Ensuring food for a growing human population, with sustainability criteria and in the face of the threat of climate change are the main challenges of agriculture in the 21st century. The solutions are necessarily complex and require diverse and coordinated measures that depend, as key factors, on the progress of science and the development of technologies that allow us to make more efficient use of available resources, increasing harvests and providing adequate food quality. to nurture the world. Technologies such as genomics, computer science, robotics and nanotechnology and their correct application, which will require highly qualified users wherever they are needed, will also be crucial elements to achieve these objectives.
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Introduction
12,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, a project was born that would completely change humanity. Some groups of hunter-gatherers began their first experiments with a new technology, agriculture, which would lead them to abandon their nomadic habits and to take advantage of the solar energy that plants capture and use for their growth and reproduction in a much more efficient way. Agriculture was slowly gaining ground – it took more than 5,000 years to impose itself as the main activity of human populations in Europe – but it did so with force, because its implementation meant increasing the demographic, organizational, military and technological capacity of those who practiced it. (Morris, 2014). The most obvious consequence of this is that agriculture has been the essential cause of the world’s population having gone from less than 6 million people twelve millennia ago to more than 7.6 billion today.
Later, agriculture arose independently in other centers of the world, but it always did so from the domestication – among the small number of potentially domestically species – of some animals and plants, different in each center, which had the essential nutritional properties for to be able to maintain a sedentary and growing population, and that at the same time also allowed to save and exchange the surplus from agricultural collection when it was produced. These plants were some cereals and legumes as the primary source of carbohydrates and proteins and several animals that completed and enriched the diet at the same time that they provided the strength to carry out agricultural activity: tilling the land, moving the water, transporting the products of harvest, grind grain, etc. (Diamond, 1997). Agriculture incorporated other ingredients of more questionable value into the human lifestyle, such as the crowding of people and animals in often unhealthy conditions or increasing degradation of the environment.
“Ensuring food security is one of the challenges of agriculture when the human population is expected to reach 9,000 million in thirty years”
At the beginning of the industrial revolution and with the better understanding of nature that allowed major scientific discoveries, agricultural activity underwent enormous technological changes. The use of fossil fuels meant that animal power, including human power, was progressively replaced by self-propelled machinery, which drastically reduced the number of people needed to feed the population and provided the necessary workforce to the nascent industry that populated the cities. In 2008 there were already more people in urban areas than in rural areas, and this is an upward trend that is expected to be 66% in 2050, when it had been 34% in 1960.
The challenges of agriculture
The first of the three main challenges for agriculture is to guarantee food security in the world when the human population is expected to reach 9 billion in thirty years. Currently agriculture provides enough food to nourish all of humanity – other causes of malnutrition of about a billion people – but it would be necessary that in 2050 there was between 60% and 110% more than in 2006 (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2016; Ray, Mueller, West and Foley, 2013). This means that, at least in the crops that are the basis of calorie and protein production (corn, rice, wheat and soybeans, as the most representative), production would have to increase by around 2.4% per year, about unlikely targets, as average growth has been well below (0.9-1.6%) in the last twenty years (Ray et al., 2013).
The second challenge is that agricultural production has to be done with sustainability criteria. The cultivated agricultural area is currently 38% of the total land area (excluding Greenland and Antarctica). This data by itself gives an idea of the shock that agriculture has represented for the environment, greater than that of any other human activity. Although the cultivated area may increase, it does not seem foreseeable that it will do so much in the future, as can be deduced from the fact that in the last twenty years it has only grown by 3% (Foley et al., 2011). The cost of incorporating new acreage may be environmentally and economically too high to derive a useful return, and the incorporation of new arable land is partly offset by urban growth – often on the best arable land. – or that of crops destined for non-food products, such as the production of bioenergy. Only 62% of agricultural production is for human consumption, 35% is intended for domestic animals and 3% for the production of biofuels (Foley et al., 2011).
Among the essential elements for the sustainability of the agricultural environment we find the quality of water and soil and the maintenance of biodiversity. The importance of these elements has only recently begun to be appreciated, when the evidence of the finiteness of the world and the need to use and recycle the available resources with criteria of maintaining their quality has been accepted. Water is an essential element for the growth of plants and its distribution on the planet is irregular, with areas where availability for agriculture is optimal or, much more frequently, others where it is excessive or scarce. It is often the element that determines whether or not agriculture can be practiced and what type of agriculture can be practiced. More than 70% of the available fresh water is used to irrigate crops and, although it is an element that is recycled, its misuse can lead to major problems. One of these is water pollution, which, apart from spoiling soils, rendering aquifers useless and polluting vital areas such as river mouths, can reach the sea and drastically reduce biodiversity and make it difficult or impossible to practice of another important food-generating activity such as fishing.
