How to feed the world’s ten billion people

With the world struggling to feed eight billion people today, how will we feed ten billion by 2050?

- Yurdi Yasmi

That is a tall order.The current food system is already buckling. Roughly 673 million people go to bed hungry every night, and in 2025, we witnessed two famines (in Gaza and Sudan). At the same time, 1.66 billion hectares — 60% of which is agricultural land — have been degraded by the very practices we rely on to feed the world.

Global hunger stems not from a lack of capacity to produce enough food, but partly from our failure to produce it efficiently and distribute it evenly. Conflict and insecurity remain the dominant causes of hunger across 20 countries and territories, leaving nearly 140 million people facing acute food insecurity. Disasters have inflicted an estimated $3.26 trillion in agricultural losses worldwide over the past 33 years, and recent supply-driven food-price spikes have pushed tens of millions of people into hunger almost overnight. Worse, these are not one-off shocks. They represent the new normal.

For decades, the agricultural sector has responded well to rising demand by developing higher-yielding crops and using more of everything: more fertiliser, more pesticides, and more water. Yet this trend has produced unnecessary waste, polluted rivers, degraded soil, and released ever more greenhouse gases. We need to find a better path, and science can show us the way.