New Tech Venture Seeks to Tackle Global Food Crisis

It pretty much goes without saying that over the past generation, the tech industry has revolutionized the way we live in ways both big (um, the entire Internet) and small (ordering pizza through your Xbox). But one enormous area of supreme significance to human existence has, to a fair degree, been left out of the tech revolution: agriculture.

Now a coalition led by Innovation Endeavors, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s venture capital fund, and hardware tech firm Flextronics Lab IX is looking to change that. Dubbed Farm2050, the collective aims to “support AgTech startups with capital, design, manufacturing, and test farms to try out their innovations,” all in a bid to stave off a global food crisis.

As Lior Susan, Flextronics’ Head of Lab IX, tells TechCrunch: “It’s still not sexy to do agriculture. You don’t see IPOs and big acquisitions that pull Sand Hill into the game.” (For those not versed in Silicon Valley–speak, “Sand Hill” is shorthand for the road that’s home to a bunch of prominent venture capital firms.)

Dror Berman, managing director of Innovation Endeavors, adds: “You see a concentration where 90 percent of entrepreneurs are focused on 10 percent of the problems. Agriculture has been really underserved. You can build a ton of technology companies here that really matter.”

That all sounds great. After all, you probably don’t need to peruse the gloomy predictions of global policy wonks to know that the human population isn’t declining, while the amount of arable land isn’t getting any larger. Estimates vary about just how dire the situation is: The Farm2050 website says we’ll need to increase food production by 70 percent to feed the world’s expected population in 2050, ten billion people, while the World Bank puts those numbers at 50 percent and 9 billion. Then there's the recent National Geographic report that says we’re looking at a 100 percent increase in production to feed 9.5 billion people.

No matter which set of stats you choose, the numbers don’t look good.

So why not put the collective genius that has given us everything from next-generation smart-grid technology to manage the nation’s power supply to next-day delivery of your Chia SpongeBob from Amazon to work solving one of humankind’s greatest dilemmas?

Here’s what gives me pause: As sleek and seductive as the Farm2050 website is, it's maddeningly vague on specifics. In particular, it gives no theoretical framework for what sort of criteria it might use to select which ag-tech start-ups to support. That may be a sort of open-ended invitation intended to encourage all ideas, but it would seem any discussion of how the world might feed an additional 2 to 3 billion people would have to take into account how we might do it without destroying the planet in the process.

Despite plenty of green on the Farm2050 website—an extreme close-up of a leaf, a hand cupping green beans—there’s nary a word about environmental sustainability being a factor here, which gives it a whiff of the kind of greenwashing you find on big agribusiness websites. What do you know? Lo and behold, the ag industry giant DuPont is one of Farm 2050’s signature partners.

DuPont is the world’s third-largest chemical maker and a major developer of GMO crops. It is, in short, one of the “big six” multinational companies that essentially dominate global agriculture. As the Pesticide Action Network puts it:

Between them, Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont control the global seed, pesticide and agricultural biotechnology markets. This kind of historically unprecedented power over world agriculture enables them to control the agricultural research agenda; dictate trade agreements and agricultural policies; position their technologies as the ‘science-based’ solution to increase crop yields, feed the hungry and save the planet; escape democratic and regulatory controls; subvert competitive markets; and in the process, intimidate, impoverish and disempower farmers, undermine food security and make historic profits—even in the midst of a global food crisis.

Those companies were the tech wizards of their day, unleashing on the world a “green revolution” that promised a worldwide bounty of record-breaking crop yields through the wonders of industrialized agriculture. But dumping hundreds of millions of pounds of chemical pesticides and fertilizers on farmland caused significant damage. It turns out, for example, that the increasingly heavy assault of pesticides and herbicides is killing off key pollinators such as bees and monarch butterflies, while the nitrous oxide that forms through use of nitrogen-based fertilizers is a potent greenhouse gas. As Jonathan Foley writes for National Geographic, “Agriculture is among the greatest contributors to global warming, emitting more greenhouse gases that all our cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes combined.”

Thus, without some sort of baseline criteria that might make the environmental ramifications of any future ag technologies an important consideration—or better yet, setting forth as a key objective the development of technologies that could both increase our global food supply and mitigate agriculture's huge environmental footprint—Farm2050 flirts with repeating the mistakes of the past: namely, letting the dazzle of tech innovation blind us to the laws of unintended consequences.

Related stories on TakePart:

• Is Organic Farming the Key to Solving Hunger? And Climate Change?

• Big Ag: 'Like a Gathering of Mafia Dons'

• Big Ag’s ‘Right to Farm’ Victory Not Such a Big Win

• A Noxious History: 5 of Monsanto’s Gravest Wrongdoings

Original article from TakePart