The Role of Innovation in Transforming the Global Food System

By Jack Bobo, CEO, Futurity

OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS the global food system has managed to increase production faster than the growth in global population, leading to significant reductions in hunger as a percent of population. However, this growth has not come without costs to land, water, and air. Despite the advances in the fight against hunger, hundreds of millions of people remain food-insecure. Furthermore, cheap, plentiful calories, combined with changes in our food environment, have resulted in huge increases in obesity. This report examines some of the efforts aimed at addressing these problems, identifies some limitations of these efforts, and highlights the need to emphasize the role of innovation in order to deliver a food system that benefits people and the planet.

• Transforming the food system to be more sustainable and resilient provides one of the best opportunities to create change for the better. An improved food system will not only promote rich biodiversity and ecosystems, but people who are resilient and empowered.

• Many organizations are waking to these challenges and calling for changes to how food is produced, processed, and consumed, from the United Nations to the World Economic Forum. By considering the food system as a whole, we are, in theory, better positioned to understand problems and to address them in a more connected and integrated way.

• Some of these organizations have positioned modern farming methods and, at times, farmers themselves as the problem to be solved. Decisions about how and what to grow inevitably result in trade-offs. Over the last fifty years, advances in farming practices and technologies, such as the Green Revolution, dramatically reduced global hunger as well as deforestation, but they also had negative consequences, including loss of soil fertility, soil erosion and toxicity, diminishing water resources, and pollution of underground water. The alternative, of course, was massive starvation and increasing hunger that would have also had their own negative impacts on the environment.

• By framing the current food system as the problem and, by contrast, low-input food systems, such as regenerative and organic farms, as the primary solution to the ills caused by food production, new initiatives may limit the range of policies and technologies available to address the problems. Positioning the current food system as broken may also undermine confidence in the food we eat and limit future innovations that advocate intensification along with regeneration.

• To address the very real challenges faced by people and the planet we will need to use all tools at our disposal. This includes advances in food production that regenerate soil and sequester carbon, but also innovations that allow more food to be produced on the same land using fewer inputs.

• Initiatives aimed at transforming the food system cannot succeed in delivering the benefits desired without acknowledging the role innovation played in the past and ensuring that it plays an equally robust role in the future.

THE DEBATE over how to address global food challenges has become deeply polarized, sometimes pitting modern agriculture and global commerce against local food systems and regenerative farms. The arguments can be fierce and the stakeholders seem to be getting ever more divided.

Those who favor modern agriculture focus on advances in mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, data and improved genetics to increase yields to help meet demand. Meanwhile, proponents of local and regenerative farms point to the benefits of more holistic approaches that improve fertility without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Both approaches offer badly needed solutions and neither can get us where we need to be alone. We need a food system that welcomes all good ideas, whether from regenerative farms or high-tech farms, and blends them together to make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Effective joint action usually involves a common vision about what is a working food system, an understanding of where positions on the vision diverge, and increasing degrees of agreement on how to realize the vision.

Achieving a common vision is easier if different actors use similar scientific analyses of what people need to be well nourished, and of the boundaries to the safe use of planetary resources. They will also want to take account of power relations, to understand how markets work and to appreciate the range in capabilities for producing, processing and purchasing food.

Promoting a positive vision for the future of the food system is critical. Humanity has more knowledge, technology, social intelligence, and human capacity than ever before, all of which can be harnessed to create a food system that nourishes all people, grows the global economy, and protects a thriving environment. Despite this great potential, we have yet to see a credible and inspiring vision for our future global food system that can unite all stakeholders and ignite a movement toward positive change.

Current initiatives aimed at transforming the food system cannot succeed in delivering the benefits desired without acknowledging that past innovation has lifted billions out of hunger and poverty while avoiding the need to cut down one billion hectares of forest. This leads to a recognition that innovation will be just as critical to the success of the food system we seek to implement.

You can read the full report here.