
Food security and agriculture are complex systems that interconnect with many other issues, including poverty and environmental sustainability. These urgent issues inspire proposals for technological solutions. Emerging technologies are often proposed as ways to increase food supply to end hunger. Other proposals target agricultural practice, grounded in the knowledge that agriculture has a large carbon footprint, and the fear that the negative climate impacts of agriculture would worsen as the population increases. Again, technological approaches are proposed to fend off these unwanted impacts. Finally, the recognition of the enormous levels of food waste prompts interventions to prevent waste, for both food security and climate benefits. These claims are also sometimes connected with advice directed to poor people on ways to save money in purchasing, storing, and cooking food.
Technological solutions aimed at improving food security and environmental sustainability in agriculture and food production can be beneficial. But ensuring that these technologies function well requires a working knowledge of the complex systems that underlie food security, so that technological and policy solutions can be implemented effectively.
Concerns about the climate impact of food and agriculture are warranted. Indeed, if current agricultural practices and crop choices are retained, there will not be enough food to feed the population by 2050, and the negative climate impacts of agriculture will increase. Food waste is also enormous, with a third of all food grown being wasted. But digging into these claims shows that there is a great deal of good news in food and agriculture, if a set of policies and practices that promote health and reduce hunger can be adopted. Using current technology and current amounts of land dedicated to farming, it is possible to grow enough food to feed everyone in the world while generating less carbon; In fact, we could produce other environmental benefits at the same time.
Using current technology and current amounts of land dedicated to farming, it is possible to grow enough food to feed everyone in the world while generating less carbon.
My goal with this piece is to situate the focus on technology within the broader conversation on the potential benefits of technological innovations in food and agriculture. This editorial serves as a brief primer on food and agriculture research and findings, aimed at exploring the ideas above. I show that while technological solutions can significantly contribute to improving food security and reducing the environmental impact of agriculture, these technologies must be implemented within a framework of policies that address the underlying complexities of food systems, poverty, and sustainability.
Industrial Agriculture
Economic impact of industrial agriculture
Industrial approaches to farming have delivered higher levels of production with lower labor requirements. Larger farms enable investment in high-cost, efficient planting, harvesting, and other agricultural equipment, as shown in Figure 1 . The initial required cash outlay only makes economic sense at very large farm sizes. However, the resulting reduction in labor and increased efficiency enable large-scale crop production at low cost. In other words, farmers can benefit from automated technologies when the farm size is large, which has led to lower production costs and prices. However, this price benefit has some other impacts, including negative environmental consequences and the loss of small, family-run farms. The larger-scale farms that these technological infrastructure investments enable are often planted with only one crop (mono-culture) because of these efficiencies. Both the large-scale and mono-culture aspects tend to have poor environmental outcomes [1], [2]. Furthermore, those reduced production costs have not always been passed on to consumers in terms of lower prices. This is in part related to increased market power for large food producers and distributors [3].
Concentration of land
Agricultural economies of scale are also related to land redistribution, with agricultural lands being concentrated among fewer people and large corporations. A widely cited article prepared for the 2014 FAO report indicated that most farms worldwide were smaller-scale and family-owned, and most farmland was under family cultivation [4]. However, later investigation revealed that the concentration of land had been underestimated. By 2020, a report issued by Welthungerhilfe 1 and Oxfam showed that land ownership was rapidly being concentrated in the hands of fewer people [5]. The title of the report, “Uneven Ground: Land Inequality at the Heart of Unequal Societies” directly tied access to land to rising social inequality. Beyond concentration on land ownership, the report points to contract farming and other mechanisms that reduce current control of land. This is particularly interesting as the results show that large farms are getting larger, often in more developed nations, while small farms continue to decrease in size, often in less developed nations [5]. Both trends reduce labor opportunities.
Large farms are getting larger, often in more developed nations, while small farms continue to decrease in size, often in less developed nations.
