Autor: Nermin Sefić
Global population is projected to reach nearly ten billion people by mid-century, raising a question that has always accompanied humanity, but which today carries new urgency given climate change, soil…
Global population is projected to reach nearly ten billion people by mid-century, raising a question that has always accompanied humanity, but which today carries new urgency given climate change, soil degradation, and geopolitical disruptions to global food trade — how to feed that growing population in a sustainable, secure, and equitable way.
Climate change represents perhaps the most significant long-term challenge to global agricultural productivity, altering precipitation patterns, increasing the frequency of extreme weather events like droughts and floods, and shifting climate zones in ways that directly affect where particular crops can be successfully grown. Regions that have traditionally been reliable grain producers face increasingly unpredictable growing conditions, while other regions are potentially opening up for agricultural use as climate zones shift toward the poles.
This reshuffling of agricultural suitability isn't simply a matter of relocating production from one region to another — soil in newly accessible regions is often not as fertile as long-cultivated soil in traditional agricultural regions, and the infrastructure needed for large-scale agricultural production — irrigation, transport, storage — doesn't exist overnight in regions only just becoming climatically suitable for intensive agriculture.
Global food trade has created a highly interdependent system in which disruptions in one major production region can have cascading consequences worldwide. The war in Ukraine dramatically illustrated this vulnerability, given that Ukraine and Russia together represented a significant share of global wheat exports before the war, and disruption of those exports led to a sharp rise in food prices that hit developing countries dependent on grain imports particularly hard.
This episode prompted a broader reconsideration of food security strategies worldwide, with many countries considering larger domestic grain reserves, diversification of import sources, and, in some cases, controversial export-restriction policies during periods of shortage that, while rational from an individual country's perspective, can worsen global shortage if adopted by enough major exporters simultaneously.
Alongside challenges, technological innovations offer significant potential for increasing agricultural productivity in ways that reduce food production's ecological footprint. Precision agriculture, using sensors, satellite data, and analytics to optimize water, fertilizer, and pesticide use at the level of an individual field or even individual plant, can significantly increase agricultural production efficiency compared to traditional, generalized approaches.
Genetic crop improvement, including both traditional breeding techniques and newer gene-editing tools, offers potential for developing varieties more resistant to drought, disease, and extreme temperatures, though regulatory and public-opinion resistance to genetically modified organisms in some regions, particularly Europe, limits the speed of adopting these technologies despite their potential for addressing food security challenges.
Alternative protein sources — from plant-based meat substitutes to cell-cultured meat produced through cell cultivation without needing to raise an entire animal — represent an additional path toward reducing protein production's ecological footprint, though these technologies remain in early commercialization stages with an uncertain timeline for achieving a significant market share comparable to traditional meat sources.
A significant part of the global food security solution lies not just in increasing production, but in reducing loss and waste of food already produced. A significant share of globally produced food is estimated to never be consumed, lost through supply-chain inefficiencies in developing countries, where lack of adequate storage and transport infrastructure causes spoilage before food reaches consumers, and through consumer-level waste in developed countries, where food is often discarded due to aesthetic standards, overbuying, or simple inefficiency in consumption planning.
Addressing this loss and waste represents one of the most cost-effective ways to improve global food security, as it requires improving existing systems and habits rather than entirely new agricultural production, though implementation requires coordinated efforts at every level of the supply chain, from farmers to individual consumers.
Alongside land agriculture, oceans represent a significant, but increasingly pressured, source of protein for billions of people worldwide. Overfishing has led to dramatic declines in populations of many commercially important fish species, driving growing dependence on aquaculture — farming fish and other marine organisms under controlled conditions — as an alternative to wild catch.
Vertical farming, growing crops in stacked layers within controlled indoor spaces, often in urban settings close to consumers, offers a potential solution for reducing transport costs and water consumption.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 13.2% of globally produced food is lost in the supply chain after harvest, before reaching retail — a loss estimated at around $400 billion annually. Alongside that loss, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates an additional 19% of food is wasted at the retail, food-service, and household levels. Together, these two figures suggest that nearly a third of all globally produced food is never consumed.
A more detailed analysis of UNEP's 2024 Food Waste Index reveals households account for a surprisingly large share of total food waste — 60% of the total 1.05 billion tons of food wasted in 2022, compared to 40% wasted across food service and retail combined. This pattern holds across global income categories — the report notes average per-household food waste levels differ by just 7 kilograms per capita annually between high, upper-middle, and lower-middle income countries, disproving the assumption that food waste is exclusively a rich-country problem.
Encouraging examples exist — Japan and the United Kingdom have shown that country-wide change is possible, with food waste reductions of 18% and 31% respectively. Food loss and waste together generate an estimated 8 to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions — nearly five times the total emissions of the aviation sector — making addressing this problem one of the more cost-effective ways to simultaneously improve food security and reduce climate footprint.
