Global growing problem of wheat production

…With 3 billion new consumers starting to emulate Western lifestyles, it is not surprising that in six of the past seven years consumption of grains has exceeded production.

The second major driver of demand is the ongoing battle for crops between a billion car drivers and the twice as many still struggling for enough to eat.


In the US, driven more by fears about energy security than worries about global warming, there has been a dramatic reallocation of agricultural resource from food production to bio-fuel manufacture. About a fifth of all US corn is now grown for the fuel tank. It was just 4pc six years ago.

Premier’s Robert Schofield said yesterday: “Governments have decided that across a portion of the world we are going to grow fuel. That’s going to put an environmental impact on food so there’s a dynamic there that isn’t going to go away any time soon”.

If the demand side looks stretched, the supply picture is not much brighter. According to Diapason, most good-quality agricultural land is already in production. What’s worse, about 35pc of that land has been seriously damaged by the intensive agriculture practised since the Second World War.

Humus, the fertile part of soil, takes up to 500 years to regenerate, too long for an impatient world. Perhaps 30pc of all agricultural land could be unusable within 15 years, it has been estimated.

That means that the “green revolution” of the 1970s and 1980s, which saw yields soar, is over. Between 1970 and 2000 the world’s deserts expanded by 160m hectares – an area about equal in size to seven Great Britains.

The Telegraph