To continue with the gloomy outlook, I finally did a hard numbers analysis to determine how much additional food the world will need to produce in order to bring the entire global population up to a western diet. This works out to be more than double the current food production. And then add on top of this 2 billion more people whom I presume will also be expecting such a diet, which works out to more than triple the current global food production!
That was part one of the analysis, which was easy. Considering that very rough estimates put the amount of global ecological productivity currently gobbled up by humanity at about 25% (not all of this goes to food production, however), then increasing this by over three fold to 77% is not a trivial matter. The second part of the analysis will be more involved and I will try to answer the question of whether the planet can actually provide this much food. Given the current difficulties we seem to face in simply maintaining current food production, this seems unlikely absent some imminent miraculous new breakthough in nuclear fusion technology or equivalent.
http://markbc.wordpress.com/how-much-more-food-must-the-world-produce/
Mark