Will there be enough food to feed people in 2050?

You Asked:

Will there be enough food to feed people in 2050? — Garry, Bristol, United Kingdom

Marshall Brain Answers:

There will certainly be enough food to feed people in 2050, because at any point where there is not enough food, some people will die of starvation. That’s a morbid way to look at it, but that is how nature works for every living thing. Populations can grow only to the point where they begin to exceed carrying capacity of the environment. Humans are not immune to this law of nature.

But when you asked your question, you were probably hoping to avoid the starvation point. So we might rephrase the question in this way:

“Given that the human population has been growing for many centuries, and will exceed 7 billion in 2011, will human beings be able to grow enough food to feed the projected population in 2050 without a mass starvation event?”

So one question we have to answer is, “what will happen to the human population in the future?” There is no way to know for sure, but futurists seem to have reached a consensus that 9 billion people is where the population will be by 2050, and that will likely represent the peak population as fertility continues to decline. This video explains why:

Can planet earth handle a human population of 9 billion people? Most likely. That is a 28% increase over today’s population, and it will be 40 years before we get there. There is still lots of room for improvement in the areas of agriculture, aquaculture, artificial meat, bugiculture, etc.

But there could be unforeseen problems. For example, Australia went through a many-year period of drought, followed by massive floods this year, and it is thought that global climate change played a role. If there were to be widespread droughts or floods in a breadbasket region that wiped out a significant amount of agricultural output for a year or two, it would create a problem. If there were a large volcanic eruption that blocked enough sunlight to cut agricultural output for a year or two, it would create a problem as well. Either of these events could cause a famine.