THE global economic slowdown has, it seems, taken only a small dent out of the long-term problem of producing enough food to feed the world.
According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world faces the challenge of producing 70 per cent more food for another 2.3 billion people by 2050.
At the same time, it must try to overcome poverty and hunger using limited water resources and also adapt to pressures of climate change.
The numbers in FAO's analysis are dazzling and should excite farmers into making long-term plans to remain good at what they do.
Demand for food will continue to grow due to population growth and rising incomes.
Demand for cereal crops is expected to reach three billion tonnes by 2050, compared with annual cereal production of 2.1 billion tonnes today.
Meat production will need to increase by more than 200 million tonnes on the current 270 million tonnes by 2050.
FAO says 72 per cent of that consumption will be in developing countries as we know them today.
FAO says 90 per cent of the growth in crop production will come from higher yields and increased intensity.
But regardless of those efforts, the amount of arable land will also have to expand by about 120 million ha in developing countries.
Meanwhile, urban population needs and industrial land use in developed countries is expected to consume some 50 million ha of arable land.
With those incredible predictions, is it relevant to be having debates about genetically modified food and worrying about the impact food production has on producing greenhouse emissions on this barren corner of the world?
The numbers worked by the FAO, CSIRO and countless other scientists says the world has already passed the tipping point - we did that in 2007 where we didn't produce enough to feed the planet.
We must be careful with policy decisions that might impose a disincentive on food producers and manufacturers - in the interests of giving lip service to creating an altruistically green society - before the rest of the world has even come to terms with how to produce enough food from available resources and technologies.
We really haven't properly looked at ways of measuring emissions, let alone encouraging mitigation and fair treatment of farming and land management practices.
It throws up an interesting issue - do we try to plan for a better world environment in the long term or do we ensure we can feed the human race that is going to live in it?
Clearly the world has to plan to do both in the next few months but we hope politicians with short-term mandates can make courageous calls which balance managing climate change against ensuring their peasant farmers have jobs and their people can buy food.
Do we seriously expect the developing world to thrust their food production industries into a half-baked global emissions trading regime?
