Weed Management: A Basic Component of Modern Crop Production

Increased world population will demand more food production, which can be achieved only by increasing crop yields. There are few possibilities to incorporate new areas into crop production. As an example of the problem in the case of cereals, Pinstrup-Andersen (2001) stated that demand for cereals to feed livestock will increase considerably in coming decades, especially in developing countries, in response to the high demand for livestock products. Between 1993 and 2020, it is estimated that developing countries’demand for cereals for animal feed will double, while demand for cereals for food for direct human consumption will increase by 47 percent. These expected increases in cereal demand will be met primarily by productivity increases. Because most of the growth in cereal areas will be concentrated in the relatively low-productivity cereals of sub-Saharan Africa, increases in cultivated area will contribute less than 20 percent of the increase in global cereal production in the period from 1993 to 2020.