It’s been said that feeding the hungry is the world’s oldest philanthropic aim, but that doesn’t mean we’ve gotten good at it. According to the UN, 925 million people currently don’t have enough to eat. That’s almost 1 out of every 7 of us, with the young being the most visible victims. Each year, 10.9 million children die—half because of issues related to undernourishment. In developing nations, 1 out of 3 children show stunted growth resulting from malnutrition. Iodine deficiency is the single leading cause of mental retardation and brain damage; a lack of vitamin A kills a million infants annually. And this is where we are today, right now, before the world’s population balloons by billions, before global warming reduces arable land, before—that is to say—an already unfathomable problem becomes downright ineffable.
That said, the situation brings to mind the story of two shoe salesmen from Britain circa 1900. Both go to Africa to explore new markets. After a week, each writes a letter home. The first salesman reports: “Prospects are terrible, no one here wears shoes, I’m on the next boat out.” But the second sees things differently: “This place is amazing. Market potential is almost unlimited. I may never leave.” In other words, when it comes to food, there’s ample opportunity for improvement.
Over the past one hundred years, agriculture has mainly been a brute force equation. First we industrialized our farms, next we industrialized our food. We backboned our food production and distribution systems with petroleum products. These days, it takes 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food. In a world facing energy shortages, this alone makes the process untenable. Irrigation systems have pumped our reservoirs dry. Major aquifers in both China and India are almost gone, resulting in dust bowls far worse than the American Midwest suffered in the 1930s. Toxic herbicides and pesticides have destroyed our waterways. Runoff from nitrogen-laden fertilizer has turned our coastal waters into dead zones so severe that the United States, a nation surrounded by oceans, must now import 80 percent of its seafood from abroad.
But even that bizarre practice can’t last. Modern fishing practices are another part of this brute force equation. Bottom trawling destroys about six million square miles of that sea floor every year—that’s an area the size of Russia. So forget about importation. A 2006 report in the journal Science, written by an international group of ecologists and environmentalists, showed that at our current pace of exploitation, the world will run out of seafood by 2048.
Moreover, we seem to be exhausting the potential of many of the technologies that have produced the greatest gains in food production over the past half century. According to Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, “The last decade has witnessed the emergence of yet another constraint on growth in global agricultural productivity: the shrinking backlog of untapped technologies.” Japan, for example, has used just about every technology available, and rice yields have flatlined for fourteen years. South Korea and China are facing similar situations. Production of wheat in France, Germany, and Britain, the three countries that account for one-eighth of the world’s wheat, has similarly plateaued. And industrial farming has left poorer nations in even more precarious shape. Writing about the Punjab region in India—which many claim was transformed by the Green Revolution from “begging bowl” into “bread basket”—the celebrated environmentalist Vandana Shiva points out: “[F]ar from bringing prosperity, two decades of the Green Revolution have left the Punjab riddled with discontent and violence. Instead of abundance, the Punjab is beset with diseased soils, pest-infested crops, waterlogged deserts, and indebted and discontented farmers.”
Yet, despite all of this devastation, the past century has also seen a miraculous change in our ability to produce food. We’ve managed to feed more people using less space than ever before. Currently we farm 38 percent of all the land in the world. If production rates had remained as they were in 1961, we would have needed 82 percent to produce the same amount of food. This is what petrochemical-backed agricultural intensification has made possible. The challenge going forward is to replace this unsustainable brute force with a considerably more nuanced approach. If we can learn to work with our ecosystems rather than run roughshod over them, while simultaneously optimizing our food crops and food systems, we could easily find ourselves in the place of that second shoe salesman: with a wide-open market and an infinite potential.
Many feel the question of how to best improve our food crops has been reduced to a binary—to GMO (genetically modified organism) or not to GMO. Truthfully, though, that’s no longer the question. In 1996 there were 1.7 million hectares of biotech crops in the world; by 2010, the number had jumped to 148 million hectares. This 87-fold increase in hectares makes genetically engineered seeds (GEs) the fastest-adopted crop technology in the history of modern agriculture. Seriously, that horse has already left the barn.
