Humanity's ability to produce enough food for 8 billion people is impressive. 1 In fact, we could produce enough calories for far more than 8 billion; we just feed a lot of those calories to farm animals, allocate crops to biofuels, and lose a lot of food in our supply chains. 2 The extremely dire predictions of widespread famine from the 1970s and 1980s did not come true thanks to huge improvements in crop yields, intensification, and food production.
2 The extremely dire predictions of widespread famine from the 1970s and 1980s did not come true thanks to huge improvements in crop yields, intensification, and food production. When I talk about these positive human developments — and suggest that we're more than capable of feeding another few billion people over the next 50 years — the pushback is often the same: "we might be able to produce more food, but it'll take more and more inputs".