With less pesticide use and continued population increase, is there going to be enough food for people?
PETER: Yes, there’s going to be enough food. Whether they get it or not is a different question. Food production will stay with population. There are still lots of ways that food production is growing. But there are problems. In a lot of places, like in Asia, land is going out of food production because it’s being built into factory land. In a place like Indonesia, the island of Java is a hugely dense place- hundreds and hundreds of people on average per kilometer. And yet we’re losing rice land there because it’s going into factories and an occasional golf course near the cities. Overall food production keeps going up. It doesn’t go up as fast but the overall food production is going up in places like that even with slightly less land and less prime land. Everyone talks about the challenge of when are we going to hit nine billion people in the world? When it will taper off? There’re going to be choices that have to be made. There’re going to be choices about charging for water. I don’