Furthermore, the idea that GE crops are a Frankenfood sin against nature is, to be blunt, pretty ridiculous. It rests on the proposition that there’s something natural about agriculture. As idyllic as it seems, farming is just a 12,000-year-old way of optimizing lunch. In fact, as Matt Ridley explains:
[A]lmost by definition, all crop plants are “genetically modified.” They are monstrous mutants capable of yielding unnaturally large, free-threshing seeds or heavy, sweet fruits and dependent on human intervention to survive. Carrots are orange thanks only to the selection of a mutant first discovered perhaps as late as the sixteenth century in Holland. Bananas are sterile and incapable of setting seed. Wheat has three whole diploid (double) genomes in each of its cells, descended from three different wild grasses, and simply cannot survive as a wild plant—you never encounter wild wheat.
The lineage of agriculture is a lineage of humans rearranging plant DNA. For a very long time, crossbreeding was the preferred method, but then came Mendel and his peas. As we began to understand how genetics worked, scientists tried all kinds of wild techniques to induce mutations. We dipped seeds in carcinogens and bombarded them with radiation, occasionally inside of nuclear reactors. There are over 2,250 of these mutants around; most of them are certified “organic.”
GE, on the other hand, allows us to be more precise in our search for new traits. For the first time in the history of plant breeding, the tools of genetic engineering allow us to understand what it is that we’re doing. That’s the real difference. That’s what all this fuss has been about: a radical change in the quality and quantity of information available to us, a move from evolution by natural selection to evolution by intelligent direction.
This is not to say there aren’t interesting non-GE techniques of seed optimization in development. The Kansas-based Land Institute is attempting to turn annual food crops like wheat and corn into perennials. The results could be fantastic. Natural ecosystems are far better than human-managed agricultural systems at converting sunlight into living tissue. Perennials—and mainly polyculture perennials (meaning a mixture of perennials growing side by side)—anchor those ecosystems. These plants have long roots and diverse architectures, making them weather tolerant, pest resistant, disease resistant, and able to produce more biomass per acre than human agriculture without requiring any fossil fuel inputs or degrading the soil and water. The issue is one of time. The Land Institute expects it to take another twenty-five years until these perennials are profitable and productive. Biocrops, meanwhile, are here today.
Moreover, after thirty years of research, a great many of our GE fears have been quieted. Health concerns appear to be a nonstarter. More than a trillion GE meals have been served, and not a single case of GE-induced illness has turned up. Ecological devastation was another worry, but, overall, GE appears to be good for the environment. The seeds don’t require plowing, so soil structure remains intact. This halts erosion, improves carbon sequestration and water filtration, and massively reduces the amount of petrochemical inputs needed to grow our food. Herbicide use is also down, while yield increases are up.
“[W]hen farmers in India adopted Bt cotton in 2002,” writes Stewart Brand in the Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, “the nation went from a cotton importer to an exporter, from 17 million bales to 27 million bales. What was the social cost of that? The main event was that Bt cotton increased yields by 50 percent and decreased pesticide use by 50 percent, and the Indian grower’s total income went from $540 million to $1.7 billion.”
This is a present-tense progress report. The agricultural portion of the biotech industry is growing at 10 percent a year; the technology itself, on a faster curve. In 2000, when the first plant genome was sequenced, it took seven years, $70 million, and five hundred people. The same project today takes about three minutes and costs about $100. This is good news. More information means better targeted approaches. Right now we’re enjoying first generation GE crops; soon we’ll have versions that can grow in drought conditions, in saline conditions, crops that are nutritionally fortified, that act as medicines, that increase yields and lower the use for pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels. The best designs will do many of these things at once. The Gates Foundation–led effort BioCassava Plus aims to take cassava, one of the world’s largest staple crops, fortify it with protein, vitamins A and E, iron, and zinc; lower its natural cyanide content, make it virus resistant, and storable for two weeks (instead of one day). By 2020, this one genetically modified crop could radically improve the health of the 250 million people for whom it is a daily meal.
Sure, there are issues with GE. No one wants to see a few companies in charge of the world’s food supply, so who owns the seed is a real concern. But this too won’t last. As the wife-and-husband team of University of California at Davis plant pathologist Pamela Ronald and UC Davis organic farming expert Raoul Adamchak described in their book Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food: “It [GE] is a relatively simple technology that scientists in most countries, including many developing countries, have perfected. The product of GE technology, a seed, requires no extra maintenance or additional farming skills.” This means that GE is already democratic, provided that we can learn to share the intellectual property. This hasn’t happened yet (or not in any great measure), but in a recent speech given at the Long Now Foundation, author and organic activist Michael Pollan called for an open source movement for GE crops. Stewart Brand agrees, arguing that “if Monsanto throws a fit, tell them that if they’re polite, you might license back to them the locally attuned tweaks you’ve made to their patented gene array.”
