The world could fall short of food by 2050 due to falling crop yields, insufficient investment in agricultural research and trade shocks, according to Joe Biden’s special envoy for food security, Dr Cary Fowler.
Fowler, who is also known as the “father” of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a global store of seeds for the most significant crops, said studies by agricultural economists showed the world needed to produce 50-60% more food by 2050 in order to feed its growing population. But crop yields rates were projected to decline by between 3-12% as a result of global heating.
“We’re going to fall fairly short of being able to provide that kind of increase in food production by mid-century,” Fowler said.
Asked by Guardian Australia whether he described the situation as an “existential crisis”, Fowler replied: “It’s pretty close to it, isn’t it?”
Fowler was in Canberra on Tuesday to give the keynote address at the Crawford Fund’s annual conference. The title for the conference is Global Food Security in a Riskier World.
He was appointed to the role of special envoy by Biden in 2022. His previous roles include with the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development.
Fowler said Australian agriculture had much to offer globally in research and development around food security in a warming, drying climate, having built a world-leading industry despite poor soils and a challenging climate. The growing industry around Indigenous crops had also attracted global interest.
But he warned that many countries had become lax about the challenge ahead off the back of huge gains in productivity that saw a massive increase in food production in the past century.
“We are in the midst of a global food crisis,” he said. “More than 700 million people were undernourished in 2022 compared to 613 million in 2019. It’s an incomprehensibly large number and a human tragedy. Every country is affected, including countries like Australia, but especially the most vulnerable around the world.”
The crisis has been exacerbated by supply chain disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, high fertiliser prices and low grain supplies on hand. Given 131 of 196 countries in the world were net food importers, Fowler said, any shocks to a global system would immediately impact trade.
“As a result of all of those things, a number of countries took action to restrict trade, and that made the problem even worse,” he said.
“Because typically, trade is how you make up for short-term deficits in your own production. So if you ask the question of what the causes are, then you have to look at climate, stockpiles, trade and conflict.”
Fowler said countries needed to increase their investment in agricultural research, including on longer-term “moonshot” projects with no near-term payoffs. The United States agricultural research and development budget was at the same level it was 50 years ago, when taking into account inflation.
“Many developed countries, and I put the United States in that category, have … fallen behind China in terms of public investment in agricultural R&D,” he said.
While some of that research funding had been picked up by the private sector, he said, in recent years much of that was focused on developing and marketing new food and beverage products rather than public sector plant-breeding programs, or the effects of drought or climate change on food production crops.
“All dollars are not invested equally, if we are trying to fix those outcomes.”
