Road Map

advancements, process innovations, and investments in research and development, which will bring down costs, further lowering the horizontal cost curve in figure 1.5. Chapters 4 and 5 show that insect farming and hydroponics offer realistic prospects for scalability given each industry’s growth potential and conventional agriculture’s large and growing demands on land, water, and energy resources. Barclays Bank estimates that the market for farmed insects for human food and animal feed will be worth up to US$8 billion by 2030, with a 24 percent compound annual growth rate (MarketWatch 2019). The market for hydroponics was worth about US$8.1 billion in 2019 and will be worth US$16 billion by 2025 (Markets and Markets 2019)—a 12.1 percent annual growth rate.

Subsidies to conventional agriculture reduce the cost of conventional farming, which could impede the transition to frontier agriculture and the circular food economy. These policies distort and lower the conventional farming line below the unsubsidized cost curve in figure 1.5. These types of subsidies give preferential treatment to environmentally harmful alternatives. Examples include irrigation or fertilizer subsidies. Missing policies, or policy errors of omission, can be equally damaging. These occur when governments fail to take corrective action to mitigate the damaging impacts from conventional farming and the current linear agri-food model. Such bad policies, from errors of commission or omission, can create disadvantages for new technologies that are socially and environmentally preferable. If governments corrected any of these policy errors, there would be a shift in the comparative and competitive advantages of frontier agricultural technologies relative to conventional farming, moving outward the conventional farming curve in figure 1.5.

ROAD MAP

The report is divided into six chapters. After this introductory chapter, chapter 2 looks at the current food security situation in African FCV countries and some of its drivers. Chapter 3 examines the food and health benefits of insect farming in Africa. Chapter 4 focuses on the potential for mainstreaming insect farming into Africa’s greater protein production economy, including estimating protein and biofertilizer production levels from black soldier fly farming and the resulting economic, climate, and employment benefits. Chapter 5 examines the benefits of expanding hydroponics as a means to quick and nutritious crop production in Africa. Each chapter also describes the benefits, costs, and potential drawbacks of the frontier agricultural technologies. Chapter 6 concludes the report by outlining the major factors that constrain the widespread adoption of insect and hydroponic farming in Africa. It proposes practical ways forward in replacing the linear food economy with a circular food economy through the expansion of frontier agricultural technologies.