「植物看得見你」公開課筆記／1.4 Food Security

Out of seven billion people in the world today, less than half get the amount of food and the amount of nutrition they need, it is what we call food insecure. A third of the world that get enough food in terms of volume, but not enough food in terms of nutrition.

Over 10% are actually getting too much calories, they're overweight. 800 million people go hungry each day, the majority of these hungry people we know is in either Africa or in Southern Asia. One of the reasons is that our population of humans in the world is rapidly expanding, actually logarithmically. Most models have us reaching nine billion by 2050. So there's huge increase in the human population.

This increase in population, is leading to a decrease in the amount of land that's available for agriculture. So we have this contradiction that as the amount of population goes up, the amount of land is going down. While 24% of the earth surface is arable, by 2050 that's only going to be 20%. How are we going to be able to feed the world with less land, a world that's hotter, less water, might have less nutrients available, and an increasing population?

Plant biology can go a long way to solve these problems, because plant biologists, by understanding how plants sense the environment, by understanding what a plant knows, we can develop plants that are resistance to drought or tolerant to drought, need less water, less fertilizer, more nutritious, more resistant to pathogens, such as fungus, and bacteria, or bugs, insects. A single gene can really lead to a plant that is resistant to drought. 

Another way that plant biologists are doing this, is by utilizing what we called wild plants. Wheat was cultivated from a wild, growing wheat. In Israel today, this wild wheat is still growing. We call this the mother of wheat. It grows wild on the side of the road.

What some of my colleagues have been able to do is to take this wild wheat and cross it with the cultivated wheat. And what they've developed is a new strain that is actually hardier, it contains more protein, and it contains more minerals.

Plants make us happy. Loads of psychological research have shown that not only we are in a better mood when plants are around us, we're also more productive.

Plants can be a bioreactor for fuels. Think about the money that would be involved in making biofuels, ecologically valid fuels from plants. We can now manipulate the oil in sugar content of plants for our own uses, and so that plants can become our own oil industry.