But even with open-sourced GE crops, feeding the world isn’t just about the production side of the equation—there’s also distribution to consider. So consider this: we live on a planet where nearly one billion people are hungry, yet we already produce more than enough food to feed the world. According to the Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First, there are 4.3 pounds for every person every day: 2.5 pounds of grain, beans, and nuts; about a pound of meat, milk, and eggs; and another pound of fruits and vegetables. Many believe the incredible waste in our distribution system is the issue. While that’s true, if we’re really serious about feeding the world, the solution isn’t to find new ways to move food around more efficiently. It’s time to move the farm.
This isn’t the first time we’ve been forced to move the farm. During the tail end of the Second World War, the US military was having trouble feeding itself. This too was a distribution problem. With troops strung out all over the world, not only was it prohibitively expensive to transport perishables hither and yon but also supply ships tended to be easy prey for submarine attacks. The obvious answer was also to grow food locally, but with soldiers stationed on barren islands in the Pacific and in arid deserts in the Middle East, fertile soil was not readily available. Then again, who needs soil when there’s water?
The idea of growing food in water dates back, at least, to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But hydroponics, the growing of food in a nutrient-rich solution, is a more modern development. The first published work on the subject was Francis Bacon’s 1627 Sylva Sylvarum: or, a Natural History, in Ten Centuries, but the tech didn’t come of age until the 1930s, when scientists perfected the chemical composition of the growth medium. Yet beyond the occasional odd application—Pan American Airways grew veggies on Wake Island in the 1930s so that passengers could enjoy leafy greens with their midflight meal—no one had tried to farm this way at scale.
World War II changed all of this. In 1945 the US military began building a series of large-scale hydroponic experiments, first on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and later on Iwo Jima and in Japan—including what was then the world’s largest hydroponic facility: a twenty-two-acre farm in Chofu. Simultaneously, because we had troops guarding our oil supply, more hydroponic farms were built in Iraq and Bahrain. All were incredibly successful. In 1952 alone, the army’s hydroponic division grew over eight million pounds of fresh produce.
After the war, most people forgot about these successes. Food production went back to the soil. The Green Revolution occurred, and hydroponics was further sidelined for petrochemical solutions. A trickle of research continued. NASA, which wanted to know how to feed astronauts on Mars, stuck with it. A few others did as well. In 1983 Richard Stoner made a major breakthrough, discovering that it was possible to suspend plants in midair, delivering food through a nutrient-rich mist. This was the birth of aeroponics, which was when things started to get really interesting.
Traditional agriculture uses 70 percent of the water on the planet. Hydroponics is 70 percent more efficient than traditional agriculture. Aeroponics, meanwhile, is 70 percent more efficient than hydroponics. Thus, if we used aeroponics for agriculture, we could drop water use from 70 percent to 6 percent—quite the savings. With the threat of water scarcity getting more serious every day, it’s hard to believe these technologies haven’t been widely adopted.
“It’s a PR problem,” says Dickson Despommier. “When people hear hydroponics, they don’t think NASA, they think pot grower. Hell, until about ten years ago, I thought pot grower.”
But this is starting to change, and Dr. Despommier is somewhat responsible. A tall man with a gray beard, Despommier is a microbiologist and ecologist by training, one of the world’s leading experts on intracellular parasitism, and, until his retirement in 2009, a professor of public health at Columbia University. In 1999 Despommier was teaching a class in medical ecology that included a section on climate change and its potential impact on food production.
“It was a really depressing thing to have to teach,” he recalls. “The FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] estimates that agricultural production needs to double by 2050 to keep up with population growth. Yet eighty percent of the arable land is already in use, and our current reports on climate change show crop production declining by ten percent to twenty percent in the next ten years. By the time I was done laying this out for my students, they wanted to throw rotten tomatoes at me.”