Even in countries with larger farm sizes, the scale of farms varies drastically. The average French farm has increased in size to 67 hectares. The total cultivated farm acres in France have remained constant, but the number of farms has dropped. However, this increased farm size in France is now comparable to the German average, and much smaller than the Canadian and United States averages of 332 and 178 hectares, respectively. [6]. Nations responded to the trend toward larger farm sizes differently as well. France, for example, limits the expansion of farm sizes beyond a certain level, with the explicit goal of keeping farms at the local scale and family-run [5]. Stricter limits on farm sizes are being proposed, both in France and across the European Union [7]. These policies represent an intentional choice to produce food at a more local level. Local production has psychic advantages which are explored in “Alternative approaches to food and agriculture.” However, less aggregated farms may have price advantages as well, as discussed below.
Pricing power
The concentration of land into fewer farms mirrors a trend toward greater market power in a smaller number of firms in food production and retail. Recent increases in food prices are likely the result of profiteering [14]. These price increases are made possible by low levels of regulation and concentration of power within a few firms, allowing those firms to set higher prices [14], [15], [16]. In Canada, for example, one firm controls 22 % of the grocery market, similar to Great Britain, where two firms share 43 % of the total grocery market [8], [9]. Larger grocery stores saw much higher profit increases during the pandemic [10]. The grocery market is supplied by food manufacturers, the largest of which also saw record profits during this alleged inflationary period [11], [12]. Finally, the top four agricultural conglomerates control 90 % of the global grain supply [12]. They, too, saw record profits.
Just as France limits farm size, regulators across the world could limit the size and pricing power of large corporations that can increase food prices for consumers. These price increases have led to record corporate profits, leading some government agencies to call these food price increases as mark-up increases, rather than inflation [13]. Some of this outsized market power could be dealt with by using existing anti-trust measures, while direct price and profit limits may require newer approaches. A simplistic understanding of macroeconomics could lead to the belief that price controls are dangerous to economic health. However, arguments against price controls rely on several conditions that are not currently met: specifically, perfect competition is not possible with current levels of market control. Advocates for price or profit controls include not just politicians but also economists for major banks [14], [15]. Perhaps most strikingly, an economist for Société Générale, one of France’s largest banks, said that unless greedflation is curbed, capitalism itself is at risk [14].
Regulators across the world could limit the size and pricing power of large corporations that can increase food prices for consumers.
Environmental consequences
Larger farm sizes and mono-culture planting have both enabled and required higher pesticide use. Technological approaches increased agricultural production through the “green revolution” which was ushered in through a combination of irrigation, plant genetics, and pesticides. Although the precise definition of the time of the green revolution varies, grain production increased three-fold over the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, while cultivated land area increased by less than a third [16]. “Environmental harms from agriculture” explores claims about the environmental impacts of future food production and the underlying assumptions on pesticide use.
Misconceptions Regarding Food and Agriculture
Technological advances are often presented as a panacea to address the interconnected problems regarding food production, access, and consumption. Techno-solutionist narratives need to be interrogated, partly because they rely on naïve assumptions regarding the drivers of agricultural productivity and food insecurity. These assumptions relate to the drivers of famine and hunger, the environmental impacts of agriculture, the potential of food waste to end hunger, and the role that personal economy can have in improving food security.
Drivers of hunger
The most common misconception regarding food security is that current hunger and malnourishment are caused by insufficient food production. This belief has motivated scholars, policymakers, and governments since Malthus. Malthusian economics advanced the idea that agriculture could not keep up with an expanding human population [17]. As the number of people increased, this line of thought suggested that hunger would naturally increase, and food production would not be able to keep up. Variations on resulting calls for reproductive restriction have included works such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons [18], [19]. These arguments are used to advance eugenicist agendas, and in the case of Hardin, were explicitly racist in their construction. Rather than focusing on increasing human welfare, these arguments seem to be aimed at reducing certain kinds of people from immigrating, reproducing, or existing. A host of excellent pieces have debunked Hardin in particular [20], [21]. Some of these analyzes are based on Elinor Ostrom’s work investigating how commons are run in practice [22]. She distilled these lessons into a set of principles that could be used to guide the development and management of common pool resources [21]. The most important revelation from Ostrom’s work is that groups of individuals can successfully manage common pool resources and thereby avoid ecosystem collapse. Her work upends the traditional understanding of scarcity and shows that communities are capable of sound planning and self-regulation. The converse of this point-that severe scarcity is largely caused by human action-is also true. Scholars and aid workers studying famine have long known that famines appear to be largely human-caused rather than induced by a technological gap or direct crop failure [23]. This is a stunning finding as it defies much popular wisdom that drove arguments from Malthus to Ehrlich to Hardin. One of the most famous examples of this is the Irish famine, during which one million people died and an additional one to two million emigrated out of a peak population of 8 million [24], [25]. However, Ireland remained a net exporter of food during most of the famine, and laws passed during the famine led to increased emigration and land consolidation by the wealthy. [25]. Famines are, in fact, political decisions related to who controls the land and commerce.
