Are synthetic biology, vertical farming the answer?
EVERY year, world leaders would converge at the World Economic Forum in Davos to find solutions to some of the world’s most challenging problems.
A few years ago, the meeting deliberated on how leaders across sectors could work together to make our global food systems more inclusive, sustainable, efficient and nutritious.
It is undeniable that our food systems face many challenges. We have seen how the RussiaUkraine conflict has disrupted the world supply of grains and cooking oil.
More than 800 million people in the world go hungry every day, but one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted.
The world has even more obese people than hungry people, highlighting fundamental problems with food quality and allocation around the globe.
Furthermore, over half the world’s hungry people are smallholder farmers, even though they produce up to 80 per cent of the food supply in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
It has been reported that agriculture and food production are the major drivers of climate change and resource consumption, with 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 70 per cent of water withdrawal coming from the agri-food sectors.
These issues will only become more urgent as extreme climate events increasingly threaten crop yields, and rural-urban migration intensifies, further increasing the competition for already-scarce land and water resources.
These challenges are complex and increasingly interconnected. They are driven by the actions and interactions of diverse stakeholders.
To solve these problems, it has been suggested that we move beyond our silos and take an “ecosystem approach” to our food systems, which maximises the whole rather than an individual part.
Tackling such large-scale and complex issues requires transforming the system itself, engaging leaders across industries, geographies and stakeholder groups in a coordinated action to reach outcomes that benefit all actors.
As rightly said, this is in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which identify multi-stakeholder partnerships as important vehicles for achieving all the SDGs, which include ending poverty and hunger, combating climate change, and ensuring clean water and healthy lives for all.
By working collectively and sharing knowledge, expertise, resources and innovations, stakeholders can produce an impact that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Taking the cue from such needs, the world has since witnessed the rise of new agriculture. There’s not just more precision, but also a moving away from the traditional land-based food production.
How ready are we to embrace such innovations?
Many believe land-based agriculture may soon be untenable. Land scarcity is one reason for the shift away from the traditional practice of growing food. Other reasons include high labour use, as well as the inevitable wastage of agronomic inputs, especially fertilisers.
The uncontrolled wastage of fertilisers has also resulted in river pollution through run-offs. There have been attempts to be more precise in the application of fertilisers. But they have achieved limited success.
High labour use has generated much concern. We have seen how the oil palm industry suffered huge opportunity losses because of a labour shortage. Many palm trees are left unharvested. There is no solution in sight.
Attempts to bring in mechanisation and other forms of laboursaving devices have not yielded a workable arrangement. Manual labour remains irreplaceable.
For horticultural crops such as vegetables and fruits, a new form of soilless agriculture has gained in popularity. In many urban centres, vertical farming has become a viable business. We have seen signs of this emerging in Malaysia.
In Singapore, the progress has been fast. For tree crops, including oil palm and rubber, the shift is towards the deployment of synthetic biology. This is where microbes are genetically modified to produce palm oil and rubber latex.
Many countries are aggressively scaling up synthetic biology. Even meat production has seen advances in deploying microbes. Some of the initiatives for chicken meat have reached the commercial level.
There is no doubt that this new form of agriculture will become the norm as the world struggles to provide enough food for the population.
...this new form of agriculture will become the norm as the world struggles to provide enough food for the population.