>And honestly, we should be spending $$$$ on food development research. We're going to need to know how to grow food in new ways soon, as the old ways have reached their limits. Food seems kind of important...
Eh, not really.
A whole lot of the world's agriculture is done far from optimally. Funding agriculture university programs in Africa with extension programs like the land grant universities in the US would do great things. Disseminating information, tools, and capital for "third world" farms is the best thing that can be done for global food supplies.
Being a bit selfish here, I'm talking about _my food_. And given what we've seen in the last few years involving supply chain disruptions (even the local ones in NL when the angry farmers try to block the grocery store distribution centers), it's clear to me that the best way to ensure food availability is to grow it locally.
Every region that is currently dependent upon remotely grown food must learn how to grow more of their food locally. Maybe these will be high efficiency vertical farms, or maybe something else. But "merely" improving the efficiency of farming half a world away isn't going to be enough. And further, our current "efficient" farming is unsustainable. Our high output methods are causing many negative effects, not the least of which is soil quality degredation. Our soils are near barren and require immense additives (fertilizers) to enable us to continue high yield farming. And returning to the supply chain topic, fertilizer availability is on that list.
I agree, decentralization of food production is critical to sustainable and reliable food production. Some places even have community compost centers where people bring their scraps and can get compost for their gardens.
A shift in growing crops more adapted to the local climate reality is also an important shift. A lot of places grow staple crops brought by colonizers centuries ago, which are ill suited to the local soil and require additional resources to grow, whereas less known types of grain and fruit/veg could be grown to produce higher yields with less effort and be more hardy in the area's temp/precipitation/soil.
Initial costs of setting up local food growth might seem exorbitant, but would bring a lot of long-term cost reduction for people.
Added bonus to this is reducing pollution caused by worldwide shipments of produce, and improving food taste as things grown nearby don't need to be harvested early and ripened in route, refrigerated, treated for pests.
Another thing that would be beneficial, and this is the idealist in me speaking, is giving people the empowerment to control their own food supply, boosting communities, giving people the means to have more autonomy over their basic needs so they're not reliant on a global market currently dealing with a variety of issues, mitigating the risk that food imported will be scarce or too expensive for families to feed their members.
Eh, not really.
A whole lot of the world's agriculture is done far from optimally. Funding agriculture university programs in Africa with extension programs like the land grant universities in the US would do great things. Disseminating information, tools, and capital for "third world" farms is the best thing that can be done for global food supplies.