More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates are calling for funding and political support to pursue high risk, high reward scientific research that can transform global food systems to avert a ‘hunger catastrophe’ in the next 25 years. An open letter, signed by more than three dozen winners of the chemistry Nobel prize including Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for Crispr gene-editing, proposes ‘moonshot’ initiatives that build on recent advancements in biology and genetics. As examples of such projects, they suggest enhancement of photosynthesis in crops such as wheat and rice, engineering nitrogen fixation into major cereal crops, and the creation of nutrient-rich food from microorganisms and fungi, among others.
‘Reversing our current trajectory towards a tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand by mid-century requires definitive action now,’ the laureates proclaim. In the last century, while scientific understanding of biology and genetics has increased greatly, they suggest that requisite productivity increases are currently hampered by lack of investment in basic and applied research, and by regulatory barriers prohibiting distribution and use of research advancements. There are other factors currently undermining crop productivity, such as soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, conflict and policies restricting agricultural innovation, according to the laureates.
‘Beyond research, success will require science-based policies, regulations, and incentives that are enabling and aligned with this goal, including those pertaining to AI, computational biology and advanced genomic techniques,’ the letter reads. Its authors emphasise that incremental agricultural productivity improvements will be ‘insufficient’ to meet future food needs, unless agricultural R&D and its dissemination become a higher global priority to meet the food needs of 9.7 billion people by 2050.
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