9 milliards d'hommes à nourrir - Un défi pour demain

20/09/2011 - Article

Are we heading for a major world food crisis? After several carefree decades, public opinion is gradually realizing the extent of the challenges we face. Moreover, to feed at least nine million human beings satisfactorily by the year 2050, we will have to produce growing quantities of food that satisfies increasingly stringent quality requirements. We will have to respect the environment more. We will also have to allow for the fact that some of the available land will be needed to produce energy and industrial goods, or to store carbon or protect biodiversity. This will mean innovating, reducing loss and waste, cutting excessive, unbalanced food consumption, and at the same time, freeing the billion or so people who currently go hungry from the poverty trap.

Researchers the world over have devoted themselves to these vast issues, and to the possible ways of finding appropriate solutions on a global level. In this book, the Presidents of the leading two French agricultural research organizations, INRA and CIRAD, put the debate across to the general public, in unequivocal terms. Readers will find a wealth of information, enlightening examples and surprising proposals. We can avoid a cataclysm, but this will require profound changes, particularly in our consumption and production habits here in Europe.

Marion Guillou is an ingénieure des ponts, des eaux et des forêts , graduate of the Ecole polytechnique and holder of a degree in food science, and has been President of the Institut national de la recherche agronomique since 2004.

Gérard Matheron is an agronomist with a PhD in quantitative genetics, and has been President of the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development since 2010.

9 milliards d'hommes à nourrir - Un défi pour demain
Marion Guillou, Gérard Matheron
Editions Bourin
2011