Sick of the doom and gloom, Despommier set aside his regular curriculum and instead challenged his students to come up with a positive solution. After thinking it over, they came back to him with rooftop gardening. “It was local,” says Despommier. “It seemed doable. They wanted to know how many people they could feed by growing food on all the rooftops—no commercial buildings, just apartment complexes—in Manhattan. So I gave them the rest of the semester to figure it out.”
As this was the era before Google Maps, just deducing the available rooftop space took three weeks in the New York Public Library. “What to grow?” was the next question. Their crop needed to be capable of dense production but pack a large nutritional punch. They settled on rice. But then they did the math. Growing rice on all the rooftops in New York would feed only 2 percent of the city’s population.
“They were pretty upset,” recalls Despommier. “All that work, and all they could feed was two percent of New York. I tried to mollify them, saying, ‘Well, if you can’t grow food on the rooftops, what about all those apartment buildings that are abandoned? What about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base? What about skyscrapers? Imagine how much food we could grow if we just stuck it inside tall buildings.’”
At the time, for Despommier, it was mostly a throwaway notion, something said quickly to appease his students. But the idea stayed with him. His wife wanted to know how it would work, so he found himself looking up hydroponics on the Internet. “I read about what the military accomplished during WWII and realized two things: Hydroponics wasn’t just for pot growers. And my crazy vertical farming idea—it wasn’t so crazy.”
His students were equally enthralled. They went right back to work. Within a year, a rough design was hashed out, and their vertical farm could feed a heck of a lot more than just 2 percent of New York’s population. “One thirty-story building,” says Despommier, “one square New York block in footprint, could feed fifty thousand people a year. One hundred fifty vertical farms could feed everyone in New York City.”
And they have astounding advantages. Vertical farms are immune to weather, so crops can be grown year-round under optimal conditions. One acre of skyscraper floor produces the equivalent of ten to twenty traditional soil-based acres. Employing clean-room technologies means no pesticides or herbicides, so there’s no agricultural runoff. The fossil fuels now used for plowing, fertilizing, seeding, weeding, harvesting, and delivery are gone as well. On top of all that, we could reforest the old farmland as parkland and slow the devastating loss of biodiversity.
So how does this all work? Nutrition, obviously, is hydroponically or aeroponically delivered. Plants also need sunlight, so vertical farms are designed for maximum shine. Parabolic mirrors bounce light around the building’s interior, while the exterior is skinned in ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a revolutionary polymer that is extremely light, nearly bulletproof, self-cleaning, and as transparent as water. Grow lights are also used, both at night and during cloudy conditions, and the electricity needed to run them will be generated by capturing the energy we now flush down our toilets. That’s right: we will recycle our own dung. “New York City alone,” says Despommier, “is shitting away nine hundred million kilowatts of electricity each year.”
Perhaps most importantly, the average American foodstuff now travels 1,500 miles before being consumed. That’s only the average. The typical US meal contains five ingredients grown in other countries. Dinner in LA could easily include beef from Chile (5,585 miles), rice from Thailand, (8,263), olives from Italy (6,353), mushrooms from New Zealand (6,508), and a nice shiraz from Australia (7,487). As 70 percent of a foodstuff’s final retail price comes from transportation, storage, and handling, these miles add up quickly.
Vertical farms change all this. They reduce the number of days it takes sustenance to reach our plates to the number of minutes it takes to walk a head of lettuce down ten flights of stairs. And despite their futuristic feel, there are no new technologies involved, so vertical farms are already cropping up. There are a number of pilot projects in the United States, and more substantial efforts overseas. Japan, while it hasn’t switched yet from horizontal to vertical production, is attempting to build several hundred “plant factories” to increase domestic food security. Using clean-room techniques and employing senior citizens to tend the plants, they can now harvest twenty lettuce crops a year instead of one or two, using traditional practices. Meanwhile, Sweden’s Plantagon is already working on five vertical farming projects: two in Sweden, two in China, and one in Singapore. Its standard model, a huge glass sphere with planting boxes arranged in a giant spiral, allows a greenhouse of 10,000 square meters to grow 100,000 square meters’ worth of produce.
