- 30% of food produced is gone in losses and waste
- People in middle to high income countries have significant obesity and related problems (some countries have either malnourished people or obese people, and less in between)
- Pollution from our agriculture and aquaculture is killing the ocean near land
- Our intensive agriculture is threatening biodiversity
- We have lost up to 70% of insects in many industrial nations
- Essentially all (90%?) of ocean fish stocks are overfished or at capacity. Even a supposedly rational and environmentally aware nation like Sweden can stop the overfishing. The cod stock has collapsed and now the herring is going too
- The soils are being destroyed or depleted
- The phosphor and nitrogen cycle is broken (fossil fuels or resources that are mismanaged)
I could go on. It is well documented.
I work on circular food production, where we really care about putting together highly efficient nutrient loops and make sure they work locally/regionally. A mix of tech (automation, IT, climate control, etc), agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, insects etc. As part of this there are very interesting completing pieces with ways of getting the nutrients in creative ways (new food tech), dealing with animal disease (new tech), combined with sensors, ML and just plain old common sense, that can make a huge impact. If we just think through the process a bit more and take responsibility for the externalities, which really are starting to bite.
Much is still overhyped in foodtech imho, specifically the stuff which claims silver bullets without proper circularity. Which is detrimental to the real solutions as investors like simple superscalable solutions, and the simple solutions are mostly not sustainable. (There are of course exceptions).
