A rapidly growing population, climate change and degradation of land and water resources are likely to make the world more vulnerable to food insecurity and challenge the task of feeding its people by 2050, the United Nations’ food agency said.

Intensive farming of the past decades has helped to feed millions of hungry people but it has often led to degradation of land and water systems on which food production depends, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Monday. A quarter of the earth’s land is highly degraded, another 8 percent is moderately degraded, while 36 percent is stable or slightly degraded and 10 percent ranked as improving.

Water scarcity is growing as salinisation and pollution of groundwater, as well as degradation of water bodies and water-related ecosystems rise. In many large rivers, only 5 percent of former water volumes remain in-stream and some rivers no longer reach the sea year-round. Large lakes and inland seas have shrunk and half the wetlands of Europe and North America no longer exist.

Almost 1 billion people are now undernourished, with 578 million people in Asia and 239 million in sub-Saharan Africa. In developing countries, even if agricultural output doubled by 2050 as expected to feed the world, one person in 20 would still risk being undernourished, an equivalent to 370 million hungry people, most of whom would be in Africa and Asia, it said.

Future agricultural production would have to rise faster than population growth for nutrition to improve and for food insecurity and hunger to recede. Innovative farming practices such as conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, integrated crop-livestock systems and integrated irrigation-aquaculture systems can help boost food production while limiting impacts on ecosystems.

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