Feed the World?

(5 minute read)

How will we feed perhaps ten billion people in 2076?

It sounds like an enormous challenge. The world's population has already passed eight billion, climate change is making some traditional farming areas hotter and drier, and hundreds of millions of people still do not always have enough to eat.

Yet when I look at how agriculture has changed during my own lifetime, I find myself surprisingly optimistic. We are becoming much better not only at producing food, but at producing more of it from less land, less water and eventually, perhaps, far less human labor.

That progress is already remarkable. One modern farmer with sophisticated machinery can cultivate an area that would once have required hundreds of agricultural laborers.

Satellites can examine crops from space, computers can identify which parts of a field need water or fertilizer, and increasingly sophisticated machines can harvest enormous areas with extraordinary efficiency. Over the next fifty years, agricultural robots may take that much further, moving through fields continuously, identifying individual weeds and diseased plants, checking moisture levels and harvesting crops at exactly the right moment.

Before looking further ahead, however, it is worth remembering how differently we once thought about food.

When I was growing up, famine seemed to be much more prominent in the news than it is today. As a small child, I remember the terrible images from Biafra in the late 1960s, and particularly the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s that led to Band Aid and eventually Live Aid. For my generation, Feed the World wasn't simply a line from a Christmas song. Those images of starving children made it feel as though widespread famine might remain an unavoidable feature of the future.

Earlier predictions were even more pessimistic. Thomas Malthus argued as far back as 1798 that population would eventually grow faster than our ability to produce food. Nearly two centuries later, Paul Ehrlich's best-selling The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation as the global population increased. The logic seemed obvious. There was only so much farmland, while the number of mouths requiring food kept growing.

Yet agricultural technology advanced faster than many people expected. Better crop varieties, fertilizers, irrigation, mechanization, refrigeration and global transport transformed food production. Famine certainly hasn't disappeared, but today the worst crises are increasingly associated with war, political breakdown, drought and disrupted distribution rather than the world simply being incapable of producing enough food.

Sudan is a terrible current example, while Somalia has faced the combined effects of drought, conflict and poverty. The problem increasingly isn't whether humanity can grow food, but whether people can get access to it.

I saw an interesting example of this when I lived in Singapore. It is a tiny island nation with a population of about 6.1 million people and very little agricultural land. It imports more than 90% of its food, yet the supermarkets are full of extraordinarily varied, high-quality produce from around the world.

Food certainly isn't particularly cheap there, but scarcity isn't something you normally notice as a consumer. Singapore deals with its vulnerability by importing from a huge number of countries, maintaining strategic food stocks, including rice, and encouraging what local production is practical.

In some ways, Singapore offers a glimpse of a possible future. A country doesn't necessarily have to grow all its own food if global agriculture and transport systems are sufficiently productive and resilient. By 2076, those systems may become far more sophisticated, with AI predicting shortages before they occur and automatically redirecting supplies from countries with surpluses.

The crops themselves will also change. Scientists are already developing plants capable of tolerating greater heat, drought and salinity. Over the next fifty years, we may create wheat, rice and other staples specifically designed for conditions that would destroy today's varieties. Farming may also move northward in some regions as temperatures rise, opening land to crops that currently struggle in colder climates.

Water will probably remain one of the greatest challenges. Agriculture consumes enormous quantities of it, particularly in hot countries, but precision irrigation can reduce that dramatically. Desalination is also improving. If energy becomes much cheaper through better renewables, nuclear power or eventually fusion, turning seawater into fresh water may become economically practical in places where it would be far too expensive today.

Vertical farming offers another possibility. I don't imagine vast indoor buildings replacing conventional wheat fields, because sunlight remains wonderfully cheap and effective. However, vegetables and other high-value crops can already be grown inside controlled environments close to the cities where they will be eaten. That reduces transport, protects crops from weather and allows conditions to be controlled throughout the year.

Then there is meat.

Imagine I put two steaks in front of you.

One is a perfectly marbled piece of prime steak that contains exactly the balance of muscle and fat needed to provide tenderness and flavor.

The other is a piece of muscle and fat ripped from the ass end of a slaughtered cow.

Which sounds more appetizing?

The trick, of course, is that the first steak could eventually be cultivated meat, grown from animal cells without raising the rest of the animal at all. The second is what most of us currently call natural beef.

That description is deliberately unfair, but it illustrates how much our reaction to food depends upon language and familiarity. Many people instinctively dislike the idea of meat grown in a vat or bioreactor because it sounds artificial.

Yet if cultivated meat eventually looks identical, tastes identical, contains the same nutritional value and costs less, future generations may wonder why we once raised an entire animal simply because we wanted particular parts of it.

Singapore was actually an early mover here as well. Its food regulator has approved cultured chicken after assessing it for food-safety risks, so this is no longer purely science fiction. They also have vertical farms already. (Like every country, Singapore has its good points and bad points, but they certainly embrace the future.)

Perhaps cultivated meat will never replace traditional farming completely. I suspect there will always be people willing to pay more for a steak from an animal raised traditionally, just as people today pay extra for organic or locally produced food. But if enormous quantities of everyday meat can eventually be produced using much less land and animal feed, the effect on global agriculture could be substantial.

We can also achieve a great deal simply by wasting less of what we already produce. Food is lost during harvesting, storage and transportation in poorer countries, while supermarkets, restaurants and households in wealthier societies throw away huge quantities that are perfectly edible. Better refrigeration, packaging, logistics and AI-controlled supply chains could reduce that dramatically.

Our own relationship with food may change as well. Medicines such as Wegovy have already demonstrated that appetite can be altered far more effectively than seemed possible only a few years ago.

By 2076, personalized nutrition may combine genetics, continuous health monitoring and medicines that regulate appetite and metabolism. One of humanity's oldest problems has been finding enough calories to survive. Increasingly, in wealthier countries, our problem is persuading ourselves not to gorge on too many of them.

That is quite an extraordinary reversal.

None of this means hunger will disappear automatically. Wars will still destroy farms. Governments will still make bad decisions. Droughts and floods will still cause local disasters, while poverty can leave people unable to afford food even when plenty is available nearby. Technology cannot solve every political problem.

What it can do is steadily remove some of the physical limitations that have haunted humanity throughout history.

As a science fiction writer, that is the part I find most interesting. We often imagine the future by concentrating on spectacular technologies such as spaceships, artificial intelligence or robots, yet the ability to provide abundant food may ultimately change more lives than almost anything else.

A civilization that can reliably feed ten billion people despite drought, changing climates and limited farmland will have achieved something our ancestors would have regarded as almost miraculous.

Perhaps by 2076 the question will no longer be whether humanity can produce enough food for everyone.

We may already know how to do that.

The harder question will be whether we can organize ourselves well enough to make sure everyone receives it.

Till next time,

Brian

BA Gillies

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