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Royal Society's In Verba blog:
"Feeding the world"

In an article by Elizabeth Bohm, Senior Policy Advisor for The Royal Society, Dr. Steven Spoel discusses how the work in his group relates to the current food security challenge of producing sufficient amounts of food sustainably.

Edinburgh, 11 August 2016 - Currently the world is facing a food security challenge to sustainably produce more food for a growing global population. The Royal Society's In Verba blog takes an insightful look at research funded by the society that could contribute to food security. Professor Martin Broadly from the University of Nottingham and Dr. Steven Spoel from the University of Edinburgh discuss how their work relates to the food security challenge.

Dr. Spoel said: "My team and I work in in an area of research that looks to address food security. There is a rapidly growing world population which is expected to reach 9 billion in the next 30 years – when you translate that to food that needs to be produced per hectare of land, we are currently producing enough food for approximately four people per hectare and we will need to get this up to over six people per hectare. This will need to be achieved against a backdrop of a decline in agricultural land as it comes under pressure from things like sprawling cities and soil degradation. We are interested in one way of addressing this that we think is quite important – reducing the loss of crops due to disease. "

Read the full interview on The Royal Society's In Verba blog.