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We’re use to hearing about poverty in 3rd world countries and the malnutrition and starvation they experience, however lack of food could soon become much more of a global issue.

Last year the industry saw food prices rise, with some basic food necessities doubling in price. This wasn’t down to a temporary shortage of crops; this was the start of a much bigger problem. Whilst the population is rapidly rising, the agricultural productivity growth isn’t rising enough. To ensure there is enough food for everyone, ideally both should be increasing at roughly the same amount (percentage wise). However, this is far from reality.

The higher prices are a clear indication that there is more demand than supply. This may not seem like such a problem from the perspective of us in the UK, however, the poorest billion people in the world spend an average of 50-70% of their income on food, and these percentages could rise greatly if we don’t find a solution to this problem.

This problem is a consequence from other current issues – rising population, less supply and global warming (hotter weather and less water supply). All together, these issues spell trouble for our food supply, and scientists are now calling this issue a “perpetual food crisis”.

The lack of food hasn’t always been the case however. Agricultural researchers have helped to double the world’s average supply of corn, rice and wheat between the 1950s and 1990s, but with our population expected to hit 9 million by 2050, this achievement needs to be repeated in order to keep up with the increase in population. With quite recent changes in the world’s weather, due to global warming, this isn’t likely to be achievable. To keep up, we need to double the current amount of food produced by 2030. What the researchers managed to achieve a few decades ago seemed remarkable, but now we need to do the same thing again, in just half the time.

Thomas Robert Malthus was a mathematician who once wrote, "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man" in an essay named ‘The Principle of Population’. That essay was written in 1798. The big question is, if we have been aware of the problem we are heading towards for such a long time, why hasn’t anything been done to prevent it?