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Most of the world is already a farm while we are facing world hunger, but you’ll never hear it on the news.
My apologies in advance, the rest of this is a serious but hopefully not too dry journal paper. Please bear with me. I’ll rewrite it in the style of umair haque later, if I ever have the time.
Agriculture
Currently there are close to 8 billion people on the planet, according to Worldometers.info. The UN projects that by 2050, we will reach 9.8 billion (9.8*10⁹) people[15]. At the same time, the food demand is expected to rise by 35–60% compared to the food production levels of 2010[16]. Feeding all these people is no small task: according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), we are already using 38% of Earth’s total land surface for agriculture. To put it differently, almost everything on the entire planet Earth that is not a body of water, a desert, an ice sheet, or a nature reserve, is already a farm.
Roughly two-thirds of this global farm are devoted to farm animals, either in form of open ranges, or pastures. The other third is agricultural crops. On the scale of the above graph, cities and other human settlements (“Urban”, bright red) that we consider so important in our daily lives, are practically invisible.
