We are fast running out of options to feed the world sustainably and preserve nature

Yonas Getaneh and Andrew Czyzewski

How do we provide the absolute necessities of food and water for a growing global population without catastrophically degrading nature? The prevailing wisdom has been that through innovation, more efficiency, and smart policy, we could achieve a win-win: more food, but with less impact on land and water. But are we on the right track?

The story begins in 2007 with the landmark Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture by the International Water Management Institute. This influential analysis laid out a blueprint for feeding the world by 2050 while protecting nature. It was built on three core strategies:

1. Optimize global trade: Instead of striving for food self-sufficiency, water-short countries could import food from water-abundant countries. Such an increase in international food trade could therefore mitigate water scarcity and reduce environmental degradation. The vision was to consolidate cereal production in the regions with the most favorable climates and soils – like North America, Europe, Central Asia and Latin America – then trade it globally. This would, in theory, reduce the overall global footprint of agriculture by concentrating it.
2. Sustainably intensify rainfed agriculture: The optimistic rainfed scenario assumed significant progress in upgrading rainfed systems and improving rainfed yield. The goal here was to dramatically “close the yield gap” on existing rainfed farmland, especially in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than clearing new land, the focus was on boosting productivity through better on-farm management – such as water harvesting and soil fertility management.
3. Improve irrigation: This strategy aimed to significantly increase irrigated cereal yields while modestly expanding the world’s irrigated lands. This could be achieved through better technology, such as drip irrigation, and smarter practices, like irrigation scheduling – ensuring that more of the water withdrawn from rivers and aquifers was productively used for crop growth.

This blueprint suggested the world could meet future food demand with a modest increase in land and water use.

A stark reality check

A recent study, looking back at how well these three strategies fared, finds that the paths we have taken are not characterized by sustainable intensification, but instead by natural resource depletion. We are indeed producing more food, but we are doing so at a profound and often hidden cost to the planet’s finite water resources and natural landscapes. As discussed in a recent webinar organized by the Water-Energy-Food-Environment (WEFE) Nexus Policy area of work of the CGIAR Policy Innovations Program, the three core strategies of the 2007 assessment have largely failed to materialize.

First, the global trade strategy unraveled. Instead of production consolidating in the most resource-efficient regions like North America and Europe, these areas have actually decreased total crop area since 2000. To fill the production gap, less favorable regions in Asia and Africa had to expand their own agricultural footprint, leading to a less efficient global system overall.

Second, the rainfed intensification strategy also failed. While the area of rainfed agriculture has expanded significantly, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, yields on this new land have remained stubbornly low. The world now has much more rainfed farmland, but not the hoped-for productivity boom.

With the trade and rainfed strategies failing, the world relied on the third pillar: irrigation. Irrigated agriculture has become a key engine of increased global food production. On the surface, this looks like the hoped for success story of intensification. But the new research reveals the hidden and dangerous paradox of this success. This intensification – planting a second or even third crop per year – has led to a massive, previously unquantified increase in the total annual consumptive water use on that same land. While production efficiency has improved, the cumulative effect of growing more crops on the same land has been a dramatic increase in pressures on already stressed river basins and a dangerous acceleration in the depletion of aquifers.

New tools for a new reality

The original 2007 scenarios were based on assumptions that have proven to be overly optimistic. They underestimated the explosive growth in demand for biofuels and faster-than-projected population growth, while overestimating our ability to rapidly improve land and water productivity. The new research is a clear-eyed call for realism. The world is on a path where we are producing more food, but only by taking more land and, most critically, more water from nature.

With the old blueprints now outdated, the options are dwindling and becoming more challenging. This means reconsidering what we grow and where, what we eat, and how we can better align our food systems with our climate and environmental goals.

What does this new, more realistic approach look like in practice? A second presentation at the webinar offered a compelling case study from Ethiopia, using an innovative foresight tool: the FABLE (food, agriculture, biodiversity, land-use, and energy) calculator.

Unlike the 2007 models, the FABLE approach is designed to be more holistic from the outset, explicitly integrating national climate commitments, land use change, and biodiversity goals alongside food production and nutrition targets. It is a stakeholder-driven tool designed to help countries find practical policy pathways that maximize synergies and manage trade-offs.

In Ethiopia, the FABLE Calculator was used to compare a “business-as-usual” (BAU) pathway with a “National Commitment” (NC) pathway, which assumes the country’s climate and environmental policies are fully implemented. The results were striking. The BAU pathway showed continued cropland expansion at the expense of forests, and a steep rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Modeling the NC pathway, however, revealed that Ethiopia could meet its national dietary and food security targets while simultaneously increasing its forest area and transforming its agrifood sector into a net carbon sink. This can be done with the help of key enablers such as afforestation, climate-smart agriculture, increased agricultural productivity and promoting protein intake from poultry products and protein-rich, plant-based foods.

This work shows that while the world may be on a deeply worrying path, alternative futures are possible. But finding them requires new tools, difficult choices, and full integration of our food, climate, and nature goals. Ultimately, true sustainability cannot be measured in crop yields alone. It must be measured in the health of the rivers, aquifers, and ecosystems that are the ultimate foundation of our food systems.

Yonas Getaneh is a researcher at Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); Andrew Czyzewski is a writer at Scriptoria.

This work was carried out under the CGIAR Policy Innovations Program. We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund (www.cgiar.org/funders).