If the world raised organic production and moved toward a vegetarian diet, farmers could feed the global population without converting large amounts of virgin land like forests to crops, says a new study in the journal Nature Communications.
“The study … found that by combining organic production with an increasingly vegetarian diet, ways of cutting food waste, and a return to traditional methods of fixing nitrogen in the soil instead of using fertilizer, the world’s projected 2050 population of more than 9 billion could be fed without vastly increasing the current amount of land under agricultural production,” explains The Guardian.
According to the study, other benefits of such a conversion would include reducing greenhouse gas emissions, curbing the runoff of synthetic fertilizers and cutting the use of pesticides.
But some critics of the study have cautioned against broad assumptions about the future of agriculture, given the wide variability of global farming systems and the unpredictability of dietary demands decades from now.