Can We Keep Producing More Food in a Warmer World?

by Mark Harris at Anthropocene: Food production now accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—and the problem is growing. The World Resources Institutes estimates an area of new farmland twice the size of India will be needed this century.

There’s an underlying moral dilemma here—if we want to ensure a welcoming climate for growing crops in the future, we need to massively scale back agriculture’s carbon footprint now. But that will take enormous investment and emerging technologies that could shift the focus from those suffering from hunger right now.

Ultimately, can we reinvent agriculture for a low-carbon world without people going hungry today?

Issues:

The biggest problem isn’t climate change, it’s politics. The Global Network Against Food Crises says the primary driver for food insecurity in 2024 is conflict, particularly in Palestine/Gaza, the Sudan and Haiti, followed by economic shocks. Weather extremes come in third place. The Global Hunger Index goes a step further, noting that gender violence and inequality goes hand in hand with hunger from climate change in many countries. “Climate change has played a much smaller role in determining agricultural productivity than factors like technological adoption, social change, and economic growth,” writes Vijaya Ramachandran at the Breakthrough Institute.

What to keep an eye on?

1. New crops. Agricultural progress didn’t stop with the Green Revolution. A new generation of crops include low-carbon perennial versions of annual staple crops like wheat and rice, drought-tolerant species to cope with extreme weather, and even genes that could enable agriculture to thrive along salt-drenched coastlines.

2. Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with most of the world’s severe hunger. Its farmers have the lowest agricultural productivity and yet it is the only major world region facing significant population growth in the decades ahead. The UN sees a path forward with investment in energy infrastructure unlocking digital communications and data to transform agricultural production, management and governance. Cheaper, green power could also drastically reduce food waste with improved cold chains.

3. AI. The latest machine learning algorithms can accurately predict a crop’s future growth, health, and yields, based on a single snapshot of a young plant. That could put precision agriculture into the hands of any farmer with a smartphone, reducing pesticide use and wasted irrigation, and improving the timing of harvests.

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