Feeding the 10 billion

Agriculture holds the key to solving poverty

Only by putting the poorest in charge of their own lives and destinies will absolute poverty and deprivation be removed from the face of the earth

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, 2015 winner of the World Food Prize

Food has a transformative power

Agriculture is the engine of growth and hunger reduction in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Working to eliminate hunger fights poverty and realises people’s potential through work and education. Consequently, food is the fundamental resource to build resilient communities. The World Bank states that agricultural growth will have 2-4 times higher poverty alleviation power than nonagricultural growth.

Food demand is growing

One out of nine of the 7.5 billion people around the world is malnourished. By 2025 there will one billion more of us. Regions that are at highest risk of food insecurity will experience the highest growth. We will need to address the growing need for food. Not only will quantity be important; cost-efficient protein sources will be in ever greater demand, to cater to the shifting appetites of the growing middle class. That puts more pressure to intensify and diversify food production by smallholders – the majority of farmers in LMICs – and we need to make sure this is achieved sustainability.

Productivity and sustainability

The last half-century has seen a major increase in food production, mainly due to transformation of agricultural practices – the adoption of artificial fertilisers, pesticides, and highyield crops – as part of the Green Revolution.

However, greater intensification of agriculture brought with it unwanted environmental consequences. A push to produce more out of less has released carbon into the atmosphere, turned forests into barren land and cut biodiversity. Coping with the future needs of people ought to be coupled with the needs of the planet as a whole.

When it comes to climate change, and I say this with a heavy heart, agriculture is the biggest part of the problem

Mark Cackler, World Bank

The world needs to be both fed and sustainable

Overcoming climate change will help to overcome poverty. If we fail on one, we fail on the other

Lord Nicholas Stern, in Gordon Conway’s One Billion Hungry

Climate-smart agriculture

Climate change affects everyone but has greatest impact on poor economies. Over time, more people will become vulnerable as their livelihoods become unsustainable.

Going forward, agricultural practices need to concentrate on closed-loop production systems that are not detrimental to the environment. This approach is a part of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), which was first coined by The FAO back in 2010.

Efficiency isn’t everything

There is much more to improving global food yields than increasing production efficiency.

In fact, food security is a value chain problem: we need to diversify our food sources, especially proteins; preventing waste could save a third of all food produced; urbanisation will further complicate market access.

Smallholders, women in particular, experience barriers in accessing: • Resources and materials. • Information and training. • Credit for investment. • Land ownership. • Distribution channels. • Market access.

Challenge prizes

The Challenge Prize Centre at Nesta wants to bring forth new ideas of how the transformative power of food could fight systemic poverty and build economic and environmental resilience in the developing world. Prizes are powerful tools for incentivising the creation of longterm solutions to social challenges by stimulating new enterprise and endeavour.

Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future

Bill Gates

1. Sustainable use of soil

How can we improve food production while preventing soil degradation and adverse environmental change? The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has identified a strong link between land degradation and poverty. Poor land also represents a major threat to food security and the environment. Tropical and subtropical soil is especially vulnerable. Regions like these will be a major contributor of the future populational growth. Clearly, we have to tackle the problems of land and soil if we want to deal with hunger and poverty. Intensification of agriculture allowed people to flourish. Deforestation and the adaptation of land for annualised crops and pastures maximised food production, but has destroyed ecosystems. We How can we better support the needs of smallholder farmers? Smallholders farm an area of land of up to 10 hectares. They work mostly within families and produce for private consumption. In developing countries, smallholders are the main food suppliers – up to 80 per cent in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Farming in low resource settings is problematic for many reasons, but the difficulties boil down to lack of access to resources, tools and training. One effective way of dealing with this is through forming communities centered on sharing and cooperation. Such groups are more resilient and invest in productivity. Creating formalised and transparent co-op platforms could offer easier access to resources and expertise but also aid, credit and training. have seen the dramatic effect of topsoil erosion, pollution and inefficient water management on land fertility. Greenhouse gases are also on the rise due to deforestation, accelerating climate change. We need agroecological practices designed for smallholder farmers to prevent an environmental catastrophe as we feed the growing population. There are plenty of ideas around: adapting nutrientfixing microbes as ecofriendly biofertilisers; deep-rooted perennial plants doing wonders for soil and carbon sequestration; clever ways of growing old crops; polyculture methods boosting resilience through biodiversity. The list goes on – but a real breakthrough will require frugal innovation and a method to scale it in a low

