With rising global demand for agricultural commodities for use as food, feed, and bioenergy, pressure on land is increasing. At the same time, land is an important resource for tackling the principal challenges of the 21st century—the loss of biodiversity and global climate change. One solution to this conflict could be to increase agricultural productivity and thus reduce the required cropland. In an interdisciplinary model-based study, LMU geographers Julia Schneider and Dr. Florian Zabel, together with researchers from the Universities of Basel and Hohenheim, have analyzed how much land area could be saved globally through more efficient production methods and what economic effects—for example, on prices and trade—this would have. As the authors reported in the journal PLOS ONE, their modeling showed that under optimized conditions up to almost half of current cropland could be saved. As a result of increased efficiency, the prices for agricultural products would fall in all regions and global agricultural production would increase by 2.8%.