Abstract
A DANGEROUS situation appears to be developing in world food production. Almost everywhere populations are increasing, and in many regions the area of land available for food production is shrinking : agriculturists are being faced with the problem of producing more and more food from less and less land. The population of England and Wales has gone up by about 14 millions since 1891, but the area of land under field and crops has shrunk by nearly 4 million acres. We now have little more than half an acre of cultivated land per head of population, and it required about 1·6 acres per head to produce the pre-war dietary. Our present reduced scale of feeding, with its cut of about 20 per cent of calorie supply, calls for less land per head, but even so we are producing on our present acreage only 40 per cent of our food. And the area of cultivated land still shrinks : housing estates, road widening, surface mining, demands of the Services and other activities absorb much land and often spoil more. Of the land still left in cultivation, little more than half can be called good ; the rest is only moderate, and although we still have some reserve of potentially utilizable land, the cost of reclaiming it and keeping it in cultivation would be high, often very high. At the present rate of loss, we shall be fortunate if technical advances in agriculture enable us to continue producing as much as 40 per cent of our food, unless the public will tolerate a lower dietary.
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Food Production and Land Utilization. Nature 161, 905–906 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161905a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161905a0