Abstract

By the year 2050, the world’s population will need 60% more food than it did in 2005. In sub-Saharan Africa (we’ll call it SSA) this problem will be even greater, with the demand for cereals increasing by more than three times as the population rises. We collected and calculated farming data for 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This made us realize that countries in SSA must make many large changes to increase their yield of cereals (the amount of cereals that are grown on the current farmland each year) to meet this greater demand. If countries in SSA are unable to increase cereal yield, there are two options. Either farmland areas will have to increase drastically, at the expense of natural land, or SSA will need to buy more cereal from other countries than it does today. This may put more people in these countries at risk of not having enough food to be able to live healthily.