How will we feed 10 billion people?
- Siraj Khaliq, partner in VC fund Atomico, finds deep fulfilment using tech to help people avoid famine — can you help too?
- “We already produce more than enough food to feed the world. Conservatively, we can double food supply.”
- Would you switch to a vegan diet to help balance the world’s uneven food calorie distribution?
We often think of software as a means to solve virtual problems, like creating better messaging or easier banking. But this is a privileged world-view — for billions of people, the main problem they address each day is much more fundamental: hunger.
Siraj Khaliq doesn’t have an agricultural background — he’s a computer scientist — but he used the tools he knows to help to improve the lives of millions.
As co-founder of the Climate Corporation, and now investment partner at VC firm Atomico he applies data science to try and improve the way food is grown, and increase the efficiency of crop production.
Siraj believes that tackling hunger is as satisfying a challenge as you could wish for. It was an inspiring talk, packed with surprising data and ideas — so we pulled together the key, condensed take-aways, and the whole of Siraj’s talk is available here:
The world population: we have an astonishing number of people to feed (and the number’s going up)
“A couple of years ago the estimate for the world’s population in 2050 was revised from 9.6 to 9.7 billion people — and now the forecast is even greater. Just to put this in context: since 1950 more people have been born on the planet than have ever been born since humans first started walking upright four million years ago.
“About 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus, an intellectual and thinker of his time, penned an article saying that a crisis was imminent. He thought there was no way of feeding the world’s population.
“But the funny thing is that it has not happened — yet. We’ve had some crises, but generally speaking it’s not materialised. In fact, the opposite has happened. If you look in the developing world, the percentage of income spent on food has gone down by about four times what it was.”
Since 1950, more people have been born than have ever been born since humans first started walking upright
The food-shortage disaster: long anticipated, but it’s not arrived… yet.
“So how have we kept up? There’s a few things that have enabled this to happen. The big one is that we’ve cultivated more land: in the American Prairie and the Brazilian Cerrado, we’ve grown tremendous amounts of food, on huge tracts of land.
“And in the developed world, there has been a tremendous increase in yields from cereal crops, which has really been game-changing: in the USA you can see a seven-to-eight-fold increase in yield for corn.
“But that rate of increase has fallen below where it needs to be in order for us to feed a population that is growing inexorably.”
We already produce more than enough food to feed the world
The problem: we’re greedy. Unsustainable eating habits are rife. But… we already have enough food.
“We’ve started a trend where we’re eating, per capita, the foods that are the least sustainable. Beef consumption has doubled in the USA. Meat consumption in China has gone up by 150%. Fish is the same story.
“And yet 800 million people are still malnourished, while two billion people are overweight or obese. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. estimates that we need 70% more food by 2050. 70 percent. We don’t have that much more land.
“So how are we going to do this?
“Funnily enough, we already produce more than enough food to feed the world — it’s just that the distribution is not even. We produce 2700 calories per person per day, which is 20% higher than the average consumption needs to be.
“So if we improve this worldwide distribution of food by half, that’s a 10% increase in food getting to the right people.”
Something like 30–50% of fruits and vegetables are wasted.
Food waste is a surprisingly big and complex problem — and one that startups are helping to solve, and we can be part of too.
“Something like 30–50% of fruits and vegetables are wasted. There are many reasons for this: food is picked at the wrong time; poor logistics mean food rots on shelves; food doesn’t look perfect so people don’t want to buy it; and some food is sold too cheaply, so people don’t care about throwing it away.
“If we were to able to change just half of that, we’re a further 20% of the way towards solving our problem.
“There are some startups in this space addressing this, like Prospera, who focus on farmers picking things at the right time instead of too early or too late, or Farmdrop, who deliver to your door, direct from your local farm.”
“Low cost, low power sensors are cheaper: imagine hundreds of thousands of sensors in a farm to make decisions quickly — and machine learning/AI helps understand all this data.
“Or imagine measuring plant disease, yield, and herd management based on drone footage or satellite imagery.
“And although I don’t expect everyone to suddenly become vegan or vegetarian, healthier foods happen to be the ones that are most sustainable — and people have started to recognise that and shift towards it.
“There are companies making plant-based dairy and meat substitutes with all of the things people like about meat, but without environmental and nutritional downsides.”
Do good, feel good — and investment is waiting.
“Conservatively, we can double food supply. And $4.6 billion was invested in Agricultural Tech last year — double that of the year before. So if you want to start a company, think about AgTech.
“There are few things more fulfilling than helping people avoid famine. And I’m a computer scientist — a distributed systems guy — so if I was able to build a business in this space you certainly can!”
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
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