Every year the Grower-Shipper Association polls its members to identify the issues and challenges that they feel are most important to them. Over the years, I’ve written about many of them extensively – labor, water, food safety, crop protection, land use, farmworker housing, transportation and logistics.
Here’s a new one to ponder: How do farmers produce twice as much food over the next 20 to 30 years with half the resources? That’s right, by 2050, there will be over 9 billion people to feed. The middle class will increase from 1.5 billion people to 4.5 billion and they will demand better food choices – fruits and vegetables being chief among them. Global production must increase by 70 percent to meet this demand. How do we do this in an era of less land, less water, less inputs, less labor?
Image: http://www.thecalifornian.com
