Food, energy, water: Conflicting in securities (and the rare win-wins offered by soil stewardship)

Excerpt

Planet Earth is experiencing environmental change of a scale and speed without precedent, driven by climate, human population growth, and changing consumption patterns.

Food, water, and energy security are finally being recognized as the most important national and international security issues, but an important element has been lacking in the discussion—the soil.

On its current trajectory, the world will need to at least double food production by 2050. We have doubled food production over similar periods in the past, mainly through clearing, cultivating, and irrigating more land, using improved varieties, and increasing use of fertilizer.

Those options are narrowing.

It now seems likely that food production by 2050 will have to be achieved using less land and water than is being used today. The current trend toward biofuels for energy security reasons further intensifies the squeeze on land and water resources.

Clearing more land for agriculture is highly undesirable from a greenhouse perspective, and there are moves in many countries to reestablish forest cover on cleared agricultural lands.

As a rule of thumb, each calorie we consume requires one liter of water to produce. Opportunities to expand irrigation are also extremely limited. The International Water Management Institute (2007) recently completed …