A global food crisis may be only a decade away

Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: "We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system's structural capacity to produce food," she says. "People could starve and governments may fall." Menker's models predict that this scenario could happen in a decade -- that the world could be short 214 trillion calories per year by 2027. She offers a vision of this impossible world as well as some steps we can take today to avoid it.

Since 2009, the world has been stuck

on a single narrative
around a coming global food crisis

and what we need to do to avoid it.

How do we feed
nine billion people by 2050?

Every conference, podcast
and dialogue around global food security

starts with this question

and goes on to answer it

by saying we need to produce
70 percent more food.

The 2050 narrative started to evolve

shortly after global food prices
hit all-time highs in 2008.

People were suffering and struggling,

governments and world leaders

needed to show us
that they were paying attention

and were working to solve it.

The thing is, 2050
is so far into the future

that we can't even relate to it,

and more importantly,

if we keep doing what we're doing,

it's going to hit us
a lot sooner than that.

I believe we need to ask
a different question.

The answer to that question

needs to be framed differently.

If we can reframe the old narrative

and replace it with new numbers

that tell us a more complete pictures,

numbers that everyone can understand

and relate to,

we can avoid the crisis altogether.

I was a commodities trader in my past life

and one of the things
that I learned trading

is that every market has a tipping point,

the point at which
change occurs so rapidly

that it impacts the world

and things change forever.

Think of the last financial crisis,

or the dot-com crash.

So here's my concern.

We could have a tipping point

in global food and agriculture

if surging demand

surpasses the agricultural system's
structural capacity to produce food.

This means at this point supply
can no longer keep up with demand

despite exploding prices,

unless we can commit
to some type of structural change.

This time around,

it won't be about stock markets and money.

It's about people.

People could starve
and governments may fall.

This question of at what point
does supply struggle

to keep up with surging demand

is one that started off as an interest
for me while I was trading

and became an absolute obsession.

It went from interest to obsession

when I realized through my research
how broken the system was

and how very little data was being used
to make such critical decisions.

That's the point I decided to walk away
from a career on Wall Street

and start an entrepreneurial journey

to start Gro Intelligence.

At Gro, we focus on bringing this data

and doing the work to make it actionable,

to empower decision-makers at every level.

But doing this work,

we also realized that the world,

not just world leaders,

but businesses and citizens
like every single person in this room,

lacked an actionable guide

on how we can avoid
a coming global food security crisis.

And so we built a model,

leveraging the petabytes
of data we sit on,

and we solved for the tipping point.

Now, no one knows
we've been working on this problem

and this is the first time
that I'm sharing what we discovered.

We discovered that the tipping point
is actually a decade from now.

We discovered that the world

will be short 214 trillion calories

by 2027.

The world is not in a position
to fill this gap.

Now, you'll notice

that the way I'm framing this
is different from how I started,

and that's intentional, because until now

this problem has been
quantified using mass:

think kilograms, tons, hectograms,

whatever your unit of choice is in mass.

Why do we talk about food
in terms of weight?

Because it's easy.

We can look at a photograph
and determine tonnage on a ship

by using a simple pocket calculator.

We can weigh trucks,
airplanes and oxcarts.

But what we care about
in food is nutritional value.

Not all foods are created equal,

even if they weigh the same.

This I learned firsthand

when I moved from Ethiopia
to the US for university.

Upon my return back home,

my father, who was so excited to see me,

greeted me by asking why I was fat.

Now, turns out that eating

approximately the same amount of food
as I did in Ethiopia, but in America,

had actually lent
a certain fullness to my figure.

This is why we should care about calories,

not about mass.

It is calories which sustain us.

So 214 trillion calories
is a very large number,

and not even the most dedicated of us

think in the hundreds
of trillions of calories.

So let me break this down differently.

An alternative way to think about this

is to think about it in Big Macs.

214 trillion calories.

A single Big Mac has 563 calories.

That means the world will be short
379 billion Big Macs in 2027.

That is more Big Macs
than McDonald's has ever produced.

So how did we get
to these numbers in the first place?

They're not made up.

This map shows you
where the world was 40 years ago.

It shows you net calorie gaps
in every country in the world.

Now, simply put,

this is just calories
consumed in that country

minus calories produced
in that same country.

This is not a statement
on malnutrition or anything else.

It's simply saying how many calories
are consumed in a single year

minus how many are produced.

Blue countries are net calorie exporters,

or self-sufficient.

They have some in storage for a rainy day.

Red countries are net calorie importers.

The deeper, the brighter the red,

the more you're importing.

40 years ago, such few countries
were net exporters of calories,

I could count them with one hand.

Most of the African continent,

Europe, most of Asia,

South America excluding Argentina,

were all net importers of calories.

And what's surprising is that China
used to actually be food self-sufficient.

India was a big net importer of calories.

40 years later, this is today.

You can see the drastic transformation
that's occurred in the world.

Brazil has emerged
as an agricultural powerhouse.

Europe is dominant in global agriculture.

India has actually flipped
from red to blue.

It's become food self-sufficient.

And China went from that light blue

to the brightest red
that you see on this map.

How did we get here? What happened?

So this chart shows you India and Africa.

Blue line is India, red line is Africa.

How is it that two regions
that started off so similarly

in such similar trajectories

take such different paths?

India had a green revolution.

Not a single African country
had a green revolution.

The net outcome?

India is food self-sufficient

and in the past decade
has actually been exporting calories.

