We could be facing a global food crisis in less than a decade
The world population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.6 billion in 2017. Currently, one billion people are unable to satisfy their basic needs in terms of food energy. 815 million people — one in nine — suffer from chronic undernutrition, that is, going to bed on an empty stomach every night. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of hunger — one person in four there is undernourished.
Source: World Food Programme (WFP).
Global food security has been repeatedly threatened by various factors. Extreme weather conditions and export restrictions presented a supply-side shock that led to the 1972–1974 global food crisis. Less than four decades later, demand-side factors such as the rapid population growth in Asia and new demand of corn for biofuel led to the 2008 global food price crisis, which drove 130 million more people into extreme poverty, inflated the number of the poor and undernourished to 1 billion people, caused political and economic instability, as well as social unrest in countries across the world. The effect of the brief period of high food prices has proven to be long-lasting, trapping millions more people in a vicious cycle of hunger and poverty. Developed countries were not immune from food crisis either. The triple effect of a declining economy, food and energy inflation affected the poor and the middle class alike. In the US, a national record of over 28 million people were driven into the national food stamp program. 12% of the US population were food insecure despite $60 billion in yearly government food nutrition programs. The explosion of over 50,000 food banks and food pantries across the nation could not stop the rise in number of people living in food-insecure households from jumping from 36.2 million in 2007 to 49.1 million in 2008 (Source: FAO). In 2010, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published a report on the causes, responses, and lessons learnt from the 2008 food crisis, citing export ban policies from major exporters as being accountable for about three thirds of the rice price increases. Panic buying, stock building and lack of transparency further intensified the problem by causing large food loses and food waste. Unless we use these experiences to prepare for the future, history may repeat itself.
According to the latest revision of the United Nations (UN) population prospects, the world population is projected to grow to 9.1 billion in 2050. In addition to population growth, the spread of prosperity across the world, especially in China and India, is shifting the food demand towards the higher-calorie foods, such as meat, eggs and dairy, putting more pressure on agriculture to grow more crops for more cattle, pigs and chickens. Should these trends continue, the world is expected to face a global food crisis in 2050 unless worldwide food production can increase at least 69% by then. This is no longer a distribution problem that can be solved by reducing food waste and improving global supply-chain management. The World Resources Institute reported that even if we took the world’s total food production in 2009 to distribute evenly amongst the global population, there would still be a shortage of 974 calories per person per day by 2050. This is a much more complicated problem that comes from both the supply and demand side. It will affect not only the poor and developing countries, but also the middle class and developed countries when supply can no longer meet demand despite exploding prices. The gloomy prospect has sparked numerous dialogues around global food security. There is growing recognition that a global agreement is in need to mobilize political will and ensure that key decisions to eradicate world hunger are implemented effectively. However, 2050 is too far off into the future that it has not received sufficient attention from policy makers and the public.
Now there’s a catch: there might have been a problem with the way previous projections were made, and a global food crisis even more severe than the 2008 crisis may come as much as 2 decades earlier than original predictions. Sara Menker, formerly a Wall Street commodities trader, now founder and chief executive of Gro Intelligence, gave a talk in August 2017 on the prospect of an impossible world in 2027. When Gro Intelligence looks at the nutritional value of food (calories), rather than the amount of food produced (kg and ton), they found out that global food security is more tenuous than previously thought. The first milestone that would bring global agriculture to its tipping point would occur in 2023, when Africa’s population is forecasted to overtake that of China and India. This crossover point will present serious challenges to global food security, and by 2027, the world will be short of 214 trillion calories to feed 8.3 billion people. To put in simpler terms, it means that the world will be short of 379 billion Big Macs in 2027 (one Big Mac is taken to contain 563 calories), more Big Macs than Macdonald’s has ever produced. This is a gap that our current agricultural infrastructure cannot fill.
Ms. Menker’s proposed solution lies in the utilization of unused arable land in Africa and India, especially sub-Saharan Africa. Reformation and commercialization of the agriculture industry in these regions include utilizing data to implement better policies, improving infrastructure, lowering transportation costs and reforming banking and insurance industries completely. As the first step towards this future, she founded Gro Intelligence in 2012, with the vision to be a global agriculture data and analytic software which aims to bridge the data gaps across global agriculture; bringing the supply and demand side together; as well as empowering the decision makers throughout the supply chain by making them more informed, connected, and productive. Gro’s intended users include commodities traders, investors, risk managers, supply chain professionals, lenders and insurers. Its products include data sources which cover crop production, consumption, weather, infrastructure, prices, trade, as well as socio-economic and environmental indicators. It also provides analytical tools, algorithms, and predictive models that allow users to have access to unprecedented current and future insights into the global food and agriculture industry.
Besides Gro Intelligence, other big data companies are also working towards revolutionizing the agricultural food chain from farm to table. New technologies have made it possible to implement sensors in various formats to measure soil moisture, nutrient density, crop yields, growth rate, as well as to obtain detailed data on wind patterns, fertilizer requirements, pest infestations and water availability. Companies like The Climate Corporation, Farmlogs, OnFarm, FarmersEdge have received venture capital funding to improve farming efficiency. However, most of these efforts are targeting large-scale operations in the US and Europe, leaving small-scale farming out of the revolution. Some other challenges include difficulties in adaptation of the technologies, lack of data interpretation, and concerns on data privacy. Wall Street Journal in its article “Why Big Data Hasn’t Yet Made a Dent On Farms” noted the futile efforts of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in making a real difference, mostly due to the deluge of data from countless sources that the companies fail to provide sufficient analysis on.
Hence, coming back to the question of “How can we feed 8.3 billion people in 2027?”, it is apparent that we have a solution, one that requires a collaborative effort by all relevant stakeholders of all fields, from agriculture to economics, from science to technology, from legal to financial, both professionals and layman alike, to avoid an imminent crisis in a resource-constrained world made vulnerable by climate change.
Note: Sara Menker’s talk can be found here.
International Food Policy Research Institute’s report can be accessed here.
FAO’s report “ How to feed the world in 2050” can be accessed here.
Reports on the 1972–74 and 2007–08 food crisis can be accessed here and here.
A report on the current state of global food security by the Food Security Information Network (FSIN) can be found here.
An overview of prominent Agriculture Big data companies can be found here.
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s report on accessing the global policy reform to combat global food crisis since 2007 can be found here.
