“Farmers adopt technologies, they don’t invent them. Innovation needs be in close connection with the agro producers for it to be impactful, otherwise we end up getting technologies that farmers don’t want”, says Ariel Ortiz Bobea, Associate Professor, Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University and advisor USDA, in an exclusive interview with Geospatial World.
With the Green Revolution, fertilizers, high-yielding varieties of seeds and other advancements in biotechnology, we have been able to break the Malthusian Trap, yet still there’s widespread hunger despite bumper production. What do you think is the reason?
Technology is allowing us to produce more with fewer inputs at a global scale. However, that growth is highly heterogeneous across the world. While agricultural productivity keeps rising in industrialized countries and emerging economies, it is stagnating in many parts of the world, particularly in regions of Africa.
Some countries have experienced no growth in productivity in decades. Innovation and the subsequent technological progress in some parts of the world has not translated to other regions. Unlike many high-tech technologies (e.g. cell phones), agricultural technologies do not transfer from one region of the world to another easily.
This fact, combined with the lack of research and development in some regions, means stagnant growth in agriculture in many parts of the world where agriculture is key for food security.
How crucial do you think is satellite imagery and Earth observation today for agriculture?
I think it is increasingly critical although it is not a panacea. We can now track measures of greenness and photosynthetic activity in near real-time. That makes us capable of tracking food production in real-time.
Combining this with information about other market variables (e.g. inventories, demand) we can anticipate price spikes caused by swings in food production. Remember that food demand is fairly stable and changes gradually. However, production is more volatile, so anything we can do to forecast production can help us better prepare for swings in food prices.
Satellite data is useful in helping us anticipate swings in production. The value of this satellite information increases when we are able to combine that data with other forms of data from surveys or ground truth data.
Agricultural depends on a lot of factors, including land patterns, crop rotation patterns, water supply, market access, so what can be done to make it more productive, efficient and remunerative?
To make agriculture more productive you have to produce more with the inputs you put in. Generally that comes with a newer technology. Farmers adopt technologies, they don’t invent them.
We live in a world where innovation in agriculture occurs outside the farm. That makes innovation and widespread adoption of technologies much faster. However, the innovation needs to be in close connection with producers for it to be impactful, otherwise we generate technologies that farmers don’t want.
That innovation can be by the public sector (e.g. government labs, universities, etc) but also – and importantly – by the private sector. For the private sector to get involved they need to make money, so there has to be an incentive for them to invest and hire scientists to develop these new technologies.
There are challenges with private innovation however. Some people worry about concentration and monopolies reducing crop diversity. However, there are ways of limiting these drawbacks while gaining the dynamism from the private sector.
Overall, there is no “one size fits all” in agriculture. A technology developed in one place may or may not work in other parts of the world. Ag technologies are typically complementary with other inputs (e.g. soils, labor, etc) so that make them fairly local.
There’s a need of people (firms, government) conducting research to improve ag technologies throughout many parts of the world, not just in a few places.
As a fallout of first the pandemic supply chain disruptions and then the Russia-Ukraine conflict, millions of people globally are at a risk of starvation as per the UN. What can be done to improve agro supply chains to avoid such scenarios?
It is difficult, if not impossible to predict major international conflicts, particularly their timing. You cannot produce food or change your grain inventories in a short period of time so any preparation for such disruptions has to happen way before these conflicts occur. This means that countries need to revisit their exposure to such conflicts and re-evaluate their preparedness.
What do you think is the economic impact of climate change on agriculture today in terms of loss of crops due to extreme heatwaves or unpredictable weather conditions, and can more precise climate monitoring be of any help?
In a study we published last year, we found that climate change has slowed down global agricultural productivity, which is equivalent to losing 7 years of productivity growth over a 60 year period.
This is not small, but also not enough to make agricultural production stagnate, as we are still investing in how to increase productivity). The key is that climate change is not a future scenario, it is something that has already occurred.
We’re already experiencing the impact. I think people struggle to grasp this because we have not experienced a world without anthropogenic climate change. We don’t get to experience that version of the world, so we grasp that counterfactual situation.
I think climate monitoring can help us better understand the current ongoing impacts of weather fluctuations, helping us anticipate future impacts.