Yet the real promise of vertical farms comes from adding tomorrow’s technologies to today’s ideas. Imagine ubiquitous embedded sensors perfecting temperature, pH balance, and nutrient flows. Add in AI and robotics that maximize planting, growing, and harvesting of every square meter. Since food production is limited by a plant’s ability to convert sunlight into fuel, how about using GE to improve this as well? Researchers at the University of Illinois have been working on this idea for a while now. They believe that over the next ten to fifteen years, photosynthetic optimization could increase crop yields by as much as 50 percent. By growing these optimized crops inside of vertical farms—and optimizing our LED lights to the plants’ preferred spectrum—we could save even more energy (by removing the bandwidths that plants don’t use) and push those yields significantly higher.
What all of this means is that for the 70 percent of us who will soon live in cities, vertical farms offer the clearest path toward ending hunger and malnutrition. These farms already have the ability to increase the amount of food grown per harvest by orders of magnitude and increase the number of possible harvests by factors of ten. They have the potential to produce all of this food while simultaneously requiring 80 percent less land, 90 percent less water, 100 percent fewer pesticides, and nearly zero transportation costs. Integrate a few emerging technologies—aquaponics for closed-loop protein production; robotic crop harvesting to lower labor costs; AI systems attached to biosensors for better environmental regulation; the continued development of biomass energy systems (so that the parts of the plant that are not eaten can be recycled as a fuel); the betterment and continued integration of waste recycling systems (to further close the loop and drop energy costs)—and we end up with the gold standard of sustainable agriculture: an entirely local food production and distribution system with no waste, zero environmental impact, and the scalable potential to feed the world.
We still have a problem. The strategies discussed so far in this chapter all improve crop production, but optimal health means 10 to 20 percent of one’s total calories must come from protein. We can eat more tofu, but for much of the world, meat is the preferred choice. Unfortunately, while meat might not be murder, it’s certainly murdering the planet.
Cattle, for starters, are energy hogs, with the standard ratio of energy input to beef output being 54:1. They’re also a land hog, with livestock production accounting for 70 percent of all agricultural lands and covering 30 percent of all land surface on the planet. Ranching produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world, and is the leading cause of soil erosion and deforestation. Disease is another issue. Tightly packed herds of animals are breeding grounds for pandemics. The global demand for meat is expected to double by 2050, so unless something changes, the threat of pandemics can only increase.
And the danger is increasing. As people rise out of poverty, their taste for meat rises too. Between 1990 and 2002, China’s level of carnivorous consumption doubled. Back in 1961 the Chinese consumed 3.6 kilograms per person per year. By 2002, that had jumped to 52.4 kilograms. This same pattern can be seen emerging globally.
But something is changing—actually, two things. In the near term, there’s aquaculture; in the long term, there’s in-vitro meat. Aquaculture is nothing new. How old is another question. Manuscripts from the fifth century BC show fish farming was practiced in ancient China. Both the Egyptians and the Romans cultivated oysters as well. The more modern incarnation was a post–World War II innovation that’s been pretty unstoppable ever since. From 1950 through 2007, global aquaculture yields increased from two million metric tons to fifty million metric tons. So while natural fisheries have been in decline during this same period (the global fish catch peaked in the 1980s), fish farming has allowed human consumption to keep on rising. Aquaculture is now the fastest-growing animal food production system, supplying nearly 30 percent of our seafood.
And that number needs to climb significantly higher. Back in 2003, the journal Nature reported that 90 percent of all large fish in the sea are gone, taken either for direct human consumption or for animal food, fertilizers, and oil. This list includes tuna, swordfish, marlin, and the large groundfish such as cod, halibut, skates, and flounder, all threatened by the downstream effect of overfishing and industrial fishing practices. As fabled oceanographer Sylvia Earle (often called “Her Deepness”) explained in the pages of National Geographic:
Trawling takes huge amounts of bycatch, birds, mammals, and a whole host of life. Many creatures we don’t even have names for yet get lost, killed in the process of dragging nets across the sea floor to catch shrimp and flounder and other bottom dwellers. And longlines—with baited hooks every few feet—may run 50 or 60 miles through the ocean and just catch whatever’s there. There’s no sign on the hook that says it shouldn’t be swordfish or tuna, and those are two that shouldn’t be caught right now. If we want to have recovery take place, we should be giving them a break.
Aquaculture is a large part of that break. The practice is renewable and scalable. And besides helping to protect our oceans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) believes that fish farming can reduce America’s need for seafood imports ($10 billion worth a year), create jobs, reduce the trade deficit, and improve food security. Others are more cautious. For carnivorous fish such as salmon, aquaculture requires two pounds of wild-caught fish to feed one pound of farmed fish. Breeding farms suffer all the issues of factory farming: concentrate thousands of fish, and waste and disease become a problem. Another is the destruction of natural habitats. Shrimp farming, for example, has devastated coastal mangrove forests around the world.
