Solved problem? We've hardly even identified the actual problem.
As it it stands now farming is an open loop system and input supplies are becoming constrained and expensive. We have killed our soils and the dirt that is left behind requires external inputs to produce current crop numbers.
In addition to this, we grow a large portion of our food in the United States in areas with active droughts and impending water shortages.
Fortunately there are better ways to do things, I just don't know that we can change fast enough.
To address the greater point of your comment though, I agree.
>Sure, there's [fossil fuels] somewhere up the supply chain but... it's not a big deal.
It is if you want sustainable food production.
An unsustainable system is by definition in the process of destroying itself. I don't know about you, but I want humanity to continue having food for generations to come.
> There are other ways to solve the problems currently solved by chemical inputs.
What is one way?
> And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer.
People need food to live and lots of people don't have much money. It's very easy to say we're addicted to cheap fertilizer when you can afford to pay premiums for your biodynamic organic food. Billions of people do not have that privilege.
>The world needs to be fed and needs to be fed properly
We can already do that without GMO.
>but damn is it a viable solution for vitamin deficiency and a way forward through changing environments.
Considering the areas people are concerned about are already subsisting on grains the developed world is giving them, it is simpler, easier, and more cost effective to just fortify that grain.
> IMHO it's simple: current farming depends on oil
Valid point, though everything depends on energy, oil being one of the main sources.
Not the only matter at hand though soil degradation, pesticide resistant pests, water pollution, ...
We actually have no quantitative problems for now: we waste over 30% of the food production, part of it being expensive food (meat, bananas, etc). See http://www.fao.org/save-food/en/
So yeah, we can afford some optimizations while researching for sustainable solutions.
> If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use.
That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, economics, you name it.
The only things this will do is allow some company to patent this, and then sell it under restricted condition that will be unfavorable to those who are hungry.
Productivity is not really a problem if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.
We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
> We have a billion people on earth who do not have enough to eat (living below the UN poverty line). That has to change, and that requires even more productive farms.
It actually just requires better distribution of the food. We've had enough food to feed everyone on the planet since the 1970s.
> Probably like half of human population would die from starvation due to failed crops if we didn't use pesticides.
Half the food that is produced ends up wasted, and a serious amount of crops isn't even counted in that total figure because it's destined from the start for fucking biofuel.
Get rid of that waste, get rid of fossil fuels, and you can feed the world comfortably without having to turn farms into chemical weapon dispensers against all kinds of wildlife.
> if you think that the problem of malnutrition is mainly a technological/agrological problem, that's very disingenuous
This is true right now. But a sane world has to plan ahead. Our existing agricultural system can easily feed the world today without GMOs. But if the world population really does grow as anticipated this century (I have my doubts), with a fast-changing climate, high levels of topsoil loss & degradation, there is zero chance without every technological trick we can muster.
> There is no unused arable land on a planet that’s already struggling to support a human population that cleared 8 billion last month
The amount of this land that is dedicated to growing food for livestock and the livestock themselves is simply astounding. Reducing meat consumption is a much simpler solution and I believe the one that will win out anyway. Complicated solar systems like this will only become relevant once we’ve addressed the low hanging fruit (pun intended) of overproduction of meat.
Even precision fermentation is an easier to implement fix for land use, which looks increasingly like it can reduce our need for land to grow grains. See Solar Foods for example
> Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it.
This is not a bad thing. Food is so abundant that globally, more people are obese than underweight. This is pretty remarkable considering that for all of human history, up until recently, periods of mass starvation was the norm.
I think the issue is that we’re artificially increasing feed crop yields with massive use of synthetic fertilizer. And beef is a very inefficient use of those resources.
I don’t know if bugs is the solution, but when our answer to everything is “more gas!” I’m willing to entertain and try alternatives.
>Providing sufficient food efficiently has been a primary challenge since day 1 of human history and probably will be right up until they invent those titanium bodies.
It might be the most important challenge, but it's certainly one of the challenges we seem to be rising to. People have been predicting mass starvation with population growth forever; From the seventeen hundreds to the seventies, Malthus has been a huge influence on the hippies, and he's been wrong for most of that time, too. Our ability to grow food is growing faster than the population; apparently arable land isn't the limit people thought it was.
At this point in history, famine is generally a political problem, not a resources problem.
It's "solved" if you can produce synthetic fertilizers from fossil fuels indefinitely.
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