Hey, Elon Musk: We Made a $6 Billion Plan to End World Hunger

Beazley’s provocation was not only avoidable, it was necessary, as are large investments from Musk and other private sector leaders. Two million people are on the verge of famine. Musk could buy each of them 43-cent of the food per person per day, which equates to a cost of $6.6 billion over 365 days. That intervention will hardly solve world hunger, but it will save many lives in the near future.

What got lost in the ensuing social media fracas was the idea that investment in food security should go far beyond emergency aid.

In his recent remarks at COP26, Beasley emphasized the impact of climate change. Along with heat and drought, floods, superstorms, invasive insects, shifting seasons and bacterial blight are affecting farmers, who have also faced the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. All told, the number of malnourished people worldwide has increased from 650 million in 2020 to 810 million today, Arif Hussain, WFP’s chief economist, told me – an increase of 150 million a year.

I join World Food Program personnel as they stop famine in Ethiopia and understand why this organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year: it helps populations survive food-system collapse . To save lives, the World Food Program must invest not only in food rationing, but also in more sophisticated supply-chain management, storage facilities, road and bridge-building for more efficient aid delivery, and, importantly, satellite surveillance. and to track the level of communication technology risk in the area.

If Elon Musk doesn’t want to plow $6 billion in emergency aid, perhaps he’ll cash in on his Tesla stock to invest in climate-smart innovations that hold tremendous long-term promise for food security — including AI and robotics technologies. These include agrochemicals that can slash methane emissions from indoor cropping systems, advances in sustainable fish farming, cellular agriculture, plant-based meats, anaerobic digesters, supplements that can reduce methane emissions from livestock, nanotech solutions that increase crop yields. and reduce carbon. Investors also need to support natural climate solutions, including silvopasture and regenerative farming practices that can improve a farm’s ability to store carbon. They should also fund growing private-sector markets that pay farmers to segregate carbon.

In a talk at COP26 in Glasgow, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told me we are entering a golden age of investment – ​​”an extraordinary array of game-changing technologies are coming into play.” Vilsack’s USDA plans to invest hundreds of millions in climate-smart agriculture. Figures like Musk who paved the way in energy and transportation investments don’t yet fully appreciate its potential.

Musk should in particular consider funding two areas that are important for small farmers to large-scale agribusiness: smart seeds and drought-proof water supplies. Advanced breeding and gene-editing tools such as CRISPR can reduce the time needed to develop new climate-resilient crop varieties to less than a year, while conventional breeding methods can take up to eight times longer. Guatemalan farmers are developing, for example, climate-adapted coffee crops; Agronomists in Florida are breeding citrus trees that can tolerate scorch; California farmers are scrambling to develop wine grape and tomato plants that can tolerate heat shock.

Musk should also consider investing in “blue tech” — water innovations that include recycled wastewater, desalination plants, ultra-efficient irrigation technologies and systems in rural and drought-prone areas, including water ponds on canals and solar- Panel shields are included that preserve scarce resources. These innovations, along with smart seeds, could help smallholder farmers survive drought – and eliminate the need for food delivery.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about emergency aid: If you give people fish, as the saying goes, they’ll eat for a day. Yet it is not true that if you teach people to fish, they will eat for the rest of their lives. In a warming world – especially in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Sudan, Yemen and other countries facing famine – with shrinking habitats there are simply fewer fish to eat. For the foreseeable future, undeniably, we will need emergency measures.

The International Panel on Climate Change predicted that by mid-century “the world will reach the threshold of global warming, beyond which current agricultural practices cannot support large human civilizations.” The operative phrase here is current agricultural practices. In the coming decades, what we eat and how we grow it will fundamentally change, and we need everyone onboard – the United Nations and Elon Musk alike – to fund sustainability change. .

Amanda Little is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University, and the author of The Fate of Food: What We Will Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.