The new study is the first to evaluate the impact of food losses and its relationship to resources on a global scale. Annually 27 m3 of clean water, 0.031 hectares of agricultural land and 4.3 kilos of fertilizers per every inhabitant in the world is wasted in food losses.

- Agriculture uses over 90 percent of the fresh water consumed by humans and most of the raw materials used in fertilizers. More efficient food production and the reduction of food losses are very important matters for the environment as well as future food security, Kummu adds.

Further, for the first time, the global food losses in terms of kilocalories per person were estimated.

As a result of food loss in the food production chain, it was determined that globally 614 kilocalories per every person a day are lost. Without this loss, present global food production would yield 2,609 kilocalories of edible food a day for every inhabitant in the world. Thus, by halving the food losses, we could feed 8 billion people with the currently used resources.