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Have you heard that we need to double food production by 2050 in order to feed a population of 9 billion people? I have. I’ve heard it ad nauseum. Today, I was reading through some transcripts from the 2009 Borlaug Dialogues, and nearly every speaker noted that we need to double food production by 2050 but no one cited their source. It was just a given, something everyone already knew.

I started Googling and ended up emailing colleagues for the original source of this figure. And, to the best of my knowledge (I haven’t given up yet), THERE ISN’T ONE. That’s right. No source. There IS a claim by Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the FAO from January 2009 – but no source. Where did he get his information? What were the assumptions used to calculate it?

UPDATE: I’ve done some more checking on this. The FAO, the source cited for saying we must double food production, says we need to increase it by 70 percent. Not double.

More below.

Jill Richardson :: Doubling Food Production by 2050

Emails began coming back from people far more knowledgeable and experienced in this area than I, first pointing me to a 2006 FAO report that says a lot of things, but doesn’t say we need to double food production. The same email contained a link to an article about the UK’s Soil Association calling out the “double food production” claim as B.S. From their own report, they found that the supposed source (the FAO report) never says “double food production,” and its numbers actually call for increasing food production by 70 percent by 2050.