Should REDD+ fund ‘sustainable intensification’ as a means of reducing tropical deforestation?

Over the last 50 years, the global population has doubled. Despite this, food production has more than kept pace, resulting in a 24% increase in per capita world food production and a 40% reduction in food prices in real terms. While some progress has been made towards lowering the proportion of people suffering from chronic hunger from 20 to 16%, the absolute number of chronically hungry has actually increased to more than 900 million. Until recently, conventional wisdom was that while global food production was sufficient to meet demand, the main problem was one of distribution. This conclusion was reassessed towards the end of the 2000s, when the effect of changing diets in developing nations was taken into account, which indicated that food production will need to increase 70% to meet demand in 2050. A recent analysis relating calorie and protein consumption to GDP puts this even higher at 100–110%. These projections have prompted a number of high-profile reports analyzing the global food production system, generally concluding that gains are likely to come from a mix of new applications of existing knowledge, new technologies, and development and implementation of appropriate economic and social policies, and sustainable intensification on existing crop area.

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