Abstract

If you were organizing dinner parties for the world, you would need to put out 219,000 more place settings every night than you had the night before. That is how fast the Earth's population is growing. But global agricultural production is currently failing to keep pace. A June 2012 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization sees trouble looming ahead, warning that “land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer.”