We've got 800 million chronically malnourished people in the world, and we'll have about 1.6 billion more by 2020. That's over two billion more mouths to feed if everyone's going to have a decent life. We're going to need two approaches to do this. One is ecologically sound agriculture. The other is biotechnology.
Some activists argue that there's enough food in the world, and it's just a matter of distribution.
But that's naive. I don't see any signs that the wealthy of the world are about to distribute their wealth. In general, aid to developing countries is declining rapidly. The increases in crop yields we saw during the Green Revolution are slowing. They're now about half of what we saw at the peak.