More than a decade ago, after an OECD conference, I wrote Global Food Security and Supply. Published in 2014, it’s still in print — but the need for an updated edition has never been clearer.
The global food security challenge has changed less than we might hope. The most destructive drivers remain armed conflict and regimes that force communities into poverty and fear. Alongside these are slower-burn pressures — climate change, natural resource decline, and economic volatility — that increasingly push the most vulnerable further to the margins.
So the core drivers of food insecurity remain stubbornly familiar: conflict, political instability, climate change, and natural resource decline. Economic pressures in agriculture also feel cyclical — when I started in the late 90s, wheat and ammonium nitrate were around £75 and £90 per tonne, and today we face new cost pressures that are very different at £150 and over £500 per tonne! While critical control points such as gas supply are evident, the agri-food system as it stands depends upon rare earths, catalysts and specialist materials just as much. Releasing these controls means changing the system and that is not happening in what we would call a transformative way- we are dabbling at the edges of it if anything, with innovations in meat free, biostimulants, carbon capture and any number of these things that are acting in isolation.
What has changed dramatically is availability of food supply data. The agri-food system now has access to more powerful and connected data than ever before. The challenge is no longer access, but the skills to ask the right questions and turn information into action. That capability will shape how AI and human expertise secure the future of food. We’re now rewriting the book. The new edition will focus on how the data revolution can help solve global food security — if the sector can skill up and mobilise the talent that can use the data available to it.
Dr Wayne Martindale, FIFST 