But here too we are learning from our mistakes. Thanks to a considerable amount of international pressure, the shrimp industry is starting to clean up its act. Improved vegetable proteins and rendered animal by-products, fortified with amino acids, are replacing wild-caught fish in most salmon farming operations. There are even bigger gains found in combining integrative agriculture with aquaculture.
On a smaller scale, Asian rice farmers use fish to fight rice pests such as the golden snail, both boosting rice yields and protein consumption (as they also get to harvest the fish). In Africa, farmers are installing fish ponds in home gardens, as the mud from the bottom of the pond makes a great mineral-rich fertilizer. On a larger scale, the most exciting innovation may belong to Will Allen, the MacArthur Genius Award–winning force behind Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based organization building one of the United States’s first vertical farms. Allen, a pioneer in urban aquaculture, aims to devote the first floor of his vertical farm to the process. Some 110,000 gallons of water will produce 100,000 tilapia, lake perch, and, possibly, bluegill a year. The fish feces will be recycled to fertilize plants on higher levels of the greenhouse.
But this is just a starting point. If we’re really serious about protecting our oceans and preserving seafood as a source of protein, integrated aquaculture needs to be a significant part of our entire food chain. “If we value the ocean and the ocean’s health at all,” continues Earle, “we have to understand that fish are critical to maintaining the integrity of ocean systems, which in turn make the planet work. We have been so single-minded about fish, thinking that the only good fish is a cooked fish, rather than recognizing their importance to the ecosystem that also has a great value to us.”
In 1932 Winston Churchill said, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” As it turns out, it took a few extra decades for biotechnologists to deliver on Churchill’s promise, but more and more, it looks like it was worth the wait.
Cultured meat (or in-vitro meat, as some prefer) is meat grown from stem cells. The process was pioneered by NASA in the late 1990s, as the agency suspected this might be a good way to feed astronauts on long space flights. By 2000, goldfish cells were being used to create edible muscle protein, and research began in earnest. By 2007, there had been enough progress that a collection of international scientists formed the In Vitro Meat Consortium to promote large-scale cultured meat production. The following year, an economic analysis presented at the In Vitro Meat Symposium in Norway showed that meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors could be cost competitive with European beef prices, and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) created a $1 million incentive prize to move things along. By 2009, scientists in the Netherlands had succeeded in turning pig cells into pork inside a petri dish. More work has been done since then, and while we’ll still a decade away from bringing this technology to market, we are definitely heading in that direction.
Providing people with protein is not all that will drive this change. “Cattle ranching is always going to be an environmental disaster, and ground beef is always going to be bad for you,” says Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a nonprofit that funds research into cultured meat. “On reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone, switching to cultured meat is the equivalent of everyone in America suddenly driving hybrids. And, healthwise, real beef is always going to have fatty acids that contribute to heart disease. You just can’t turn a cow into a salmon, but cultured meat allows us to do just that. With in vitro meat, we can create a hamburger that prevents heart attacks, rather than one that causes them.”
By growing beef in bioreactors, we also become less vulnerable to emerging diseases (70 percent of emerging diseases come from livestock) and contamination—something that occurs when workers in slaughterhouses accidentally slice open an animal’s intestinal tract. Cultured meat has no gastrointestinal tract, so there’s no danger of harmful bacteria spilling into our food supply. There are, of course, concerns that the same hostility facing GE crops will be encountered with cultured meat, but the medical establishment is in hot pursuit of organ regeneration. If we’re willing to live with a lab-grown kidney permanently inside our bodies, then what concerns could we possibly have with cultured beef spending a few hours in our stomachs?
Beyond the increased health benefits, both from nutritionally fortified meat and from the reduced chance of pandemic, the 30 percent of the world’s surface that is currently used for livestock can be reforested. The Belgium-sized chunk of Amazonian rain forest razed annually for cattle production can now be kept intact, the 40 percent of the world’s cereal grains now devoured by livestock can be repurposed for human consumption, and the forty billion animals killed each year (in the United States alone) no longer have to suffer for our benefit. As PETA president Ingrid Newkirk told the New Yorker: “If people are unwilling to stop eating animals by the billions, then what a joy to be able to give them animal flesh that comes without the horror of the slaughterhouse, the transport truck, and the mutilations, pain, and suffering of factory farming.”
