Forget food security, our fast growing global population's real challenge in the next decade will more likely be nutritional security.
With 10 billion people forecast to be on earth by 2050 and carbon dioxide levels rising fast, the nutritional value of key food crops such as wheat and corn will plunge, having a debilitating impact on wealthy and developing populations alike.
The big evokeAg agrifood innovation conference has been told fears about climate change sapping farm productivity and greater hunger pains in regions hit by drought and floods will be compounded by unpleasant statistics such as almost a third of all people in the Asia-Pacific expected to have Type 2 diabetes within 30 years.
In fact, one in every eight people worldwide will suffer from the disease - a sign of intensifying nutrition problems for humankind.
In one of evokeAg's keynote addresses, leading US food and agriculture venture capitalist, Victor Friedberg, declared nutritional security would have to become a preeminent principle for food production and supply systems.
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He predicted the need for better nutrition would actually drive farm and supply innovation and a new era in agricultural science, revolutionising and integrating the carbon science, life science and technology sectors.
"You'll start hearing a lot more about not just genomics, but other `omics' - proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics - and you'll start caring, not just about food's nutritional value, but its bioactivity value, too," Mr Friedberg told about 1600 delegates to the high energy Adelaide event.
He expected transformational shifts in consumer demands, too, as people recognised good food was medicine.
"The 20th century saw a revolution in chemicals in everything from petroleum to packaging and perfumes, but the 21st century will be a biotechnology revolution delivering a new class of benefits for society, and lowering our dependence on chemicals, particularly petrochemicals.
Nutrition per hectare
The redesigned food systems of the next few decades would be driven by nutrition per hectare, not tonnes/ha, and harvests would be timed to produce the best nutritional yield results, not for ease of transportation or long shelf and storage life.
Agricultural and medical science would increasingly be built around increased understanding of gut microflora and brain health, recognising that half the DNA in humans was the DNA of microorganisms.
In fact, world class organisations and start-up companies were already at the forefront of the food as medicine movement.
Californian firm, Brightseed, used artificial intelligence to learn how plants affected the body and mind by identifying natural bioactive compounds and their health benefits; Digestiva, also in the US, had doubled or trebled protein and amino acid absorption in the bloodstream, and non-profit group, Periodic Table of Food, was using analytical chemistry and data processing to unlock bioactive chemicals and metadata in 1000 of the world's most popular whole foods.
San Francisco-based Mr Friedberg's investment interests include co-founding S2G Ventures, which contributed early capital to "a scrappy little alternative protein start-up", Beyond Meat, which five years later floated publicly in 2019 valued at $US8 billion.
S2G also led investment into the organic, millennial-targeted, fast casual restaurant chain, Sweetgreen, which went public last year valued at $6b.
FoodShot Global
Mr Friedberg is also founding chairman of non-profit investment and grant giving organisation, FoodShot Global, which pays out millions of dollars in funds to help researchers and entrepreneurs with food and agriculture improvement goals.
Recipients' projects range from mapping living soil microbiome, to transforming waste carbon into protein for the aquaculture and stockfeed sectors, and addressing low sulphur soils in Africa to correct human amino acid deficiencies.
Mr Friedberg used his evokeAg appearance to extend his philanthropic food-for-good agenda, launching FoodShot Asia-Pacific.
The regional offshoot will be a alliance of venture funds, corporates, governments, universities and research institutes to tackle "the global need for food that is healthy, sustainable and equitable".
"I think Australia is a particularly ripe market for this space that looks to understand our food and its properties in fundamentally different ways," he said.
"Australia is home to some really exciting, cutting-edge science, research and companies."
His comments underscored observations by new AgriFutures Australia chair and former independent federal MP, Cathy McGowan, who told the conference deals involving Australian agricultural innovation sector finance totalled $19 million in 2019, but by 2021 had exploded to total about $500m.
FoodShot APAC's line-up of launch partners includes evokeAg host, AgriFutures, CSIRO, Cicada Innovations, Mandalay Venture Partners, Kilara Capital, University of Queensland/Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI), Soil CRC, Tenacious Ventures, VisVires New Protein and Yield Lab Asia Pacific and Main Sequence Ventures.
The two-day Adelaide evokeAg event, the first since 2020, drew visitors from 18 countries, including representatives from 40 start-up farm and food sector technology and innovation start-up exhibitor businesses and a veritable who's who of farm service sector, research and agribusiness identities and farmers.
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