The scientific literature on climate change's impact on crop yields offers a more nuanced picture than a simple decline story. A study published in PNAS estimates climate trends have already reduced global wheat yields by 10%, barley by 13%, and maize by 4% relative to what they would be without climate change — while global production of these crops simultaneously shows dramatic growth (69-123% over the past 50 years) thanks to technological advancement, better varieties, and improved agronomic practice.
This seemingly contradictory picture — growing absolute production alongside a simultaneous "decrease" relative to a hypothetical no-climate-change scenario — explains why climate change's impact on food security is often misinterpreted. According to another PNAS analysis, each degree Celsius of global average temperature rise reduces global wheat yields by 6.0%, maize by 7.4%, rice by 3.2%, and soybean by 3.1%, without accounting for CO2 fertilization, adaptation, and genetic improvement effects that partly offset those losses.
Regional differences remain dramatic. For sub-Saharan Africa, staple crop yields are projected to decline 10-20% by 2050 under current climate trends, with Ethiopia's maize yields projected to fall around 15% due to rising temperatures and erratic rainfall — and in areas affected by pest spread like fall armyworm, maize yield losses reach as high as 30%. South Asia faces a similar challenge, with rice and wheat yields projected to decline 10-15% by mid-century due to heat stress and altered monsoon patterns, directly affecting millions of smallholder farmers.
While vertical farming is often cited as a promising technological solution, the sector's actual business history during 2023-2025 reveals a dramatic gap between technological promise and business viability. Plenty Unlimited, a California startup backed by investors including Jeff Bezos and SoftBank, raised $940 million before filing for bankruptcy in March 2025, with company value falling over 99% from a $1.9 billion peak. Bowery Farming, once worth $2.3 billion after raising $700 million, shut down operations in late 2024. AeroFarms, a longtime sector pioneer headquartered in Newark, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2023 with $135 million in liabilities, laying off around 172-173 employees at its Virginia facility — a facility that, despite a temporary recovery and 2023 refinancing, was permanently closed in December 2025.
A total of 14 controlled-environment agriculture companies filed for bankruptcy during 2025, with combined historical funding exceeding $1.37 billion — while according to an iGrow News report, the actual failure count is likely higher due to "silent bankruptcies" where companies quietly exited or were acquired before formally filing. Nearly $2 billion in venture capital "evaporated" in the sector between 2023 and 2025, while investment in new indoor farming systems fell a dramatic 53% year-over-year in 2024 alone.
The fundamental problem, according to analysis published on the Vertical Farming blog, is structural: vertical farms replace free sunlight and rain with electricity and engineered systems, and the resulting produce often can't command enough price premium to cover that cost difference. Surviving companies — like 80 Acres Farms and the restructured AeroFarms — share common traits distinguishing them from failed competitors: financial discipline, secured buyers before building capacity, and a focus on actual farming operations rather than technological spectacle.
John Deere's "See & Spray" technology, which uses machine vision and artificial intelligence to identify individual plants and apply herbicide only to weeds instead of uniformly spraying an entire field, offers one of the best-documented, measurable examples of precision agriculture's actual value in commercial application. According to 2024 data, farmers achieved an average 59% reduction in herbicide use across corn, soybean, and cotton operations, with over a million acres treated with this technology that year.
Particularly significant, this reduction in chemical inputs didn't come at the expense of yield — on the contrary, farmers recorded a yield increase of 3-4 bushels per acre precisely because crops were less chemically stressed due to more precise, targeted herbicide application instead of uniform spraying that hits both crop and weed alike. This combination — fewer chemicals, higher yield — explains why early technology adopters report reaching return on investment faster than expected, mostly through chemical savings combined with yield increases.
The broader precision agriculture picture shows similar, though somewhat more modest, figures — tools like variable-rate input application, guidance systems, and soil mapping can boost yields by 9-13%, while variable-rate irrigation can save roughly 25% water without hurting output. According to analysis presented at the GriNext conference, field evidence shows a 15-20% productivity increase after adopting autonomous tractor technology, which uses GPS systems accurate to under an inch and 16 cameras arranged around the tractor for 360-degree visibility.
These concrete, measurable results from actual commercial application provide an important counterweight to the earlier-mentioned vertical farming collapse — while technologies attempting to entirely replace traditional agriculture with closed, energy-intensive systems face structural economic barriers, technologies that improve existing, field-based agriculture through precision and automation show a considerably clearer, proven path toward real business and food value.
The challenge of sustainably feeding a growing global population requires a coordinated approach combining technological innovation, improved global food-trade coordination resilient to geopolitical disruption, and systematic reduction of food loss and waste throughout the supply chain. No single solution offers a complete answer, but the combination of these strategies offers a realistic path toward feeding ten billion people without further degrading the natural resources that food production ultimately depends on.
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Autor i urednička odgovornost: Nermin Sefić. Izdavač: GNK ASG d.o.o..
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