What emerging trends will most shape the future of food production?

Food production faces several interconnected challenges. Population growth means there will be 10 billion mouths to feed by 2050, while producers are faced with the threats of climate change, land degradation, resource scarcity and geopolitical uncertainty. “To ensure food security, food processors and farmers alike need to find ways to mitigate these risks,” says Allan Wilkinson, Head of Agrifoods at HSBC UK.

But with the global food system accounting for an estimated one third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, they also need to do so while meeting decarbonisation targets. COP28’s Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action affirmed clearly that agriculture and food systems must play a vital role in meeting the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and that an urgent adaptation and transformation is necessary.

We asked three agrifood Trailblazers which emerging trends are most likely to play a role in the redesigned global food systems of the future…

“In order to keep growing populations well fed, we need to produce a lot more food, in increasingly challenging conditions. We’re going to see a transition to alternative crop varieties that are more climate and disease resistant, with gene-editing playing a huge role in that.

“Climate change is increasingly disturbing agricultural production, especially in the developing world. Rice is close to 25 percent of global calorie consumption, but cultivation is under threat: a one degree increase in nighttime temperature contributes to roughly an 8 percent decrease in yields. Another thing people don't always associate with climate change is disease. Diseases that were manageable five or ten years ago are becoming devastating, due to changes in rainfall or temperature making conditions better for fungal growth, for example.

“Historically, crop varieties have been improved through traditional breeding, which can take 20 years or more. We can’t wait that long, given the urgency of the challenge. Gene-editing technologies allow us to speed up the process significantly.

“Regulation used to be a major bottleneck. It could take 10 years or more to get approval for a genetically modified (GM) product. But gene editing is not the same as GM—it involves editing an organism’s own DNA rather than introducing DNA from another organism—so it doesn't face the same issue. Today, gene-edited products can be approved within a few months.”

“Fermentation for food production is going to be huge going forward. The process—a chemical change in a substance caused by microorganisms like bacteria or yeast —has always been an important part of our food system. People are familiar with it in terms of beer, wine, bread, cheese, and in preservation. But over the last few years, we’ve seen an emerging trend of next-generation fermentation technologies. That includes what we’re doing, but also precision fermentation: using microbes to make the kind of proteins that you’d normally see in, say, milk to create something that is, on a molecular level, still milk—or could be fermented into cheese—but with no animals involved in its production process. You can do the same thing for egg whites.

“Traditionally, almost all fermentation processes have been reliant on sugar as a feedstock, which means you need arable land. The big technological leap forward— the one that we and some of our peers are working on—is replacing that sugar feedstock with something else. In our case, it’s carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Once you’ve done that, you’ve completely divorced yourself from arable land for making food.

“There's a place in our food system for many types of alternative ingredients, like insect proteins and cell-grown meat, but most of them are limited by scale. The real benefit of a fermentation process is that it just requires CO2, renewable electricity, water, and some mineral salts, so it provides a potentially limitless source of protein that can be created anywhere.”

“We need to be far more efficient in our use of land and resources if we want to ensure food security around the world. There is a finite amount of quality farmland, and most of it is in the Northern Hemisphere. However, we’re seeing certain technologies reaching maturity which can make us incredibly hopeful.

“Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) systems, like hydroponics, aeroponics or aquaponics, can help in a number of ways. They can produce food year-round, regardless of external weather or climate conditions, and can be located anywhere. CEA systems use less pesticides — or none at all — which has huge benefits in terms of environmental footprint, and all water is kept within a closed or semi-closed loop, making them far more efficient in terms of water use.

“Vertical farms are a form of CEA that is incredibly efficient in terms of land take, getting up to 250x more yield per acre than a traditional British farm. They can’t do everything of course — we can’t grow trees, so we won’t be producing peaches, almonds, avocados — but they can solve some of the fundamental problems of inefficiency.

“There has been scepticism around vertical farming, largely due to its energy use and the commercial viability of staple crops. But technological advances are rapidly making it cheaper. As the costs of these underlying technologies continue to come down, crops with lower price points will indeed become profitable. Growing just rice, wheat, soy and peas more efficiently could have a significant impact in combating the problems of food security.”

Gene editing can overcome many of the problems faced by GM, and stands to help crops become more resilient to climate change and disease.

Fermentation can help create proteins that we once had to get from animals. Next-gen techniques don’t require sugar, completely obviating the need for arable land.

Vertical farms can make food production much more land- and resource-efficient. As costs come down, so does the economic case for adoption.