How to feed 100 million people?

Massive areas of land in poor countries have been bought up by powerful companies over the last decade. The aim is to use it for farming, but these land grabs have displaced and harmed many local people, so several charities and non-governmental organisations are campaigning against this.

Cristina Rulli of the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy and Paolo D’Odorico of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, looked at a global database of 31 million hectares of land deals concluded since 2000. The largest targets for land-grabbers were Sudan, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

They calculated the likely crop yields using modern farming techniques on that land and found that land-grabbers could could produce enough food for 300 million to 550 million people. Traditional local methods could only feed between 190 million and 370 million people