요약

Our population trajectory means that from now to 2030, the world will need to build the equivalent of a city of one million people in developing countries, every five days! There is widespread consensus that, going forward, farmers must produce more food per unit of land, water, and agrochemicals.

To do so, however, they simply cannot continue producing in the same way. They will have to do this while facing climate change, volatility, shifting nutrition needs, and the increasing scarcity of most of the physical factors of production. Agriculture is at the threshold of a necessary paradigm shift.

This paper illustrates how leading thinkers imagine our future food and agriculture world. It eschews positions and instead invites reasoned discussion. It cuts across the thought silos intrinsic to different world views and partisan values to identify consensus and also disagreement. We solicited input from leading experts in different dimensions of agriculture, representing the perspectives of the natural and social sciences, developing and developed countries, policy and academia, public and private.

Respondents were asked about most significant trends and the most important priorities in the next 20 years to ensure sustainable food and agriculture systems.

Farming has enormous impacts on the world’s most critical resources. Accordingly, farmers will have to produce while also ensuring the provision of various vital ecosystem services. If they do not, we will not only degrade those resources but also exhaust the ability to produce enough food.

These expectations pose quite a challenge and the overall outcome depends very much on the response of millions of mostly small and medium farmers. The current ‘more production’ orientation is so outdated and unresponsive to our current needs that it is causing its own problems, particularly for our environment

and natural resources. Although food is critical, it is not just about food. We have a pressing need for new approaches in policies and structures that realistically account for the formidable environmental impacts and consider the social consequences of our evolving agrifood systems. Rather than simply “more” production, we must also consider what would be “better” production and better food systems.

There are many who advocate a profound re-thinking of our current models and, to better serve our coming needs, would re-imagine and transform the world’s major agriculture and food systems, not just tinker at the margins or modify them incrementally. Recent decades have seen such re-imagining result in radical and world-changing innovations in every field from politics (social network media) to healthcare (nanotech-based diagnostics and drugs) and communication (mobile telephony).