UN Food Agency Director-General calls for ‘Green Revolution’ to feed world

The Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has called for a second ‘Green Revolution’ to feed the world’s growing population while preserving natural resources and the environment.

“In the next few decades, a major international effort is needed to feed the world when the population soars from six to nine billion,” Jacques Diouf told a meeting of the World Affairs Council of Northern California in San Francisco. “We might call it a second Green Revolution.”

The original Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s doubled world food production by bringing the power of science to agriculture, but “relied on the lavish use of inputs such as water, fertilizer and pesticides,” Mr. Diouf said.

“The task ahead may well prove harder,” he cautioned. “We not only need to grow an extra 1 billion tonnes of cereals a year by 2050 – within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren – but do so from a diminishing resource base of land and water in many of the world’s regions, and in an environment increasingly threatened by global warming and climate change.”

He noted that 100 million people faced forced migration as a consequence of advancing desertification and soil degradation while water reserves had started to run low in key grain production areas such as India and China.

“The new Green Revolution will be less about introducing new, high-performance varieties of wheat or rice, important as they are, and much more about making wiser and more efficient use of the natural resources available to us,” Mr. Diouf said.

The San Francisco-based World Affairs Council of Northern California, which has 10,000 members, is considered a leading United States forum for discussion and debate of international affairs.