The most common misconception regarding food security is that current hunger and malnourishment are caused by insufficient food production.
While the common perception that more food production is needed to feed the world is not accurate, it is true that current food production practices cannot optimally nourish the world. Today eight hundred million people are defined as undernourished, meaning a lack of caloric intake, and 150 million suffer from stunted growth as a result [1]. Current agricultural production is sufficient to meet current needs by calories, but may not yet provide optimal nutrition for the entire human population [26]. Malnourishment comes in many forms, including a lack of micro-nutrients, which is associated with poor access to fresh produce and food insecurity [1]. While micronutrient deficiency has decreased over the past two decades, 1/3 of the global population continues to suffer from micronutrient deficiency, leading to high levels of disease [1], [27]. Levels are higher in developing countries and particularly among children, but micronutrient deficiency also exists in the developed world [27]. The availability of fresh food is essential to delivering sufficient micronutrients. Ensuring access to fresh food requires changes, both in land use and diet. Raising fewer livestock and the necessary crops to feed them would allow for current fields to be reallocated to produce more fresh food that delivers micronutrients [1], [26], [28]. This shift in production could allow agricultural production to meet humanity’s needs both in the present as well as by 2050 [26], [28]. Conversely, without reallocation of land use or other structural changes to food production, hunger and malnutrition will increase [1]. “Environmental harms from agriculture” details the ways in which making land use changes that promote human health will also have environmental benefits.
Environmental harms from agriculture
“Drivers of hunger” discussed the current state of agricultural production and food security, finding that crop reallocation is necessary to provide micronutrients to the current and future human population. The good news from a climate perspective is that reallocating land to better provide for human nutrition will also provide climate benefits [1], [28]. These benefits stem in part from growing fewer crops that feed livestock, as more cropland and food are needed to raise an animal than to grow non-meat foods. The transition to fewer monoculture plantings and more fruit and vegetable crops will also provide habitat. As discussed below, more heterogenous plantings will also require fewer pesticides.
It is true that current food production practices cannot optimally nourish the world.
“Drivers of hunger” details the ways in which agricultural productivity skyrocketed during the green revolution. This co-occurrence of increased production and the implementation of modern pesticides have led to a strong belief that pesticides are necessary both for our current agricultural production and for future production. However, this does not seem to be wholly accurate. A 2017 UN report suggested that the case for pesticide use was vastly overblown and that pesticides produced far less value and introduced more risks than had been commonly understood [29]. While the debate on the appropriate use of pesticides is ongoing, two things seem clear: technological advances in agriculture have successfully increased yields, but this increase could be continued with less pesticide use (particularly with the continued development of slow/controlled release pesticides). Technological approaches—particularly data technology and restorative agriculture—are well suited to continuing to improve agricultural outcomes. Data technologies can be deployed to maximize yields while minimizing pesticide use and optimizing human health, particularly when approaches are grounded in improving soil health and ecosystem services [30]. Agricultural approaches that focus on improving environmental sustainability and food security are broadly referred to as regenerative agriculture but are sometimes termed circular or organic agriculture. Precision agriculture deploys monitoring techniques in concert with tailored solutions for small sections of land, crops or animals, enabling farmers to minimize inputs (like pesticides and fertilizers) and maximize yields [31]. Effectively deploying these technological approaches requires making intentional policy choices that incentivize sustainable behavior. Policy choices also impact urgent questions regarding food access.
