Global food production needs to be increased by 60–110% between 2005 and 2050 to meet growing food and feed demand. Intensification and/or expansion of agriculture are the two main options available to meet the growing crop demands. Land conversion to expand cultivated land increases GHG emissions and impacts biodiversity and ecosystem services. Closing yield gaps to attain potential yields may be a viable option to increase the global crop production. Traditional methods of agricultural intensification often have negative externalities.

Global food demand is increasing rapidly, as are the environmental impacts of agricultural expansion. Here, we project global demand for crop production in 2050 and evaluate the environmental impacts of alternative ways that this demand might be met. We find that per capita demand for crops, when measured as caloric or protein content of all crops combined, has been a similarly increasing function of per capita real income since 1960. This relationship forecasts a 100–110% increase in global crop demand from 2005 to 2050.

Safeguarding the world’s remaining forests is a high-priority goal. We assess the biophysical option space for feeding the world in 2050 in a hypothetical zero-deforestation world. We systematically combine realistic assumptions on future yields, agricultural areas, livestock feed and human diets. For each scenario, we determine whether the supply of crop products meets the demand and whether the grazing intensity stays within plausible limits. We find that many options exist to meet the global food supply in 2050 without deforestation, even at low crop-yield levels.

Agricultural activities have dramatically altered our planet's land surface. To understand the extent and spatial distribution of these changes, we have developed a new global data set of croplands and pastures circa 2000 by combining agricultural inventory data and satellite-derived land cover data. The agricultural inventory data, with much greater spatial detail than previously available, is used to train a land cover classification data set obtained by merging two different satellite-derived products (Boston University's MODIS-derived land cover product and the GLC2000 data set).

Malnutrition costs the world trillions of dollars, but global commitment to improving people’s nutrition is on the rise, and so is our knowledge of how to do so. Over the past 50 years, understanding of nutrition has evolved beyond a narrow focus on hunger and famine. We now know that good nutrition depends not only on people’s access to a wide variety of foods, but also on the care they receive and the environment they live in. A number of countries and programs have exploited this new understanding to make enormous strides in nutrition.

The developing world has made substantial progress in reducing hunger since 2000. The 2016 Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that the level of hunger in developing countries as a group has fallen by 29 percent. Yet this progress has been uneven, and great disparities in hunger continue to exist at the regional, national, and subnational levels.

Smallholder farmers have a vital role to play in global food security and nutrition, and in supporting a range of development and climate change goals. Strengthening the resilience and commercial viability of these farmers, particularly women and youth, can increase their capacity to contribute to these global goals.

This study uses five rounds of household panel data from Tigray, Ethiopia, collected in the period 1998–2010 to assess the impacts of a land registration and certification program that aimed to strengthen tenure security and how it has contributed to increased food availability and, thus, food security in this food-deficit region.

In October 2011, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) requested the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) to prepare "a comparative study of constraints to smallholder investment in agriculture in different contexts with policy options for addressing these constraints, taking into consideration the work done on this topic by IFAD, and by FAO in the context of COAG, and the work of other key partners.

There are 1.4 billion poor people living on less than US$1.25 a day. One billion of them live in rural areas where agriculture is their main source of livelihood. The ‘green revolution’ in agriculture that swept large parts of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s dramatically increased agricultural productivity and reduced poverty. Many of the productivity gains accrued to smallholder farmers, supported through research and extension services.

Halving Hunger examines current world progress towards eliminating hunger, and calls for the implementation of seven recommendations in the areas of: political action, national policy reforms, increased agricultural productivity for food insecure farmers, improved nutrition for the chronically hungry, productive safety nets for the acutely hungry, improved rural incomes and markets, and restoration and conservation of natural resources essential for food security. 

The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), through Resolution 64/236 of 24 December 2009, decided to organize the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, 3 to 6 June 2012 (UNCSD, also referred to as Rio+20). The two main stated themes decided by the UNGA for UNCSD are: a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication; and the institutional framework for sustainable development. The preparatory process foresees three sessions of the preparatory Committee and three inter-sessional meetings.