An official website of the United States government
Foreign investors have acquired approximately 90 million hectares of land for agriculture over the past two decades. The effects of these investments on local food security remain unknown. While additional cropland and intensified agriculture could potentially increase crop production, preferential targeting of prime agricultural land and transitions toward export-bound crops might affect local access to nutritious foods. We test these hypotheses in a global systematic analysis of the food security implications of existing land concessions. We combine agricultural, remote sensing, and household survey data (available in 11 sub-Saharan African countries) with georeferenced information on 160 land acquisitions in 39 countries. We find that the intended changes in cultivated crop types generally imply transitions toward energy-rich, but nutrient-poor, crops that are predominantly destined for export markets. Specific impacts on food production and access vary substantially across regions. Deals likely have little effect on food security in eastern Europe and Latin America, where they predominantly occur within agricultural areas with current export-oriented crops, and where agriculture would have both expanded and intensified regardless of the land deals. This contrasts with Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where deals are associated with both an expansion and intensification (in Asia) of crop production. Deals in these regions also shift production away from local staples and coincide with a gradually decreasing dietary diversity among the surveyed households in sub-Saharan Africa. Together, these findings point to a paradox, where land deals can simultaneously increase crop production and threaten local food security.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
Electro-agriculture: Revolutionizing farming for a sustainable future
For millennia, humanity has depended on photosynthesis to cultivate crops and feed a growing population. However, the escalating challenges of climate change and global hunger now compel us to surpass the efficiency limitations of photosynthesis. Here, we propose the adoption of an electro-agriculture (electro-ag) framework that combines CO2 electrolysis with biological systems to enhance food production efficiency. Adopting a food system based entirely on electro-ag could reduce United States agricultural land use by 88%, freeing nearly half of the country’s land for ecosystem restoration and natural carbon sequestration. Electro-ag bypasses traditional photosynthesis, enabling food cultivation in non-arable urban centers, arid deserts, and even outer space environments. We offer a new strategy that improves energy efficiency by an order of magnitude compared with photosynthesis, along with essential guidance for developing electro-ag focused on staple crops, to maximize benefits for regions facing food insecurity. This innovative approach to agriculture holds significant promise in reducing environmental impacts, streamlining supply chains, and addressing the global food crisis.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10611510
- Publisher / Repository:
- Joule
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Joule
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2542-4351
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2974 to 2991
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- agriculture electrochemical CO2 utilization food production
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Global demand for food and bioenergy production has increased rapidly, while the area of arable land has been declining for decades due to damage caused by erosion, pollution, sea level rise, urban development, soil salinization, and water scarcity driven by global climate change. In order to overcome this conflict, there is an urgent need to adapt conventional agriculture to water-limited and hotter conditions with plant crop systems that display higher water-use efficiency (WUE). Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) species have substantially higher WUE than species performing C 3 or C 4 photosynthesis. CAM plants are derived from C 3 photosynthesis ancestors. However, it is extremely unlikely that the C 3 or C 4 crop plants would evolve rapidly into CAM photosynthesis without human intervention. Currently, there is growing interest in improving WUE through transferring CAM into C 3 crops. However, engineering a major metabolic plant pathway, like CAM, is challenging and requires a comprehensive deep understanding of the enzymatic reactions and regulatory networks in both C 3 and CAM photosynthesis, as well as overcoming physiometabolic limitations such as diurnal stomatal regulation. Recent advances in CAM evolutionary genomics research, genome editing, and synthetic biology have increased the likelihood of successful acceleration of C 3 -to-CAM progression. Here, we first summarize the systems biology-level understanding of the molecular processes in the CAM pathway. Then, we review the principles of CAM engineering in an evolutionary context. Lastly, we discuss the technical approaches to accelerate the C 3 -to-CAM transition in plants using synthetic biology toolboxes.more » « less
-
Crop production is among the most extensive human activities on the planet – with critical importance for global food security, land use, environmental burden, and climate. Yet despite the key role that croplands play in global land use and Earth systems, there remains little understanding of how spatial patterns of global crop cultivation have recently evolved and which crops have contributed most to these changes. Here we construct a new data library of subnational crop-specific irrigated and rainfed harvested area statistics and combine it with global gridded land cover products to develop a global gridded (5-arcminute) irrigated and rainfed cropped area (MIRCA-OS) dataset for the years 2000 to 2015 for 23 crop classes. These global data products support critical insights into the spatially detailed patterns of irrigated and rainfed cropland change since the start of the century and provide an improved foundation for a wide array of global assessments spanning agriculture, water resource management, land use change, climate impact, and sustainable development.more » « less
-
Food and agriculture is the largest global industry, at $7.8Tn annual value, and is also the least digitized industry. As a consequence, the inefficiencies in this industry are staggering: yield gaps below potential are 20-70% worldwide, and of the crops that are produced, 20-50% are lost from the time of harvest up to consumption. Where some frame the challenges in agriculture as “grow more with less,” a more useful analysis is around risk and uncertainty. In emerging markets, lack of geospatial data makes it difficult to recommend improved seeds or fertilizers for particular locales, therefore risky to make operating loans, impossible to accurately price crop insurance, and ultimately poses challenges in making contracts for delivery to processors that bring ag products into the food system. In developed markets, the ever increasing demands around immediacy, transparency, quality, crop novelty and food safety are straining the capacity of growers and processors to keep up. We have come to see this as a challenge in developing predictions joining both buyers and sellers around a shared set of facts on harvest timing, total yield, and post harvest quality. While these challenges have been met historically from government agencies and marketing boards reporting seasonal and regional forecasts, in many instances these are insufficient for making critical operational decisions on short timescales. In this talk, we will present a new set of measurements and analytical tools that enable unprecedented granularity in predictions to reduce risk and uncertainty in the food and ag supply chain, with special attention to applications that have potential to be economically self-sustaining.more » « less
-
Abstract The United States is a major producer and exporter of agricultural goods, fulfilling global demands for food, fiber, and fuel while generating substantial economic benefits. Agriculture in the U.S. not only dominates land use but also ranks as the largest water-consuming sector. High-resolution cropland mapping and insights into cultivation trends are essential to enhance sustainable management of land and water resources. Existing data sources present a trade-off between temporal breadth and spatial resolution, leading to gaps in detailed geographic crop distribution. To bridge this gap, we adopted a data-fusion methodology that leverages the advantages of various data sources, including county-level data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with several gridded land use datasets. This approach enabled us to create annual maps, termed HarvestGRID, of irrigated and harvested areas for 30 key crops across the U.S. from 1981 to 2019 at a resolution of 2.5 arc minutes. Over the past four decades, irrigated harvested area has remained relatively stable nationally; however, several western states exhibit a declining trend, while some eastern states show an upward trend. Notably, more than 50% of the irrigated land in the U.S. lies above three major aquifers: the High Plains, Central Valley, and Mississippi Embayment Aquifers. We assessed the accuracy of HarvestGRID by comparing it with other large-scale gridded cropland databases, identifying both consistencies and discrepancies across different years, regions, and crops. This dataset is pivotal for analyzing long-term cropland use patterns and supports the advancement of more sustainable agricultural practices.more » « less
