The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) describes the challenges facing the world’s food and farming system, in the introduction to its ‘Global Forum on Agriculture 2019.’
The challenges are:
- Ensuring food security and nutrition for a population expected to increase by two billion in the next 30 years.
- Dealing with the effects of climate change.
- Farming sustainably at a time when global competition has never been stronger.
It’s the belief of the OECD – and Nuseed – that agriculture will deliver.
“Agriculture has already experienced several key inflection points in its history,” says Nuseed’s Group Executive, Brent Zacharias.
“As we enter the next two decades, we are about to see the most significant step-change yet seen in agriculture. There is enormous opportunity not only to continue to meet the big challenges related to feeding our population, but to fundamentally change the intrinsic value of crops.”
In the future, the transformation of food and farming systems will be enabled and accelerated through the use of technology.
These technologies include ‘big data,’ the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, blockchain, autonomous vehicles, advanced robotics, additive manufacturing, advanced materials and nanotechnologies.
Next-generation plant biotechnologies and genomics are also critical tools.
“We are now at a point in history when breeding advances, other technologies and a tremendous amount of hard-won knowledge are enabling us to move beyond incremental improvements in crops as commodities,” explains Zacharias. “We are shifting the purpose and use of crops to go from only feeding the world population to doing that and solving important consumer-driven problems.”
Agriculture is uniquely positioned to provide customized solutions to many food, health and energy problems.
