A health quarantine officer collects samples to run tests at a pig farm in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. REUTERS/Stringer
The world is growing, and it’s hungry. By 2050 the world’s population is on track to surpass 9 billion people—the most the world has ever seen—and they’ll all need to eat. How we feed a population this size is only the beginning: we’ll have to do it well, with proper nutrition for all, food security for the food insecure, and we’ll have to do it with dwindling natural resources and a changing climate.
To call this a challenge is an understatement.
So what do we do? We build an agriculture and food system for the future, one more resilient, equitable, and efficient than today’s. To explore the ways this is happening, the Council on Global Affairs is proud to announce its new Global Food for Thought series: Feeding 2050: Science, Food, and Equity. In the spirit of the United Nations’ 2016 International Conference on Sustainable Development and Pathways to Zero Hunger event happening today in New York, this new series is the Council’s own chance to look forward: to explore the facets large and small that will build the food system of 2050.
Driving these changes to the global food and agriculture system are three major trends which will be explored in depth in our new series: major shifts to current economic and demographic geography, innovation driven by strain on system inefficiencies, and a changing natural environment—both climate and natural resources.
Demographically—in terms of raw economic geography—a world of 9 billion looks very different than today: In 2050, 14 of the world’s 20 largest cities will be in Africa and South Asia. And those people will work. And those people will be part of growing, dynamic economies. These will be economies with booming middle classes with purchasing power on a scale that strains, reshapes, and rebuilds global food supply chains from farm gate to the consumer level. The trickle down of this, of ballooning demand and expanding markets, means market inefficiencies pushed to the breaking point and the promise of rapid innovation.
Changes in the human landscape aren’t the only source of strain on the food and agriculture system. The climate is changing. The future of global breadbaskets like California are in question due to severe and ongoing drought; rising sea levels are inundating ground water sources with salt water in South Asia and beyond; floods in the United States and elsewhere cause largescale destruction of crops; and warmer weather globally means widespread proliferation of plant and livestock diseases.
While obstacles to a new and better global food and agriculture system may abound on both the human and natural fronts, to innovators, opportunity and urgency are without limit: to build the food and agriculture system of 2050, everything is on the table.
What is a farm. Sure, it’s where we grow our food, and raise our crops, and husband our livestock. But does it have to take up so much land? Or use so much water, or fertilizer, and do plants and animals have to take so long to grow into meat, dairy, grains, and produce?
No. And innovators are working even now to find solutions to the inefficiencies in what we assume to be given. Today, agriculture science is booming. From precision agriculture, drones, and satellite imaging technologies that make farms more space-efficient than ever, to microbiologists cracking the secrets of the phytobiome, to big data harnessed to usher in new frontiers of efficiency: researchers are redefining what a farm is and what a farm can do.
Vertical farms. Hydroponic farms. Entrepreneurs are making hamburgers from reengineered peas, and technology firms are using satellites to define and target poverty, low production, and supply chain disruption wherever in the world intervention is needed. The farm of the future is anything you can invent. This can yield not just a new food and agriculture system, but a better, and more globally equitable system.
Agriculture is a major consumer of resources—land, water, energy. But in shrinking agriculture’s footprint, agriculture can help solve other problems, too. Take climate change. Often, agriculture is cited as a contributing factor to climate change, either due to it consumption of energy, or its output of biomass and methane; but it doesn’t have to be that way. Carbon capture agriculture actually pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, producing both food and reduced atmospheric CO2. More broadly on the environment, agriculture can help support biodiversity through mindful cultivation and land use. In fact, for a redesigned food system, there’s no reason agriculture itself can’t be a form of conservation—farms as a net positive, rather than drain, to our natural resource base.
Leading the charge on much of this is venture capital and the drive to bring the transformative successes experienced in the tech industry to agriculture, but this is just the start. In a global food system, the sort needed to feed 9 billion, there’s no room for silos, no opportunity to think of food and agriculture as anything but a global system. There’s no us or them, no here and over there—a dysfunction in the food system anywhere is lost prosperity everywhere. Solutions invented must be a tide that lifts all boats: you can’t solve water management in California without generating ideas useful to Nigeria, India, or Bolivia. The stakes are too high, and the demand too massive to think any one player can feed the world alone.
This is the underappreciated true scale of the discussion, and in the Council’s forthcoming series, Science, Food, and Equity, we plan to explore what’s next, what’s coming, and what’s already here that will bring us the food and agriculture system of 2050. What’s around the corner could come from anywhere—let us know what new innovation you think is coming down the pipeline that will transform the way we eat and farm @GlobalAgDev.