Food security depends very much on the number of people needing food, the level of consumption of people (especially animal diets), and the availability of (fertile) lands. According to the FAO (The state of food insecurity in the world, 2008) food insecurity is rising and around 900 Million people are undernourished nowadays. The number of people in the world is expected to rise from more than 6 billion to around 9 billion in 2050, which means a much higher production of food is needed.
It should be noted also that feeding the hungry, is as much about alleviating poverty, helping poor families in developing countries gain access to food, getting resources to rural households for productive farming and empowering family farmers to influence agriculture and trade policies, than it is about increasing food supply. This PAN-Europe Perspectives however focuses on food supply.
Food production in the world is limited to fertile soils and favourable climates and presently around 5000 Million of hectares can be used for food production (L. Brown, ”Outgrowing the earth” Norton ed. 2004).
Increasing the use of land is not easy because much land is unsuitable for production (desert, mountain areas) or severely degraded. Even, of the 5000 Million hectares in use for agriculture around 2000 Million hectares is already severely degraded (FAO, “Livestock’s long shadow”, 2006) by wind erosion, water erosion or chemical degradation.