The World in 2030

16 The World in 2030
Revolution’ 9 that was taking place even as they made their
prognostications. From the 1950s onwards improved
fertilisers, crop breeding programmes and factory methods
of farming boosted agricultural output by several hundred
per cent. There was no overall shortage of food produced
in the year 2000, even if many people in the world went
hungry.
By 2030 food production will have been revolutionised
yet again. The genetic modification of crops and livestock will
produce seeds that can grow in the harshest of conditions 10
(despite worries over the proprietorial commercialisation
of agriculture – see the section ‘Climate Change and the
Environment’) and meat that can be grown on its own in
factories, 11 without a host animal. Plastic covering films and
irrigation systems are already allowing European farmers
to produce multiple crops in a single season and these
techniques will be widely exported to the developing world
to boost food production.
Indeed, for reasons of climate change we cannot go on
deforesting our planet to grow more and more crops and
rear more and more cattle. We have already exceeded the
percentage of land that should be put to agriculture and the
planet can yield up no more. As Professor James Lovelock, 12
one of the first scientists to raise the issue of climate
change and man who popularised the concept of the ‘Gaia
Hypothesis’ 13 (the Earth as an organism), III writes in ‘The
Revenge of Gaia’:
III
The first scientist to think of the Earth as a ‘living organism’ was Russian-born Vladimir Vernadsky
who laid out the theory in his 1926 book, ‘Biosfera’.