The African continent now imports
over 300 trillion calories a year.

Then we add China, the green line.

Remember the switch
from the blue to the bright red?

What happened and when did it happen?

China seemed to be
on a very similar path to India

until the start of the 21st century,

where it suddenly flipped.

A young and growing population

combined with significant economic growth

made its mark with a big bang

and no one in the markets saw it coming.

This flip was everything
to global agricultural markets.

Luckily now, South America

was starting to boom
at the same time as China's rise,

and so therefore, supply and demand
were still somewhat balanced.

So the question becomes,

where do we go from here?

Oddly enough,

it's not a new story,

except this time
it's not just a story of China.

It's a continuation of China,

an amplification of Africa

and a paradigm shift in India.

By 2023,

Africa's population is forecasted
to overtake that of India's and China's.

By 2023, these three regions combined

will make up over half
the world's population.

This crossover point starts to present
really interesting challenges

for global food security.

And a few years later,
we're hit hard with that reality.

What does the world look like in 10 years?

So far, as I mentioned,
India has been food self-sufficient.

Most forecasters predict
that this will continue.

We disagree.

India will soon become
a net importer of calories.

This will be driven both by the fact

that demand is growing
from a population growth standpoint

plus economic growth.

It will be driven by both.

And even if you have
optimistic assumptions

around production growth,

it will make that slight flip.

That slight flip
can have huge implications.

Next, Africa will continue
to be a net importer of calories,

again driven by population growth
and economic growth.

This is again assuming optimistic
production growth assumptions.

Then China,

where population is flattening out,

calorie consumption will explode

because the types of calories consumed

are also starting to be
higher-calorie-content foods.

And so therefore,

these three regions combined

start to present a really interesting
challenge for the world.

Until now, countries with calorie deficits

have been able to meet these deficits

by importing from surplus regions.

By surplus regions, I'm talking about

North America, South America and Europe.

This line chart over here shows you

the growth and the projected growth
over the next decade of production

from North America,
South America and Europe.

What it doesn't show you

is that most of this growth is actually
going to come from South America.

And most of this growth

is going to come
at the huge cost of deforestation.

And so when you look
at the combined demand increase

coming from India, China
and the African continent,

and look at it versus
the combined increase in production

coming from India,
China, the African continent,

North America, South America and Europe,

you are left with
a 214-trillion-calorie deficit,

one we can't produce.

And this, by the way, is actually assuming
we take all the extra calories

produced in North America,
South America and Europe

and export them solely
to India, China and Africa.

What I just presented to you
is a vision of an impossible world.

We can do something to change that.

We can change consumption patterns,

we can reduce food waste,

or we can make a bold commitment

to increasing yields exponentially.

Now, I'm not going to go into discussing

changing consumption patterns
or reducing food waste,

because those conversations
have been going on for some time now.

Nothing has happened.

Nothing has happened
because those arguments

ask the surplus regions
to change their behavior

on behalf of deficit regions.

Waiting for others
to change their behavior

on your behalf, for your survival,

is a terrible idea.

It's unproductive.

So I'd like to suggest an alternative
that comes from the red regions.

China, India, Africa.

China is constrained in terms
of how much more land it actually has

available for agriculture,

and it has massive
water resource availability issues.

So the answer really lies
in India and in Africa.

India has some upside
in terms of potential yield increases.

Now this is the gap
between its current yield

and the theoretical
maximum yield it can achieve.

It has some unfarmed
arable land remaining, but not much,

India is quite land-constrained.

Now, the African continent,
on the other hand,

has vast amounts of arable land remaining

and significant
upside potential in yields.

Somewhat simplified picture here,

but if you look at sub-Saharan
African yields in corn today,

they are where North American
yields were in 1940.

We don't have 70-plus years
to figure this out,

so it means we need to try something new

and we need to try something different.

The solution starts with reforms.

We need to reform and commercialize

the agricultural industries in Africa

and in India.

Now, by commercialization --

commercialization is not
about commercial farming alone.

Commercialization is about leveraging data

to craft better policies,

to improve infrastructure,

to lower the transportation costs

and to completely reform
banking and insurance industries.

Commercialization
is about taking agriculture

from too risky an endeavor
to one where fortunes can be made.

Commercialization
is not about just farmers.

Commercialization is about
the entire agricultural system.

But commercialization
also means confronting the fact

that we can no longer place
the burden of growth

on small-scale farmers alone,

and accepting that commercial farms
and the introduction of commercial farms

could provide certain economies of scale

that even small-scale
farmers can leverage.

It is not about small-scale farming
or commercial agriculture,

or big agriculture.

We can create the first successful models
of the coexistence and success

of small-scale farming
alongside commercial agriculture.

This is because, for the first time ever,

the most critical tool
for success in the industry --

data and knowledge --

is becoming cheaper by the day.

And very soon, it won't matter
how much money you have

or how big you are

to make optimal decisions
and maximize probability of success

in reaching your intended goal.

Companies like Gro are working
really hard to make this a reality.

So if we can commit
to this new, bold initiative,

to this new, bold change,

not only can we solve
the 214-trillion gap that I talked about,

but we can actually set the world
on a whole new path.

India can remain food self-sufficient

and Africa can emerge
as the world's next dark blue region.

The new question is,

how do we produce 214 trillion calories

to feed 8.3 billion people by 2027?

We have the solution.

We just need to act on it.

Thank you.

(Applause)