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.