How do we achieve a food-secure future for the world’s growing population on a sustainable basis without destroying the planet?
Sunny Verghese, executive director, co-founder and group CEO of Olam Group, sees “eight major gaps” in the global food and agricultural production sector.
The first is the “food gap”, says Verghese, due in part to rising per capita income around the world. “We need to increase food production by roughly 56% from what we are producing today by 2050 to feed an estimated 10 billion population with growing per capita incomes.”
Speaking at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs’ (SIIA) 12th Singapore Dialogue on Sustainable World Resources in May, Verghese says food consumption is partly a function of population growth — with more mouths to feed — and also partly a function of affordability.
“As population grows, income grows per capita, you’ll see a big demand for growth and food and feed and fibre and all other agricultural production,” he adds.
The second is the “land gap”, says Verghese. “In order to produce this additional food, the estimate is that we have to put an additional 593 million hectares of land under cultivation, which is equivalent to twice the size of India today.”
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Today, the world cultivates about 1.5 billion hectares of land, he notes. “Where would we go for this additional land? How much more can we deforest to plant more food, feed and other crops to meet this demand? [This is] the second big challenge.”
Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is the third challenge, according to Verghese. Agriculture contributed roughly 25% of the world’s total emissions last year, at between 12 and 13 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide.
He believes this figure must fall to 4 gigatonnes to keep within 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels.
To keep global temperature rise within 1.5°C — the goal of the Paris Agreement — emissions must fall to zero, says Verghese. “It is a whole different ball game altogether… You have to reforest approximately 585 million hectares [of land].”
The fourth challenge is to solve “biodiversity collapse”, says Verghese, especially among insects, which make up more than half of the 10 million species of plants and animals in existence today.
“We are seeing the extinction of the insect species at an alarming rate. According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, you need to avoid species loss of more than 10 species for every million species each year,” he adds.
The Convention on Biological Diversity estimates that up to 150 species are lost each day. Verghese notes that the world grows some 6,000 plant species for food and feed consumption, but just nine of these varieties account for two-thirds of the world’s food production. “We are becoming more concentrated on a few species accounting for a big part of the production.”
In the 2022–2023 crop season, Olam issued a profit warning after the bee population in Victoria and New South Wales halved. To mitigate such population losses, Olam buys roughly 4.8 billion bees a year, according to Verghese.
“Every tiny creature in this world has a specific role to play, and if that balance changes, it has real financial and economic consequences for a business,” says Verghese.
Another challenge is food loss and waste, Verghese continues. “A third of the food that we produce, we lose. A trillion dollars of food that we produce is wasted, and all the greenhouse gas emissions that go towards producing that food is lost as a result of food loss and waste.”
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This, however, is “within our control”, he adds, and the solutions require investment.
The sixth challenge, according to Verghese, is water use. “I don’t know what kind of breakfast you had this morning, [but it takes] about 35, 36 litres of water to produce two toasts. If you had a couple of strips of bacon, that was almost 200 litres of water to produce that portion of bacon… In total, if you had a full English breakfast this morning, you would have consumed 1,300 litres of water.”
An individual’s water consumption extends far beyond what they drink. According to Verghese, roughly a litre of water is needed to produce a calorie of food. “In Singapore, you are consuming 3,200 calories per day. You are consuming 3,200 litres of water, plus 50 litres of water that you need for bathing and household purposes, and one or two litres of water that you need to drink.”
Stretching the crop grown per drop of water is key, says Verghese, but accessing that water is increasingly difficult. “In our Californian almond plantations, we used to get water if we dug a bore well up to 600 feet [deep]. Now, we have to go 1,600 to 1,800 feet to get the same water in the same region.”
Water tables are receding, and corporates must pump a “much longer distance”, at a “significantly higher cost” to access that water, he adds.
A “livelihood gap” is the seventh challenge that Verghese sees today. “About 70% of the food in South Asia is produced by smallholder farmers. Globally, that average is about a third… If you pick a crop like rice, you have literally hundreds of millions of farmers growing rice in various parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia, and those farmers — almost 90% of them — are below a living income line.”
The living income benchmark provides a rung on the income ladder above the poverty line. Verghese roughly places this figure at four times the poverty line, which the World Bank defines as an income of US$3 ($3.90) per person per day.
Despite a recent surge in prices for commodities like cocoa, 55% of the world’s farmers are still living below the poverty line, notes Verghese. “If you want a decent quality of life for a farm, they will need to have a living income, and we are a long way from that.”
Smallholder farmers who work for subsistence need to be incentivised to invest in technology to lift themselves out of poverty, says Verghese, which brings him to the final challenge on his list: a gap in innovation.
Agricultural productivity growth over the past 100 years has been “phenomenal”, says Verghese, but the “next wave” requires rapid breakthroughs, not incremental growth. “A lot more investment has to [occur] compared to the investment today.”
Each of these challenges should not be viewed in silos, says Verghese. “They are all interrelated — these causes and these challenges that I mentioned — and therefore we have to treat this whole problem as a system, if we want to address it in the long term.”
