How Food Innovation Hubs will transform our food system | World Economic Forum

Imagine Sandra, a smallholder farmer in Utopia, providing for her family of four by growing maize and tomatoes. She struggles to make ends meet and sometimes depends on assistance programmes. She wants to improve her income and the soil health of her farm, which has been deteriorating due to frequent droughts.

Start-up Precis.IO has a precision agriculture technology that uses big data and machine learning to help farmers plan and apply the optimal inputs. These tools could help Sandra improve yield and even lead to significant reductions in GHG emissions. However, Precis.IO is struggling to scale up their impact and reach smallholder farmers like Sandra.

Meanwhile, Company Inc. has invested in IOT technologies to reduce food loss for farmers across the tomato supply chain but is struggling to meet processing requirements as the produce from farmers like Sandra does not meet the sustainability standards needed for procurement. Company Inc. needs partnerships with NGOs, farmer-producer organizations and financial institutions to deploy better inputs, financing, manage risk, advise and train farmers for better production practices.

Michael is an affluent urban consumer in Utopia who uses an app, Idea.IO., which scans food labels and provides information on the product’s environmental footprint. He likes that the tomatoes from Sandra’s farm have lower GHG emissions and he is willing to pay a higher price for them, but he wants to ensure that farmers are receiving this premium. But Idea.IO needs investors or partners to develop this feature.

The key priorities of the Utopia government is addressing food security and nutritional goals, and dramatically reducing the environmental footprint of food production. It recognizes that technology innovations can provide leapfrog opportunities, but physical and technological infrastructure are needed to unlock such investments. It also wants to ensure equitable access to benefits for farmers like Sandra.

As Utopia illustrates, technology and innovation provide enormous opportunities to make food systems inclusive, efficient, sustainable, nutritious and healthy. However, no one stakeholder is able to navigate the complexities of food systems on their own to meet the necessary scale and impact.

Approximately 40% of the world’s agricultural land is degraded. Globally, almost 2 billion people do not have access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food, and 690 million suffer from hunger. Food loss and waste costs the global economy $940 billion annually and emits 8% of GHGs. Now, COVID-19 threatens to push 270 million people to the brink of starvation.

When deployed appropriately and rooted in local needs, innovation has the potential to solve several of these challenges – from cutting across the production cycle with advances in logistics and ingredient development, to enhancing market and consumer access. Mobile phones can facilitate complex financial transactions. Blockchain can help safeguard quality in end-to-end supply chains and lead to fairer prices and financial accountability. Remote sensing and artificial intelligence are helping farmers in developing countries plan and use optimal agricultural inputs in real-time. To leverage the role of technology innovations, The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has an Innovation Accelerator which sources, supports and scales innovation to achieve a world without hunger.

Yet, the food and agriculture sector is decades behind in adoption and delivery of technology, and there has been a historic lack of investments in food and ag(riculture) tech.

Technology and innovations can help identify bottlenecks and accelerate cooperation, both of which are needed at an unprecedented scale. However, we need to move beyond specific technologies, initiatives or stakeholders, to take an ecosystem view that recognizes all key actors in the system, and looks to solve overarching challenges.

What is needed is a deliberate and coordinated effort towards developing a vibrant local “innovation ecosystem” – an environment focused on increasing investments, creating policy incentives, building capacity and developing smart partnerships – that can enable solutions to meet local challenges and achieve scalable impact.

Silicon Valley hails “unicorns” – startups with a billion-dollar valuation. Imagine if we elevated “social impact unicorns” – startups that could positively impact millions or even billions of people’s lives?

The Food Innovation Hubs will be multistakeholder platforms – neutral coordinating entities that are pre-competitive and work with governments, private sector, innovators, farmer organizations, investors, donors and civil society. They will link those who need technology and innovations, those who are developing it, and those who might finance and scale it.

Further, the Hubs aim to connect various ecosystem actors to enable co-creation, develop linkages and alignment and generate innovative and inclusive governance models that enable collaboration and unlock barriers to scale. In doing so, the Hubs aim to unlock investments and enable policy incentives, improve resiliency of food systems and mitigate unintended consequences. In addition, the Hubs will work towards capacity development for farmers and incentivize consumer demand for more sustainable outcomes and practices.

More than 20 organizations are leading on the Food Innovation Hubs with work already underway in Colombia, India, ASEAN and several countries in Africa. With the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 as a key milestone to deliver action and broader engagement, these Hubs are working with local stakeholders to forge partnerships that develop impactful innovations. For example, in Zambia, initial work is focused on providing financial, advisory and capacity-building support to smallholder farmers to move towards more sustainable agriculture practices. An interoperable data and analytics platform in development will generate insights for Zambian farmers.

Over the next year, the Hubs will also develop a community of innovators and entrepreneurs across geographies to share learnings and build capacity, including through more South-South collaborations.

Two billion people in the world currently suffer from malnutrition and according to some estimates, we need 60% more food to feed the global population by 2050. Yet the agricultural sector is ill-equipped to meet this demand: 700 million of its workers currently live in poverty, and it is already responsible for 70% of the world’s water consumption and 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

New technologies could help our food systems become more sustainable and efficient, but unfortunately the agricultural sector has fallen behind other sectors in terms of technology adoption.

With research, increasing investments in new agriculture technologies and the integration of local and regional initiatives aimed at enhancing food security, the platform is working with over 50 partner institutions and 1,000 leaders around the world to leverage emerging technologies to make our food systems more sustainable, inclusive and efficient.

At the core of the Food Innovation Hubs is a vision to empower stakeholders across the food value chain with the necessary tools to ensure that the 7.7 billion people currently in our food systems can collectively benefit from the promise of innovation.