Governments and businesses have more tools than ever for spotting vulnerabilities in the food system before they trigger global disruptions. That’s good news as the climate crisis and geopolitical turbulence intensify.
The bad news? These technologies won’t achieve much if they’re only used to patch a system in need of an overhaul, speakers at the Hello Tomorrow Summit in Amsterdam.
The politics of progress
The problem with resilience, said Giga Futures consultancy founder Christine Gould during a panel on the topic, “is that you bounce back to a status quo that is fundamentally not working.” For the most part, the current food system is operating as designed, to deliver yield and shelf-stability at scale. “But we’re living in a world where that’s no longer enough,” she said.
There’s broad consensus that the food system needs updating but little agreement about how to do it.
Take, for example, the vision outlined by Marc Canal, a senior fellow at McKinsey Global Institute, which published a report this year called “A Century of Plenty.” It argues that humanity already possesses a “progress machine” capable of generating huge leaps in prosperity—increasingly decoupled from carbon emissions—to deliver Switzerland-level living standards to today’s poorest populations by 2100.
Surveying the past century and modern advancements, “it’s almost weird to think, okay, now all of a sudden we’re going to stop,” Canal said. That’s true even in “this more-conflict world” where pessimism runs rampant, he said in a presentation at the event that urged continued tech development, private-sector innovation and a “new narrative” to inspire it. One slide read, in part, “The opportunity is real. Growth is good.”
Giuseppe Borghi, who leads Earth observation development at the European Space Agency, agreed that “we should have a very positive view of the future,” citing “a lot of elements that were not available 50 years ago, 80 years ago.” But he cautioned that “the political element” is “what we are missing.”
The ESA has been building digital models to monitor and predict the interacting effects of human activity and natural processes, Borghi said. The ongoing project draws on satellite, meteorological, supply-chain, precision-agriculture and other data to “detect subtle elements a few weeks or months before the damage is coming,” he said. (“The commercialization of space is helping a lot in this direction,” Borghi added.) The goal is to arm policymakers with “actionable insights” before crop failures, floods or fires spiral out of control.
Even so, Borghi described tech deployments like this as “simple engineering” relative to the political coordination required to utilize them well. To “put together different cultures, put together different strategies and so on is the critical element,” he said.
Policy and technology in food security
This argument and others like it have grown louder lately, particularly as shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have hit fuel and fertilizer prices. The think tank IPES-Food, which has criticized some forms of digitization in agrifood as business plays that prop up a brittle and unjust food system, released a report last month calling for policy measures to reduce volatility, stabilize prices and rebalance power across the value chain.
Gould emphasized Friday that “it can’t just be technology” that bolsters food security, saying governments “need a new vision” to support it.
For example, state agencies are well-positioned to repurpose and mobilize interventions for which “the business case never panned out,” as with vertical farming, she said. Gould cited U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s creation of the land-grant university system in 1862, during the American Civil War, as a model of ambitious policy responses in periods of “extreme vulnerability.”
Tech can play a powerful role, she said: AI can help spot intellectual property “sitting maybe latent or dormant in one sector and match it to another,” for example, or find a crop “over in this region here that might be perfect” in another as climate patterns shift.
“Who funds that, at the end of the day?” is a big question, Gould said, but industry isn’t likely to do it alone. Corporate risk management teams “are thinking very, very short term,” she said, “like breeding corn varieties for the next five years.”
She argued policymakers need to go beyond reactive resilience measures and take an “antifragile” approach, a term the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized in his 2012 book of that title. In the process, they can draw on public-sector and institutional prototypes, Gould said: “We can learn some of the capabilities from how militaries prepare and bring that into our innovation agenda.”
If this sounds hard and complicated, it is. But “complexity is the new normal,” she said, “and we have to lean into it.”
