List of Headings
- i The most widely used method of water conservation
- ii Differences in food productivity around the world
- iii Climate change and the world's food supplies
- iv Ways to prevent global warming
- v The advantages of selecting from a wide range of crops
- vi The impact of the estimated increase in population
- vii Mistaken views in the past about poverty and food supplies
- viii The cheapest vegetables to produce
- ix How food production and consumption might change
- x The benefits for local farmers of an initiative to improve food production
Passage
Drag a heading to each paragraph.
1. By 2050, there will be approximately nine billion people in the world. Unless there are major breakthroughs in terms of crop yields, there will have to be a greater area of land made available for cultivation in order to meet such a rise in demand.
2. As water becomes more scarce, farmers are probably going to switch to crops that are less water-intensive or that rely on drip irrigation. Or as food prices rise, maybe people won't eat quite as much meat especially not as much as they eat in the USA.
3. In places like Nebraska in the USA, farmers are probably close to the yield ceiling on certain crops. But for most of the world—Africa, Asia and Latin America—other constraints are keeping farmers from reaching more than 50 percent of the yields achieved in the USA.
4. Maybe we have spent too long believing that resources would eventually trickle down to the poorest groups—when increasingly the evidence suggests they're not going to. The global community has only recently begun to focus on what kind of crop investments would be needed to reach those with extremely limited resources.
5. With the temperature increases that are projected for the next 40 to 50 years, we're going to start to see a falling off in crop yield in many parts of the world.
6. Scientists working for international agencies are helping poor communities to use solar-powered drip irrigation for small plots of high-value crops. The project is doubling and tripling incomes for the families involved, and nutrition has improved throughout the communities.
7. Although crops are probably going to be made more efficient by genetic engineering than by traditional breeding, there are a lot of crops already out there that are extremely drought and heat tolerant. These crops must be suitable, not just ecologically, but economically, for a specific region.