Tuesday 12 April 2016

Innovation in Agriculture: The Path Forward





Experts on the future of food from A.T. Kearney, FarmLink, WaterFX, and Monsanto weigh in on what future digital, biotech, and process innovation technologies should look like and how they should be managed.
Global agriculture is facing an unprecedented challenge. By 2050, the world’s population is expected to swell by two billion people. Beyond the sheer number of mouths to feed, this growth will bring a fundamental shift in diets around the world as more prosperous populations seek more protein, demand higher-quality food, and eat more prepared foods. Food demand will double in the next three decades with a 50 percent increase in protein demand. At the same time, crops are being diverted for feed and fuel, land for agricultural expansion is scarce, and freshwater resources are dwindling. In fact, access to freshwater will be one of the greatest challenges in the next few decades.
The last time we faced such global issues was in the 1970s when the Club of Rome, a global think tank, published dire warnings about population explosion and starvation. Thanks to the great work of agricultural scientists such as Norman Borlaug, crop yields were increased dramatically.
Although farming techniques, fertilizer use, and crop protection are continuing to improve, the dramatic gains in crop yields have slowed. In a quarter to a third of today’s most important cropland areas, many of which are in the world’s top crop-producing nations, yields are flat or declining. Based on analysis of historical improvements, yields for corn, rice, wheat, and soy—the four crops that account for about two-thirds of globally harvested food calories—will fall short of the needed 2.4 percent annual improvement required to double crop production by 2050. Add environmental and sustainability issues and activists’ demands for cage-free, antibiotic-free, and non-genetically modified foods, and combine that with the continuing need to provide food security to almost a billion people who are chronically undernourished. The result is that global agriculture will be severely challenged to meet the demands of nine billion hungry people.
Can the tech industry, which has forever changed the world’s relationship to media, information processing, and communications, bring breakthrough innovation to agriculture? Venture capital funding supporting dynamic new approaches and disruptive technologies for food and agriculture-related start-ups has increased dramatically from $400 million in 2010 to an estimated $4.2 billion in 2015. According to industry experts who gathered earlier this year at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) event, there is reason to believe those are well-placed investments.

An Agricultural Revolution

Dave Donnan, A.T. Kearney partner in the Consumer Products & Retail Practice, moderated, “The Future of Food: Innovation, Technology, and Agriculture,” a panel discussion hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in January 2016. The dialogue engaged industry experts, including Randall Barker, FarmLink’s managing director of business development; Aaron Mandell, WaterFX and HydroRevolution co-founder and chairman; and Virginia Ursin, Monsanto Company’s biotechnology prospecting lead. These leaders shared their views on what breakthrough innovations in the future of food should look like and, perhaps more importantly, how to manage the development and acceptance of digital, biotech, and process innovation technologie

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