Question: how can we grow food

Kuntal Singh answered on 7 Nov 2016:

This is a really good question and a complex subject as well. I will try to answer it as clearly as possible.

There are two broad ways we could grow more food: either by planting more crops which implies we need to bring more areas under agriculture OR develop new crop varieties that produces more grains from the same amount of land.

First one implies expanding our agriculture areas. But where will the additional land for new agriculture areas come from? By clearing forests which could pose risk to biodiversity. Second implies we need to develop new crop varieties that could produce more or are high yielding. Green Revolution (read about it here http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/green-revolution/) helped us develop new crop varieties that produce good amount of grains. However, these crops needs good irrigation or water supply and fertilizer application. With climate change, rainfall patterns are becoming more variable which means agriculture areas that depend on rainfall for supplying water to crops could be at risk.

So in summary, it is a big challenge to produce more crops in the future especially in the context of climate change. Hope this was useful and keep asking these great questions.