Feeding Humanity Requires Healthy Ecosystems, Not Gadgets

Reader Contribution by Stan Cox
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With anxiety building over how humanity will feed itself in coming decades, we have two routes open to us. We can eliminate waste, stop producing crops for destructive uses (in factory farms, for biofuels, in sugary drinks, etc.), stop degrading the soil, water, and atmosphere that undergird our food production, and ensure fair access to nutritious food for all. Or we can keep running with our current global food system, but just run faster, hoping for dramatic increases in crop yields—regardless of how that extra production is achieved or used.

The former, sufficiency-oriented approach offers a lot of “low-hanging” fruit for strengthening food security.

Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, has a strong preference for the supply-side approach—even though studies like one just published by researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Environment show that  to keep our species fed solely through increases in production, current efforts are far from adequate.

Concern over lagging production has prompted a search for technologies that could revolutionize food production. Thus, we have a report published in June by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, entitled “The Age of Plenty.” It featured more than twenty articles whose authors attempted to argue that, in the introduction’s somewhat crude language, “Smart technology and better management policies will let us feed the hungry hordes to midcentury and beyond.”

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