Transcriber: Silvia Rivera Reviewer: Denise RQ
Host: Thank you, Jim.
Try to imagine 800 million people,
packed in this auditorium,
through the streets of the city, across the bridges, down the highways.
It's hard to imagine.
But these are the people who will not get enough to eat today.
These are the people on the brink of starvation.
And what you might not know,
what I did not realize until recently,
is that our prospects of being able to address this dire challenge
are getting worse, not better,
and if we aren't able to make a significant change,
they can be getting far worse and let me explain why.
The population of the world is on track to go
from 7.3 billion today to over 9.6 billion by 2050.
In addition, each person is on track to consume more than 30% more calories
as we see a continued shift towards more diverse and protein-heavy diets.
You add these two together, and what this tells us,
is that we're going to need to produce more than 50% more food
if these trends continue.
The problem is that we're not on track to be able to do this.
If you look at the growth rates in the yields of our major crops
- corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice
which make up over 90% of the acres that we farm -
the growth rates in those yields have been steadily declining.
We need to be at over 2% growth rate,
to be able to meet the needs of this growing population.
However, those growth rates have declined
from over 3.5% in 1970 to less than 1% today.
To make matters worse, when we look at the total production,
and the increase in total production we've seen over the last 50 years,
70% of it has come from farming new land.
If we look at the trends that we expect to see over the next 50 years,
less than 5% of our increases in food production
will be able to come from farming new land as we're already farming our best land.
So if you put these together, what this means is that, well,
demand will be going up, our ability to increase supply is going down.
The result of this is a sharp increase in price,
that will hit the most vulnerable people on Earth the hardest,
as it is in the developing countries
where people spend over 75% of their income on food.
So, what do we need to do?
We need to be able to increase
the productivity of the land that we already farm.
The beginning, I think, of a story to how we can do this starts in Africa.
Why is that?
Africa is the largest arable land mass on the planet.
Not only that, the gap between what's currently produced in Africa
and what could be produced off of that land
is far greater than anywhere else in the world.
While the rest of the developing world has been able to triple the productivity
of their land over the last 50 years,
agriculture in Africa has remained more or less stagnant.
Why is this?
What is this mystery as to why Africa has remained stuck in time
while the rest of the world has progressed?
I believe that the answer to this mystery starts with understanding the soil.
If you look at the nutrients in the soil
the same way as we think about
the food that allows us to grow from children into healthy adults,
[they act] much in the same way: [they fuel] the growth of those crops,
and without [them], those crops see the same impact as humans,
stunted growth, malnutrition, and starvation.
In Africa, the average farmer applies less than one one-hundredth
the nutrients to its soil as in the developed world.
This, in combination with the fact that crop practices
- like crop rotation which naturally replenish nutrients in the soil -
are vastly under adopted,
means that those farmers are farming off of depleted soils
which have no chance of being able to meet their full productivity.
A lack of progress in this area has not been for a lack of trying.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent over decades
on aid, on new technologies, and new programs, with little success.
Why is this?
These subsidies alone are unable to create an efficient set of practices,
and what happens
is that grower ends up applying far too much fertilizer or not enough,
and when those subsidies eventually go away,
they are unable to maintain those practices
as they are inefficient and not sustainable.
A recent World Bank study looked at it in an extensive, exhaustive view
of what is it that's holding back progress in African agriculture.
And they cited as a prime example,
our inability to put crucial information in the hands of farmers,
to really empower each farmer
to make the right decision about their fields, for their farm,
and put them in the driver's seat to drive those changes.
So if this is so crucial to being able to impact a change,
why have we not been able to make more progress in this area?
I want you, for a moment, imagine that you are a farmer.
You farm one field, maybe not bigger than this room,
and that field provides the entire livelihood for your family
year in and year out.
Each year, you are faced with an impossible decision:
do you invest everything that you have,
all of your money, potentially going even further into debt,
into an investment in fertilizer that you have no visibility
into whether or not that will lead to greater prosperity for you
or just put you further into debt?
To make matters worse, if you are to make that purchase,
you have no way of knowing how much to apply to that field.
Why is this such a complex problem?
The variability of the soil from one field to the next,
the variability that you see in weather from year to year
in the crops that are planted,
means that the difference in the optimal amount to put on your field
can vary three to four x,
from one field to the next, from one year to the next.
And so as a farmer, you have no way
to put together these complex variables and to come to a solution,
and as a result, you stick with the practices that you know.
You fall back to what is familiar,
and even if you know that that outcome is barely having
enough food to feed your family and much less supply your village,
that is what you return to.
I want you to imagine for a moment, that you have a tool in your hand.
This tool already knows all of the details of your field,
it knows about your soil,
it knows about the weather that you've experienced,
and it knows about the crops you've planted or you are going to plant.
And this tool can tell you the benefits
of those decisions that you're trying to make.
It can help solve that impossible question
of whether or not to plant a specific crop, how much to apply.
And it is that information, that confidence that it gives you
that allows you to get over that hump
and make a new decision, adopt a new practice,
and really start to impact a change in a sustainable way.
But if this is so important,
if this information that has the farmer is so important,
why have we not gotten there already?
Well, the building blocks that are needed to make this solution a reality
have just started to come together in the past few years.
We've seen an explosion in our ability to run complex computations at scale:
100 x increase in computing power,
the development of cloud computing technologies like Hadoop are map-produced
that allow to run calculations across thousands of machines
and turn that back into one simple answer.
In addition, the world is becoming digitized.
We know more about the land that we farm than we ever have in the past.
New satellite data, weather data,
digitization of the soil, new sensors on the farm.
These all have given us a better understanding
of the interactions between crops, weather, and soil
that we've ever had before,
in ways that are cheaper and faster than we have ever seen before.
And finally, mobile technology.
So all these mountains of data, all this computational power
is worthless unless you can turn it into a simple actionable solution
that you can put in the hand of a farmer.
If you can do that, via the technology that they already have,
and one that they already understand how to use,
that's how you can start to impact real change.
And mobile adoption in Africa over the last ten years has exploded
from less than 10% to over 70% and continuing to incline rapidly.
Now, if all of these core trends are coming together at the right time,
the rest of the puzzle pieces
that we would need to make this solution a reality
are also starting to become available.
There are projects on-going today to digitize all of the soil in Africa,
there are projects to deliver mobile apps into the hands of farmers
that help them get better insight
into things like crop prices when they take their crops to market,
and there're programs from groups like the Gates Foundation
that are out there educating farmers about these best practices.
In addition,
there is a product I've have worked on for the last several years,
that takes the various data sets that you would need
to give a farmer a recommendation
about the amount of fertilizer to put down on a field,
and ties this together from a system-built on data science and mobile computing
that can give a farmer a very simple, actionable recommendation
about how much fertilizer to apply.
If we are able to put each of these pieces together
and create a holistic solution that really empowers the farmer
to take action and to make these decisions,
that's where I believe we can have a true solution.
I want you to imagine, for a moment,
that we could put a tool in the hand of every farmer
that would answer that impossible question.
Imagine that we could reverse the trends
of increasing starvation and decreasing productivity.
Imagine we could triple the productivity of every farmer in Africa,
and we could do this in a way
that puts those increased profits and increased food
right where they are needed most:
with every farmer, in every field, in every village,
which is so important
as over 70% of those 800 million people are themselves farmers.
Imagine that.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thanks so much, Jim. Thank you.