Exhibition Room Nutrition: Baykomm - Bayer Communication Center

Exhibition Room Nutrition

Feeding the world – A challenge for research

Over six billion people inhabit planet Earth, and by 2025 their number is likely to increase to as many as eight billion. More than 840 million of them are currently not getting enough to eat. At the same time, the amount of land available for growing food is decreasing continually. And around one half of the world’s annual harvests are still being lost to plant diseases, insects, weeds and pests which attack stored products.

A pair of grain weevils and their offspring can destroy 50 metric tons of grain in a year - the equivalent of 75,000 loaves of bread.

Zoom image

A pair of grain weevils and their offspring can destroy 50 metric tons of grain in a year – the equivalent of 75,000 loaves of bread.

This is a situation which presents a tremendous challenge to science and research. We need to find innovative ways of improving agricultural yields considerably in the face of an ever-growing population and ever-diminishing land.

How will people eat in the future? What can we do to protect harvests and control pests? How can we make efficient use of agricultural land? A whole range of urgent questions which research scientists all over the world are working to solve.

Visitors will find comprehensive information on these topics in the Nutrition room. For example, a global nutrition clock shows how the situation is escalating from one second to the next. The "Nutritopia" interactive simulation shows visitors what the world could be like in the year 2050.

Nutritopia Trailer
Qicktime Video (4:47min)

Nutritopia is an imaginary world in which the visitor is responsible for feeding the population of an entire planet. His or her instructions determine the fate of the population. But which decisions are the right ones?