By Laura Reiley
A full-scale shift toward healthier diets, combined with improved farm productivity and a halving of food waste, could reduce global agricultural land use roughly 6% by 2050 – an area the size of India – and lead to a 42% decline ($630 billion) in global livestock production value, according to a sweeping new analysis published the May edition of Nature.
That reversal would be historically unprecedented, marking one of the first sustained contractions in farmland in modern history. The reason is straightforward but profound: a world that eats differently farms differently.
“This work underlines that the scale of this change is huge and the policy ambition has to be commensurate with the challenge,” said Matthew Gibson, former postdoctoral associate in the Food Systems and Global Change research group in the Cornell CALS Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment. “We have to think about a coordinated push involving governments, industry and consumers alike.”
Gibson, currently a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, led the study, which attempts to map what would happen if the world actually followed through on years of calls for healthy diets from more sustainable food systems.
Source : cornell.edu