Feeding the world - Indoor crops may resolve food crisis

IN a world where about half the population — about three billion people — is hungry or malnourished it is imperative that scientists help farmers find new ways of producing food.

In a world where food prices are soaring, where changes in weather is limiting production, where the energy needed to plant, fertilise, harvest, process and deliver food is becoming ever more expensive and, as if all of that was not enough, in a world where farmers — and cities — are exhausting water resources this quickly becomes a life-or-death situation.

One of science’s responses has been genetically modified foods but that has raised all sorts of ethical issues, some real, others more emotional than well-founded. Already the proportion of GM crops in the world harvest is growing and this trend is likely to continue as UN predictions about population growth — up from today’s 6.8 billion people to something close to 9bn in half a lifetime — come to fruition.

Dutch scientists have published a vision of food production that has far more to do with industry than it has to do with the small-scale and organic vegetable production so beloved of those with a choice about how their food is produced.

The scientists suggest more crop production will move indoors, “where the sun never shines, where rainfall is irrelevant and where the climate is always right. The perfect crop field could be inside a windowless building with meticulously controlled light, temperature, humidity, air quality and nutrition. It could be in a New York high-rise, a Siberian bunker, or a sprawling complex in the Saudi desert.”

Dutch plans to build a commercial-sized building to do this are advanced as are plans to grow vegetables next to shopping malls and supermarkets.

We spend almost €600 million importing fruit and vegetables every year and whether these methods might allow us to reverse that trend remains to be seen, but if they do offer that opportunity — and the jobs involved — we should do all we can to create the environment where these projects might succeed.

One of the most recent reports on the future of Irish farming — Pathways to Growth — suggested, among many things, that we place special emphasis on producing premium grade food. This is appealing in so many ways, not least the prices achieved. Grass-fed Irish beef sells in New York for €18 a pound, more than three times conventionally-produced American beef. Feeding the world’s rich may be a viable proposition for Irish farmers but that does not mean we cannot, in parallel, make the best use of modern technologies to produce food while cutting imports of fuel and food.

Doing all of this, and making a significant contribution towards feeding the 9bn people expected to inhabit this earth by 2050 would make a huge contribution towards re-establishing our food and economic independence.