Several global factors, including climate change, population growth, disruptions in supplies and regional conflicts are raising the question of how we will feed and heal the 10 billion people who will roam the Earth by 2050.
It’s not an easy question, but certainly a very controversial one. Figures and statistics vary. However, the World Bank 2024 report reveals that presently, about 45 percent of the world’s population is food insecure, and 800 million are undernourished.
The MENA Region has the Most Hotspots
In the last year, ½ million people have been displaced in Mali and that number is rising due to the ongoing conflict.
These displaced people are facing critical levels of food security due to the violence as opposing factions are creating blockades so that vital supplies such as food cannot reach accessible local markets.
The latest projects make grim reading that more than 1.4 million children are projected to be acutely malnourished in the region by the end of this year.
In Sudan, it has been estimated that 9 million people have either been displaced or have crossed into neighbouring countries as fighting continues to escalate.
This has resulted in a food crisis of biblical proportions as the availability of food has been affected not only by the conflict, but by critical food production infrastructures being decimated. Sudan relies on food imports, and due the region’s instability, very little is coming through to the 17.7 million people who most need it. Amongst those, estimates are suggesting that nearly 4 million children are expected to be acutely malnourished.
Through media reports we are also aware that more than a million people in Gaza are facing starvation and that several blockades of Gaza are preventing lifesaving food from entering. Famine is an imminent threat according to Action Against Hunger. Lebanon is set to face similar issues.
Amongst other countries which are listed as worrying hotspots include Burkina Faso and Ethiopia and the situation in the following countries where food supplies are deteriorating quickly include Chad, Syria and Yemen.
There is a bigger storm coming.
The Perfect Storm of Food Insecurity
As we have shown, the irrefutable fact is that vulnerable communities disproportionately feel the escalating food crisis and its impacts.
The three main threats to global food security are climate change and environmental shocks, population growth and modern food system and disruptions in the food supply due to external factors outlined such as conflicts and political instability.
Climate change is one of the most concerning issues. As temperatures worldwide increase, water supplies decrease, causing the desertification of vast swathes of agricultural land.
Ironically, though, agriculture is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, resulting from its heavy reliance on dangerous nitrogen fertilizers, which also harm the soil, air, and waterways.
Cattle deforestation is another huge issue that is only worsening as we lose approximately two million hectares of forest to cattle annually. Meat is the ultimate bioavailable dense nutrition for humans, yet land and sea animal agriculture contributes to significant global greenhouse (GHG) emissions.
Finding the Right Answers
Synbio and Biotech scientists are relentlessly finding the answer to the question I posed in my headline.
My team and many others are pioneering bioengineering solutions. We aim to leverage microbes and cell lines to create complementary protein products to combat scarcity and create a sustainable, abundant food system.
We are making high-quality, nutritious proteins identical to those found in nature using biotechnology through a process known as precision fermentation so that we don’t need to isolate these ingredients from natural sources.
We further realize the potential of technologies like cultivated meat and seafood, which would enable us to transform access to sustainable, high-quality nutrition. We are finding ways to produce meat using exponentially less land and water. Cultivated meat requires animal cells that can proliferate rapidly and cheaply.
Fast Forwarding Evolution
We know that evolution is an incredibly powerful algorithm that has brought about the diversity of life around us.
Suppose we can harness the power of this algorithm to solve the problems of an overpopulated planet. My team is doing exactly this by using evolutionary design to create and sift through the billions of possible solutions 10,000 times faster than ever before. If we can look at enough designs, even without fully comprehending their intricacies, biology can guide us to a winning solution every time.
Now imagine that we’ve succeeded in miniaturizing the test tube, which is the unit of measure in biology, into a vessel smaller than a human hair’s width. This allows us to place an individual cell and the reagents to test its performance into this vessel, take 100s of millions of these vessels, and put them into a chip that fits in the palm of our hand.
We call this the microprocessor of biology. We evaluate the thousands of vessels per second. This is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, than with any other technology in existence.
Making the Biggest Impact
Global food corporations and exporters will not invest in producing or supplying foods in areas where they will not see profits, so we are finding ways to bring the cost of producing food and nutrition ingredients to well below cost parity, thereby opening up access to these products worldwide.
My organization is already creating proteins identical to those found in nature but made at a larger scale, at a lower cost, and with less environmental damage. We also focus on supply chains, mainly where bottlenecks exist, because they contribute significantly to food insecurity.
Foodtech innovation was one of the trends that shaped 2023. We are entering a new era of food ingredients that will become how we eat. Investors believe it, too, with food tech attracting over $13 billion in 2024. Startups in this sector now have a combined value of more than $1.5 trillion.
While climate change, resource scarcity, wars and population growth threaten our food security, there is hope.
Thanks to tech innovation and the unwavering commitment among biotech scientists who are all working hard to address the issue of how we will feed not just those countries worst affected, such as those in the presently high risk MENA region, but across the entire world by 2050.
Rolling Stone MENA newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.
