Plausible pathways to sufficient global food supply without land clearing

Current trajectories in staple food and oilseed production cannot meet projected global demand without extensive land clearing, severe environmental degradation, and enormous greenhouse gas emissions. While accelerating yield growth on existing farmland is necessary to avoid land clearing, substantial disagreement exists regarding which crops, cropping systems, and regions to prioritize. Two dominant narratives steer the current dialogue: one favors continuation of a globalized, highly efficient food system focused on current “breadbaskets” and “rice bowls” that produce 60-80% of major staples (rice, wheat, maize, and soybean); the other advocates for diverse, more self-reliant cropping systems with reduced commercial inputs and a focus on local to regional food security. We argue in favor of a globalized food system for two reasons. First, emerging data-driven technologies provide a plausible path to accelerate yield growth of current staple crop champions while significantly reducing pollution and emissions by 2050. Second, more diverse cropping systems offer no plausible path to meet expected food demand of 9.7 billion people by mid-century due to lower yields and prohibitive infrastructure costs for transport, storage, and processing of alternative crops. While a more diverse, local-to-regionally focused global food system might be viable with drastic dietary changes and waste reductions, evidence for such shifts is lacking. Imposing a 25-year timeframe for current R&D investments to achieve global impact severely restricts the plausible solution space. Consequently, we call for a tight focus on robust, low-cost metrics to monitor performance of R&D investments and to measure field-scale progress toward sustainable intensification within a relevant time frame.