Future of Agricultural Technology on the Road to Global Security

Over 800 million people go to bed hungry every day, 1.2 billion are food insecure, over two billion suffer from micronutrients deficiencies, and over 200 million children are either stunted or wasted according to a recent report by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Malnutrition and hunger also hinder the progress of sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are to be achieved by 2030.

Access to safe and nutritious food is also an urgent need to end global hunger and malnutrition as recognized by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 2. Technological innovations in the agricultural field can help address the most pressing issues facing the world today including food security by enhanced productivity, improving financial services, managing resources and addressing environmental concerns.

Agriculture is linked with food security and is the key element in abolishing global hunger, poverty, and malnutrition. FAO estimates that the world population will reach 9.1 billion by 2050 and global food production needs to be increased by 70 per cent in order to feed that number of people.

Technology holds potential to transform and improve the efficiency of agricultural production worldwide. When combined with agricultural technology, AgriTech has huge potential to improve global food security. Latest technological advancements like agricultural robots, drones and cell phones have the potential to be game changing for farmers as they are time and cost effective and provide real time data to detect the health of the crops, get weather updates, and gain financial services and more.