The population is expected to rise to nearly 10 billion people by 2050. With agricultural land expansion reaching its limits if we do not want to jeopardize the planetary boundaries related to biodiversity, carbon sequestration and environmental buffers provided by nature, we as humanity must increase agricultural productivity to feed this growing population while using less and less resources.
Climate change is bound to change crop suitability in different regions and extreme weather events threaten food supply, requiring sufficient buffers and hence higher production in favorable years.
Barring major catastrophes, profoundly disrupting civil unrest, widespread warfare, this growing population is bound to be more affluent than the current one. The population will be living predominantly in urban settings in contrast to today, where the majority of the world’s population is still living in rural areas. Urbanization and increased welfare is likely to induce changes in diets and in food systems as value chains become longer people and people buy more processed food, either as street food or in super-markets. The distance between commodity and food is growing. Moreover, in many countries in the world, we have witnessed a double burden of malnutrition (simultaneous occurrence of obesity and hidden hunger).
Continuing the way have been doing over the past decades is not going to ensure us having enough to eat while staying within planetary boundaries. We will have to do things radically different. At the root of many of the obstacles preventing the attainment of sustainable food systems are issues such as lack of trust and transparency, asymmetric information and weak institutions and poor governance. Blockchain enabled solutions can help to break down those barriers and thus become the game-changer that makes food systems sustainable in the long run.
The
Strike Two Summit is a series of meetings to address the issues of digitally enabled food system transformation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oOA8Qj4DoXFF9hpNZ04ayy7AAWYanSlQ/viewLike in many tech savvy nations, in India, companies such as
T-Hub are pushing an aggressive agenda to foster the digital transformation of agriculture and the CGIAR is pursuing an agenda to provide the scientific evidence of the process and to provide insight into the possible impact pathways.
