Featured image (above) by Tom Fisk
Can agriculture meet the demands of a growing world population while ensuring environmental sustainability? Daniel Lapidus, Director of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at RTI International, highlights important trends on both the supply and demand sides that suggest we are heading in the right direction.
It’s easy to look around and see stark challenges facing the agricultural sector – decreased investments, erratic weather, unpredictable commodity prices and thin margins for most farmers. Growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP), or the metric used to track how efficiently agricultural output is produced, has slowed to its lowest rate in decades. This is occurring at a time when the world not only needs to ramp up production to meet the needs of a growing global population that demands more diverse foods, but also to do so in a way that ensures the health of our planet.
The agricultural sector has overcome challenges in the past. For example, the Green Revolution and subsequent widespread technological advancements brought us unprecedented agricultural production over the last 75 years that has tripled yields, keeping supplies high enough and prices low enough to avoid mass starvation. However, this progress has come at a cost, impacting water availability, leading to biodiversity loss and rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite this history, it would be a false choice to think that agriculture has to choose between productivity and sustainability. There is increasing alignment between these two goals on both the supply (farmer) and demand (consumer) sides.
Supply-side Technology Trends
Farmers need to be nimble and resilient to stay profitable, which means investing in solutions that are both efficient and preserve the long-term viability of the land and soil. Three technology areas that are gaining traction and have the potential to transform the future of agricultural sustainability are:
- Agricultural biotechnology: Genetically modified organisms and gene editing, along with biostimulants, biofertilizers and biocontrols, received $1.9 billion in venture capital investment last year, representing the top investment in the farm tech category. Powered by artificial intelligence, there is potential to accelerate even more rapidly, making crops more drought resilient, increasing their nutritional content and combatting emerging pests and diseases.
- Precision agriculture: Enabled by GPS, precision agriculture allows farmers to boost yields while using fewer inputs. However, these technologies have been adopted mainly by large-scale farms and have yet to be successful in reaching smaller, less technologically advanced farms. Growth in precision technologies, including agri-fin tech, remote sensing and blockchain, is expanding opportunities to reach farmers both directly and passively through innovations in track and trace technologies, digital commerce and improved access to finance. They are also showing promise in developing countries.
- Regenerative agriculture: Regenerative agriculture embodies principles and management practices aimed at improving soil health, including minimizing tillage, planting cover crops, leaving residues on the soil and diversifying cropping and livestock systems. These principles have become increasingly sophisticated, and the body of evidence around their benefits is growing. Localized benefits to farmers include reduced input costs, decreased erosion, increased soil moisture content and enhanced soil carbon sequestration.
Demand-side Sustainability Drivers
The success of these innovations relies on markets that incentivize them. As the environmental sustainability movement evolves, consumers are demanding healthier food that doesn’t contribute to deforestation, climate challenges or water quality degradation. This demand and other equally important trends on the demand side continue to incentivize agricultural sustainability:
- Private Sector Sustainability Commitments: More than 600 large commercial food and beverage companies, including Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Cargill and PepsiCo, have set ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Science Based Targets Initiative. Companies are also addressing sustainability issues like food loss and waste and finding alternatives to plastic packaging. If companies stick with these targets, a significant amount of investment currently sitting on the sidelines will need to be deployed.
- Food is Medicine Movement: This movement has grown out of recognition that nutrition-based interventions can be more cost-effective than traditional medical treatments. It is gaining public and private sector support as evidenced by the Make America Healthy Again Initiative in the U.S., and driven by consumer demand for foods that contain less additives, are less processed and are grown using fewer chemical inputs.
- Overcoming Transition Costs. Private sector commitments and consumer demand are necessary, but not sufficient, to finance the initial transition costs associated with the rapid adoption of sustainable technologies. Multiple foundations, multilateral institutions, development banks and national and sub-national governments have set up mechanisms and partnerships to address this challenge. However, scaling these efforts will take time.
Collective Approach
Agriculture sector innovation has been able to overcome fears that our food supply could not meet the rising demands of a growing population. However, looking ahead, it’s unlikely that a single solution will emerge for all productivity and sustainability challenges. Instead, it will require collective and collaborative action and investment in interconnected innovations with environmental, social, and economic sustainability at their core, supporting a healthier population, planet and meeting market demands.