“The destruction of biodiversity on Earth would not only be an impediment to the progress of agriculture, but would also produce imbalances that could make the life of many organisms that INHABIT, including us,”
Some of the pollutants in water and soil are the same that we use to improve crop yields: phytosanitary products (insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, antibiotics) and mineral and organic fertilizers. The former control pests, diseases and weeds, which cause serious losses in agricultural production, but many of them are toxic to flora and fauna different from those they try to control and put agricultural biodiversity at risk in the first instance, as well as the from other ecosystems when they are transferred there by water, soil or air. The fertilizers allow the plant to easily dispose of the elements that it has to extract from the soil (nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus as the most important), and create a suitable physical environment for the development of the roots that leads to vigorous growth and a good harvest. Currently it is estimated that around half of inorganic fertilizers are not used by the plants to which they are directed and are retained in the soil or are displaced to other ecosystems (Foley,
The future of agriculture in Latin America is directly linked to constant innovation and the use of new technologies in the sector so that the countries of the region can be globally competitive.
Economic conditions together with limited access to technological advances in agri-food are barriers that seem insurmountable, but there are examples that show that producers in the region can be as competitive as those in the United States.
This is the opinion of the commercial director of Monsanto Latin America North, Nery Echevarria, who participated this week in the I Agri-food Forum organized by the Efe agency, “El Heralds de Chihuahua” and the Autonomous University of Chihuahua (UACH).
In an interview with Ere, Echeverria explained that in the region “there are many success stories, but unfortunately not all (farmers) have access to technologies and that is where companies like Monsanto have an important role and challenge to make those technologies accessible. technologies to more farmers. “
“The future of agriculture is closely linked to adopting all available technologies to be competitive,” he added.
Echeveria cited the huge increase in cotton production in the state of Chihuahua as a sign that Mexican farmers do better than their peers in the United States when using innovation and biotechnology.
“When you have access to the technology that exists in other countries, the Mexican farmer has proven that he can be more productive,” he said.
He added that the yield per hectare of cotton cultivation in Mexico is above that of the US, which shows that “if we give farmers access to available technologies, they can be very productive.”
He noted that the use of biotechnological products and the efficient use of water have helped Mexican farmers achieve better yields than their counterparts in the US.
But, although Mexico has been improving in some products, it has pending tasks in crops such as corn, in which the United States “is far ahead in its production,” although this difference represents an opportunity that should be taken advantage of.
“The opportunity exists, the region has an agricultural vocation and we have the land,” Echeveria said, citing as an example the case of Mexico, in which more than 25 million people live in the countryside, so “it cannot be ignored the importance of agriculture in Latin America “.
The role of science and technology
Can agriculture meet these challenges? Or is the world heading for a growing food deficit that is likely to lead to a period of hunger, migration, and progressive misgovernment? There is no clear answer, although we have asked ourselves this same question in the past and fortunately we have found answers, many unforeseen and all related to the progress of science and technology. This was the case of Malthus’ apocalyptic predictions about the future of the human population at the end of the 18th century, which were not realized thanks to the progress of agronomy and crop genetics in different aspects, such as the use of fertilizers and pesticides and the development of genetic improvement from the understanding of the basic laws of inheritance, which allowed the green revolution.
The growth of scientific knowledge continues to be exponential and these last decades have produced an explosion of results and paradigm shifts in many aspects. It seems that the 21st century will continue in the same vein and, although our understanding of the biology of plants and animals – which is the basis of agriculture – is greater, the new discoveries continue to generate more questions than answers. A substantial part of the new knowledge has come and will come from the interaction between biology and other new or old scientific areas, making multidisciplinary approaches to research increasingly necessary. Scientific advances lead to technological innovations, which are what will change agriculture in the coming years. Some of these technologies are described below.
Genomics
We have just sequenced the DNA of the entire genome of many species, but we are only able to interpret a small part of the genetic message. The DNA sequence is the basis for the functioning of living organisms and the raw material for their diversity, which means that the study of this matter will foreseeably continue to focus the scientific work of the coming decades. Advances in this field have made it possible to develop technologies for DNA modification, which began with the obtaining of the first transgenic plants almost four decades ago. Transgenic crops occupy almost 190 million hectares (International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications, 2017), 12% of the total agricultural area, but they have created social rejection in some parts of the world, notably in Europe. The powerful new gene editing tools will likely replace transgenics because they allow targeted mutagenesis with which genes can be precisely modified and result in plants or animals containing no genes other than their own. The debate on these technologies has a strong ideological component, but the current scientific evidence is that they do not present clear risks to human health or the environment by themselves. It would be desirable for the current doubts about its use to disappear, because we cannot afford to discard potentially solving technologies when we need all the tools at our disposal to overcome the challenges we face.
High-efficiency and cheap sequencing makes possible the characterization of a new environmental variable hitherto ignored: the microbiome of soil, water, air, rumen, etc., with consequences that will lead to a greater understanding and control of the environment where plants and animals live and the relationship they have with the genotype. New elements, such as the role of non-coding sequences in the genome, including transposons, or that have recently gained more relevance such as epigenetics, open up additional questions to be solved, which break or modify the currently accepted concepts and will have applied consequences. Finally, high-throughput phenotyping, which uses state-of-the-art computer and robotic elements, makes it possible to establish the genotype-phenotype connection in a much finer way and to advance in the early prediction of the phenotype using the DNA sequence.
