ingenieur Vol.84 Oct-Dec 2020 Vol 84 2020 | Page 66

INGENIEUR
INGENIEUR
Future of Food : Harnessing Digital Technologies to Improve System Outcomes ( Source : World Bank )
The world is today facing the pressing challenge of unsustainable food production and consumption practices . Today ’ s food system is the main driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss and generates a quarter of the greenhouse gas pollution globally . The world ’ s roughly 500 million smallholder farmers who contribute 80 % of our food are amongst the poorest and most malnourished groups . In fact , climate change could force over 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 , mostly through impacts on agriculture and food security .
Hence , improving the performance of the food system is critical if we are to sustainably feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 while raising farmer incomes , protecting them from climate change and helping them to thrive .
Breakthrough digital technologies have the potential to deliver significant positive impacts across food value chains . These range from innovations that can make food systems more resource-efficient and climate-resilient such as precision agriculture , gene-editing and biologicalbased crop protection , or technologies that improve traceability from farm to fork .
Harnessing Digital Technologies to Improve Food System Outcomes looks at the opportunities from digital technologies , including better transparency of agricultural value chains , smarter farms , and improved public services . It also reviews some of the risks , including an overconcentration of service providers , poor data governance , and exclusion . The report presents a set of potential entry points for public sector action to seize the opportunities that expanding rural network coverage can bring .
What will we eat in 2030 ( Source : World Economic Forum )
The future of food is a contested space , with multiple competing ideas about how the future will evolve . The growing human population , with a significantly increasing global middle class , will be the engine of increasing global demand .
Historically , increasing wealth has led to changing consumption patterns , particularly more meat and other resource-intensive foods like cheese and eggs . The question is the extent to which historical trends will play out in future .
On a global basis more people are now of an unhealthy weight than a healthy weight . While the historical “ hunger challenge ” is slowly receding , malnourishment is increasingly associated with excessive weight and obesity . Policy interest in “ food for health ” has the potential to help shape diets and thus food systems .
The Paris climate agreement pledges to keep climate change to well-below 2 ° C . Given that food systems — growing food and feed , making and transporting food , cooking , eating and throwing food away — accounts for just under a third of greenhouse gas emissions , food alone has the potential to use up the entire Paris agreement ’ s carbon budget . As many people have written , the most potent way to “ decarbonise ” the food system is to reduce the amount of greenhouse-intensive food we produce – notably meat .
Dietary advice suggests 500g per person per week is healthy meat consumption or 26 kg per year . As can be seen , on average , we exceed this globally , particularly in the rich world .
So what might we eat in 2030 ? I think demand will be shifting and more people will want to eat a healthy diet , one that is less intensive ( and wasteful ) of resources . The increasing emergence of localism , wholefoods , organic , artisanal and “ real food ” movements is a sign of this – at least for the rich and dedicated . So our diets may be more veg and fruit , whole grains and vegetarian food or new alternatives ( soya products , or perhaps insects or artificial meat ), and less fried and sugary things .
For the world ’ s poor , as Adam Drewnowski and others have shown , the cost of a nutritious diet is so much greater than the cost of a calorie-dense one . It is therefore likely that commodity crops ( maize , wheat , sugar , oil ) will continue to underpin the global food system – but will be processed in ways that are better for our health . This may include fortification ( or biofortification ) – where nutrients are engineered in , either in the biology or manufacture of food – and the significant reformulation of current foods for fewer calories and more nutrients . “ Ultra-processed ” foods need not be unhealthy .
64 VOL 84 OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2020