The UN forest initiative--helpful or a recipe for starvation?

Here's an interesting UN report being rolled out in Rio: how forests can become part of a sustainable future. Who knew?

To quote from the BBC article, the UN report states that forests "are sources of food, energy and income for a billion of the world's poorest people." A reforestation activity is also being announced, with a goal of 18 million hectares of restored forests. This should also have a beneficial effect on the level of atmospheric CO2.

While the reforestation effort is laudable in itself, there is an unaddressed tension here. In a previous post, we reported that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization believes that it will be possible, barely, to feed the world in 2050. Among the steps that are critically important to avoiding mass starvation: create more farmland. And where is this new land going to come from? The FAO report does not say, and the UN State of the World's Forests report does not bring it up.