Human innovation to feed the world

Professor Sir Gordon Conway and Katy Wilson highlight the need for innovative solutions to food insecurity

Article originally appeared on The Economist Insights

With global population expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050 the world faces unprecedented demands on its resources – not least water, biodiversity and land. Add to this the likely impact of climate change, and the challenge of feeding a world where some 870 million people are already chronically hungry appears a difficult one.

Governments, NGOs, academia and the private sector are searching for long-term sustainable solutions to global food insecurity and future resource scarcity.  One solution, first proposed by Jules Pretty in the 1990s, and backed by the Montpellier Panel, a high-level group of European and African experts in the fields of agriculture, trade, policy, and global development, is sustainable intensification. At its heart sustainable intensification is about producing more food, more efficiently.

Achieving global food security will not be possible if food is produced at the expense of other natural resources such as water and soil. Instead we need to find ways of maximising both agricultural output and the health of the environments and ecosystems upon which farming relies.

Sustainable intensification is, at its core, about balancing the trade-offs between short-term gains and long-term sustainability. This is a shift in thinking that is not going to be easy but one that members of the Montpellier Panel think is achievable. A large part of their optimism results from historical evidence of human ingenuity in the face of challenges, as well as from the ground-breaking technologies and innovations being developed today.

While much can be achieved by using existing knowledge and technologies, the scale of the challenges we face will need innovation. In a new Montpellier Panel briefing paper, Innovation for Sustainable Intensification in Africa, we emphasise the importance of innovation to drive sustainable intensification and to overcome Africa’s hunger and development issues in general. As an example, a study by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture found that agricultural research in sub-Saharan Africa yields an estimated aggregate rate of return of as much as 55%. This same research also reduces the number of poor people by 2.3 million each year in the region, with about half of this impact originating from international agricultural research conducted by the CGIAR.

Since sustainable intensification is about reducing trade-offs and maximising benefits across economic, environmental and societal objectives we need to redesign our innovation systems to aid multidisciplinary and collaborative research.