Can Global Data Collection Help Alleviate World Hunger?

The most recent issue of the journal Nature included a noteworthy piece from economist Jeffrey Sachs and a gaggle of agricultural experts. The team of writers said that in order to feed all the people on the planet without completely destroying our natural resources, we need to mount a global data collection effort that tracks the way different farming practices impact the environment.

The problem, the writers say, is that there is no overarching and standardized method for evaluating the impact of agriculture across all its different types. The proposed solution would establish a common set of metrics that could make it easier to compare farming practices at comparable scales, data that would ideally inform how we go about farming around the world as we move into a heavily populated 21st century. The authors argue, according to SciDev.net, "that data must be collected for a suite of standard metrics in a systematic way, using a common protocol."

The global initiative, which the authors envision taking place across 800 connected research sites around the world, would model itself on such groundbreaking research efforts as the Africa Soil Information Service, which maps the soil types and nutrients across 42 countries.

While measuring soil health is one thing, can a system that assesses the global environmental impact of our food really be comprehensive enough to be fair and balanced, especially considering the limited public funding available for agricultural research?

A food supply chain reaching from seed to dinner plate has a vast number of moving parts and often stretches a monumental distance. A conclusion about the efficiency of certain farming methods assessed at a regional level might become moot when coupled with the inefficiencies in processing or shipping. A conclusion about the efficiencies of GMOs might become moot when the evolution of new weeds forces the use of more and different pesticides. There are so many variables that it's hard to make hard and fast conclusions about what's best.

Much funding would be needed to do such a complex analysis, and I fear that the lack of available dough will open the process up to prowling by special interests. Public spending for agricultural research has been declining since the 1970s. It's flattened out in most developed countries, but is still on a downhill trend in some developing areas like parts of sub-Saharan Africa, which you could argue is the region that needs this research the most. There are a lot of powerful interests in agriculture, and they would most certainly be doing every last thing they can think of to put their fingerprints on the researchers' recommendations when the limits of public funding puts the squeeze on.

And as an editorial in Nature reminds us, the question of feeding the exploding world population, which is ultimately the cause that prompts these authors to call for such research, is not simply, or even mostly, an agricultural question. "Science and technology," the editorial states, are not "by themselves a panacea for world hunger. Poverty, not lack of food production, is the root cause. The world currently has more than enough food, but some 1 billion people still go hungry because they cannot afford to pay for it." Then, of course, there's the fact that one-quarter to one-third of the food we currently produce is wasted.

So perhaps we need more research on how to fix our unequal global society as much (or even more) than we need study on the relative merits of various methods of farming. Unfortunately, that's an even more complicated undertaking, and might result in some uncomfortable conclusions about the way our societies are structured.

Photo: Koshyk via Flickr