Doing the sum right or the right sums? Techno-optimist numbers in food security scenarios

Abstract

In a paper recently published on the journal Food Ethics (Saltelli and Lo Piano, 2017), we take issue with a scenario for the future of agriculture recently published. The scenario we target, which is not uncommon in present discourse on food security, assumes that improving in agricultural techniques and adopting better dietary styles will lead to producing more food in less land, as to feed 10 billion people in 2050. While the proposed scenario and its quantitative estimates may be useful to initiate a debate on the important issue of food security, it also poses the risk of anchoring the discussion to a pre-defined narrative.