The three technologies presented in this chapter so far have world-feeding potential, but there are still issues to be discussed. While aquaculture is here today, the GE industry is dominated by three seeds (cotton, corn, soybean) and has yet to penetrate deep into the food crop market. That said, golden rice (rice fortified with vitamin A) is about to clear regulatory hurdles and enter the food chain. As many believe that this technology will save millions of lives, its arrival could bring a much-needed shift in public opinion and speed the acceptance of other biocrops. But, between GE’s developmental timetables and regulatory hurdles, we’re still five to ten years away from significant change.
Cultured meat, meanwhile, is probably ten to fifteen years out, and the same appears true for widespread deployment of vertical farms. Moreover, vertical farms are designed to be built within cities or just outside of them, but the majority of the world’s hungry and malnourished now live in rural poverty. In light of these facts, this does raise the issue of stopgap measures.
While no blanket technology fits this bill, there’s now an emerging set of agricultural practices that blends the best of agronomy, forestry, ecology, hydrology, and a number of other sciences. Known as agroecology, the basic idea is to design food systems that mimic the natural world. Instead of striving for zero-environmental impacts, agroecologists want systems that produce more food on less land while simultaneously enhancing ecosystems and promoting biodiversity.
And they’re getting them. A recent UN survey found that agroecology projects in fifty-seven countries have increased crop yields an average of 80 percent, with some being pushed up to 116 percent. One of the most successful of those is the push-pull system, developed to help Kenyan maize farmers deal with pestilence, invasive parasitic weeds, and poor soil conditions. Without getting too technical, push-pull is an intercropping system in which farmers plant specific plants between rows of corn. Some plants release odors that insects find unpleasant. (They “push” insects away.) Others, like sticky molasses grass, “pull” the insects in, acting as a kind of natural flypaper. Using this simple process, farmers have increased crop yields by 100 to 400 percent.
More importantly, while these agroecological techniques are widely available today (three hundred thousand African farmers have already adopted push-pull), we are only beginning to understand their real potential. Although the practices themselves look decidedly low tech, all the fields they’re informed by are information-based sciences and thus on exponential growth curves. Moreover, there’s no anti-GE bias permeating agroecology, so as better and better biotech becomes available, these new seeds can be quickly integrated into these sustainable systems. As UC Davis plant pathologist Pamela Ronald explained in an article for the Economist, this may be the very best way forward:
A premise basic to almost every agricultural system (conventional, organic, and everything in between) is that seed can only take us so far. The farming practices used to cultivate the seed are equally important. GE crops alone will not provide all the changes needed in agriculture. Ecologically based farming systems and other technological changes, as well as modified government policies, undoubtedly are also required. Yet … there is now a clear scientific consensus that GE crops and ecological farming practices can coexist, and if we are serious about building a future sustainable agriculture, they must.
So there you have it: a long chain of sustainable intensification backed up by agroecological principles, GE crops, synthetic biology, perennial polycultures, vertical farms, robotics and AI, integrated agriculture, upgraded aquaculture, and a booming business in cultured meat. This is what it’s going to take to feed a world of nine billion. It won’t be easy. All these technologies will need to be scaled up simultaneously, and the sooner the better. This last point is key. We have a measure for the amount of plant mass-produced each year: it’s called primary productivity. As every animal on Earth eats either plants or animals that eat plants, this number is a good metric for examining the impact that human food consumption is having on the planet. Right now we’re consuming 40 percent of the planet’s primary productivity. That’s a dangerously high number. What’s the tipping point? Perhaps 45 percent could be enough to start a catastrophic loss of biodiversity from which our ecosystems cannot recover. Perhaps it’s 60 percent. No one knows for sure. What is known is that unless we figure out how to better the system and lower our impacts, then, with our ever-burgeoning population, we have little hope of a sustainable future. But if we follow the blueprint outlined in this chapter, we can radically increase the planet’s primary productivity, protect its biodiversity, and concurrently make good on mankind’s oldest humanitarian pledge: to feed the hungry. And we can do so in a truly abundant fashion.