The Earth now supports seven billion people – a tripling of the global population over the past 70 years. This begs the fundamental question of whether it is feasible to feed this number of people. Is such continued growth sustainable – just how many more people can the Earth support?
The answers lie in humanity’s capacity to continue to innovate – to continue generating the productivity gains in agriculture seen over the past century. This is important because of the increasing human population and its reliance upon agriculture for sustenance, but also because nature presents ever new and varied problems of pests, plagues and pathogens. Innovation is about continuing to increase yields in the face of ever-increasing competition from these naturally occurring biological competitors.
The Centre for International Environmental Studies (CIES) has just received a grant from the European Commission to investigate how institutions manage resources and innovation to address problems of food security.
The grant will be used to conduct research on the role of genetic resources, and their conservation. It is a fact of commercial agricultural life that each new modern plant variety that is widely planted has its yield eroded rapidly over time. Hence the importance of maintaining genetic resources to address these evolutionary problems; but how much biodiversity should be conserved? What sort of conservation measures should be undertaken? The conservation of genetic resources is important to avoid collapse in the face of such evolutionary pressures, but it is essential to consider their conservation in light of new forms of biotechnology and innovation.
Another area of research will look at the role of institutions in innovation. Agricultural innovation has been managed over the past century by a complex of institutions: public, private and IPR-based. Since the “seed wars” of the 1960s, international institutions have become an increasingly important part of this complex. And the institutions involved contribute to determining two distinct parts of the food security problem: both the rate of innovation at the technological frontier and the rate of diffusion within it. Both are critical in the quest for food security. Innovations that improve agriculture for a small set of countries, but reduce the rate at which these innovations reach others, result in an increasingly skewed distribution of the benefits from agriculture. The world’s poor become less secure if their capacity to tap agricultural innovation becomes more constrained.
The Centre for International Environmental Studies will analyse these problems. It hopes to make an important contribution to the quest for global food security, and to further the understanding of how institutions and innovation can be a part of the solution to this critical problem.
Written by Timothy Swanson, Andre Hoffmann Chair of Environmental Economics and Director of the CIES.