In a keynote presentation to the Irrigation New Zealand conference Cribb said a 2100 menu would be unrecognisable to today’s consumer.
Change would be driven by fierce supply and demand pressures, global scarcities, changing climates, growing health and social impacts and new science and technologies.
The global food system would wipe out 1.4 billion small farmers by 2050.
Driven by globalisation of food chains, it would affect all countries.
Already an area the size of Western Europe had been “land-grabbed” by investors since 2001.
The challenges would be huge but the opportunities for NZ agriculture would be even greater, Cribb said.
A United Nations 2015 report predicted groundwater mining would lead to vanishing lakes, disappearing rivers and shrinking glacier and that by 2030 demand for water could be 40% greater than the available supply.
Where irrigation now grew 40% of the world’s food using 69% of its water, by 2050 65% of the world’s food would require irrigation.
The shortage of water would cause increased conflict.
“There will be a war for water,” Cribb said.
About 33% of the world’s topsoil had been lost since 1975.
If soil loss continued at present rates it was estimated there was only another 48 years of topsoil left, Cribb said.
Science had been strangled for 25 years.
“There is a knowledge drought. There is just not enough knowledge going into the food system now like there was in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
“It’s amazing that we humans spend more on ways to kill one another than we do on ways to feed one another.
“We need to turn that around. Peace requires a full platter,” Cribb said.
Between 30% and 50% of the world’s food was wasted or lost post-harvest.
“We need to deliver a system to recycle our food back into food production.
“I believe NZ will emerge as a knowledge centre,” he said.
By 2050, with the right investment, urban culture would supply half the world’s food.
“That will relieve agriculture and pave the way for re-wilding half the world and instead of throwing farmers off the land society will pay them for being stewards of the land.”
Two people in three now died of a diet-related disease (The Lancet, 2012) with food killing six times more people than tobacco.
“We have a killer diet that can be preventable.”
By 2050 water plants, an algae boom, would be the world’s top crop for health food, stock feed, transport fuel, plastic textiles and chemicals, Cribb said.
There would be a new system that would ensure the world never ran out of food.
Cultured (synthetic) meats would take over.
“What we know as a sausage the consumer in 2100 won’t know as a sausage.
“We had the first synthetic sausage in 2011 and the first synthetic hamburger in 2013.
“It’s another area of food development that is coming whether we like it or not,” Cribb said.
But the opportunities for NZ, as the world’s centre of expertise in water, soil and landscape management, to be a world leader in the age of food had never been better.
“NZ has major water knowledge, is an innovative technology exporter in the field of intensive agriculture and as a pioneer of high-value farming systems you are designers of a healthy sustainable world diet.
“You have got to give your farmers a pay rise,” Cribb said.
