Will urban farming help to feed the growing population?

There are currently 7.6 billion inhabitants in the world, and according to the World Health Organisation, this number is expected to grow to 9.8 billion by 2050.

That’s an extra 200,000 mouths to feed a day, over the next 30 years.

How can it be done? Mark Zawacki, one of the world’s leading strategy experts, weighed in on the topic at a recent event, ‘Feeding the Next Two Billion: Full Planet, Empty Plates’.

Mr Zawacki said urban farming concepts, like vertical farming, container farming, and rooftop gardens, have been flagged as solutions to this problem.

But he said they are too small-scale to make much of a difference.

“You could put a rooftop garden on top of every building in Melbourne, and it’s only going to feed a couple of blocks,” Mr Zawacki said.

“You can grow something for the fancy restaurant downstairs, but you’re not going to be able to feed people at scale.”

He said the idea of urban farming is based around the notion of ‘food miles’.

“If you look at your plate of food tonight as a bill of materials, and you work out how far everything traveled to get onto your plate, that’s its food miles, and in the United States, the average is about 1500 miles (2400 kilometres),” he said.

“The view is that if we shrink those miles, there’s all kinds of benefits in freshness, waste reduction, and for the environment.”

But he said urban farming projects are hitting a wall because people have taken this notion too far.

“You don’t need to build farms in the city centre, they just need to be a couple of hundred kilometres from the city,” he said.

He said the vertical farming concept is an efficient way of producing food, but current projects are misguided.

“What feeds us are grains, we like wheat and rice and corn, so you can grow all the tomatoes you like, but that’s not going to create the carbohydrates that we need,” he said.

He said container farms can be useful in emergency situations, but again, not to feed an entire population.

Mr Zawacki said another challenge was figuring out how to lessen the impact of food consumption.

One suggestion was vegetarianism, but he understood this what not entirely feasible.

“The problem is, we have between five and 10,000 taste buds in our mouths, so we want food to taste good,” he said.

He said while some people have issues with ‘fake meat’, there have been dramatic improvements in creating plant-based products that taste like meat.

“They trick your tastebuds, trick you visually, and trick you with the scent, and they’re insanely good,” he said.

“They’re only early days, but they’re going to get much better at creating plant-based products that mimic animal products, for those people that still want to get their burger.”

He said in San Francisco, they’re “flying off the shelves”.

“I think we’re going to see a lot more out of the alternative meat movement,” he said