Our world could be "unrecognizable" by 2050 thanks to
competition for scarce resources among our expanding, ever-more-
affluent population, or so warned scientists at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science yesterday. To cope with a population that's expected to
hit 9 billion by that year, "we will need to produce as much
food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said
Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund. "More people, more money,
more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told the AFP, which
reports that as people make more money, they tend to consume
more meat. It takes about seven pounds of grain to produce one
pound of meat, according to experts. And incomes are expected to
triple globally, and quintuple in developing nations in the next
40 years. (Click for another dire 2050 prediction.)