| Abstract |
After alarm bells sounded due to rising food prices in early 2014, the world and particularly poor consumers, who spend much of their income simply to eat, were relieved by a sharp downturn in global food prices over the rest of the year, partly from strong maize and wheat harvests in regions where CIMMYT and its partners work. Prices are still well above the decadeslong, stable levels that preceded the 2008 food crisis; we now live in an age of higher and fluctuating global food prices. Reverberations of relatively local disturbances, like droughts or crop disease outbreaks, cause inordinate price spikes and worsen food insecurity for the disadvantaged worldwide. Looking to the future for maize and wheat – which together with rice provide more than half the world’s plant-derived food energy – projections hold that farmers will need to grow at least 60 percent more grain to feed a planet of 9 billionplus people by 2050. And they must do so using the same or less land, confronting more extreme and erratic rainfall and temperatures, and with more efficient use of increasingly scarce inputs like water and fertilizer. |
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