3. Improving smallholder outcomes

resource setting. ICT solutions are one way of bringing people together but community groups around the globe have done very well without them, too. Smallholder farmer problems are in a big part women’s problems, thus solutions need to take gender into account. FAO reports that 79 per cent of economically active women are farmers and amount to 43 per cent of all agricultural workers in developing countries. Women often are paid less and do not own land, which has a detrimental effect on their education, status and the wellbeing of their children. One study showed that women’s education contributed 43 per cent of the reduction in child malnutrition over time. Giving women equal access to resources, materials and training could reduce malnutrition by up to 17 per cent, especially among children.

2. New sources of nutrition

What unconventional food source could we leverage to improve global nutrition? Frogs or snails have found their way onto our plates but other juicy creatures still have a long way to crawl before people across the world find them palatable. What if we embraced unusual but nutritious organisms and plants to address growing food demand? Necessity being the mother of invention, hundreds if not thousands of insect and bug species are eaten in the developing world. Additives derived from them are also used to enrich foodstuffs. It does make economic sense. Compared to cattle, insects need 12 times less feed to produce the same amount of protein, and have What can we do to incentivise shifting from value chains to sustainable food systems? According to FAO, a third of all food produced ends up either wasted or spoiled. That amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes of food – $1 trillion worth – each year. Just a quarter of that would be enough to feed all the hungry people in the world for two months. The situation is even worse in the developing world, where up to 40 per cent of food is wasted. It is more than a waste of nutrition. It is somebody’s work, land, their resources and their time that did not reach its transformative potential. We need a radical change of culture around food production and consumption. The most important thing is to produce varied and nutritious food sustainably with minimal environmental footprint. a lower carbon footprint. Algae also offer a very wellrounded nutritional package, and face less aversion and scepticism with eaters than creepy-crawlies do. Many algae applications are under consideration, from animal feed to baby formula. Algae are claimed to be 20 times more productive than regular crops, do not compete for fertile land and metabolise carbon dioxide. In fact, half of the world’s oxygen is produced by the microalgae in phytoplankton. The challenge is to identify an such an organism and designing a method of its cultivation on a small or community-wide scale. For these opportunities to take off, we should think about their operational needs and environmental

2. New sources of nutrition

competitiveness. Sustainability of food systems can be achieved by shifting towards closed-loop farming - recycling all elements to achieve a sustainable cycle of production. Thailand’s innovative cassava producers did just that. The leftover peel of this highly nutritious root is turned into fertilisers, while the wastewater is treated with microorganisms and produces extra biogas that powers the processing plants. Some dairy farmers are experimenting with similar ideas to reduce their carbon footprint involving cow manure to produce energy. The process can be so effective that the excess energy is being sold back to the grid at a profit. Synergies like these could help us to close the loop on food production and facilitate the next green agro-revolution.

Surgical equity

We want to bring transformational innovation to surgical procedures in poorer countries.

There is room for improvement in areas ranging from the development of better surgical tools and systems design, upskilling personnel and operative care, to new infrastructure, platforms and distribution systems for healthcare provision. With new technologies, materials science and ways of thinking, increasing access to and capacity of surgical care around the globe is within our grasp and could have a lasting benefit for communities in low resource settings.

Workshop facilitators

Lead facilitator

Daniel Berman

Lead, Global Health, Challenge Prize Centre, Nesta

Scott Smith

Managing Partner, Changeist

Piotr Gierszewski

Foresight Researcher, Challenge Prize Centre, Nesta

Caroline Purslow

Programme Manager, Longitude Prize, Challenge Prize Centre, Nesta

Our partners

Kate Sutton

Inclusive Economy Lead, Innovation Programmes, Nesta