Food waste diversion and reduction to eliminate hunger
Avoiding food waste has also been posited as a way to solve hunger. Food waste happens at both the large-scale agricultural level and at the smaller scale of household and commercial waste. Worldwide food waste was estimated to be nearly 1 billion tons in 2019, accounting for 1/3 of the food produced [32]. An estimated 14 % of total food is wasted before reaching the retail level [32]. This waste has important implications for climate and reduces the total amount of available food [1]. Some solutions for avoiding waste, including diverting food at risk of being wasted due to spoilage, can function at the large-scale level.
Loop Mission, for example, is a Quebec start-up that takes soon-to-expire food and turns it into juice, soap and gin [33]. Efforts like these are important and surely reduce food waste in large-scale settings, where economies of scale make waste fun attractive. Digital platforms and frameworks have been proposed to address food waste from a systems perspective [34], [35]. The economies of scale present in industrial and commercial food settings allow food to be reused or repurposed in an economically viable way. However, fun programs face higher challenges in avoiding food waste where it occurs most, in the home.
While data availability remains low in many sectors, food waste is enormous and exists in low- and middle-income countries at least as much as in high-income countries [17]. Household food waste is both underreported and much higher than waste in food service and retail settings; household waste is estimated to be nearly twice as high as waste in food service and retail combined. Of the 931 million tons of food wasted annually, a whopping 61 % comes from household waste [17]. The production and distribution of food that is wasted accounts for up to 10 % of global greenhouse emissions, suggesting significant climate (and other environmental) benefits from eliminating food waste [1]. Wasted food tends to be fresh food. As discussed above, fresh food is critical in delivering micronutrients [36]. A lack of micronutrients can occur both from a lack of overall nutrition and from consuming highly processed foods [1], [37]. In places where food insecure people rely on highly processed foods, the reasons boil down to fresh foods not being easy to access, process, or store.
Crop reallocation is necessary to provide micronutrients to the current and future human population.
Programs that aim to bring soon-to-expire food to food banks or other community centers are often criticized for being meaningless to poor people, and many food programs and homeless shelters no longer accept these types of donations [38]. At the microscale, community fridges for perishable foods and boxes, like the one shown in Figure 2 for non-perishables, have become popular in cities [39]. In my own experience, these boxes are well-used, and people quickly pick up food that is left there. The simplicity of these direct donation systems, however, is also a disadvantage. Traditional food pantries typically have some mechanism to verify that food is not expired or has been handled properly, although food security within donation systems is understudied, varies significantly by nation, and is likely insufficient [40]. But by their nature, community refrigerators or food boxes cannot provide any control mechanism for quality or safety. Donation and diversion systems like the ones described here have some ability to reduce waste. These approaches can provide additional food and help alleviate hunger, but their ability to do so is at the margins and does not present a systemic solution. “Personal economy to offset food insecurity” explores the ways that programs aiming to reduce food waste overlap with calls for food insecure people to employ personal economy to prevent hunger.

Figure 2.
Little Food Pantry in Eugene Oregon. This small outdoor cabinet is used to donate food within the community. Photo credit: Rick Obst, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Personal economy to offset food insecurity
Food exists as a commodity, and both food and agriculture are international industries. Agriculture and food production also exist at the local scale, on smaller scales, and at home. In contrast, food consumption always relates to the individual and is therefore personal. Economic trends impact consumers in a personal way. At this local and personal level, food costs can prevent access to food. This cost barrier impacts increasing numbers of people due to recent enormous increases in food prices. As discussed in “Industrial agriculture,” greedflation is possible due to outsized market power by large corporate distributors and grocers [14], [15], [16]. Due to these high food costs, food-insecure people are often advised to employ personal economy in their food consumption as a way to reduce or eliminate hunger at the household level.
At home, some of the barriers to reducing food costs are also barriers to preventing food waste. Planning, preparing and storing food to prevent waste and reduce cost all require time. Bulk buying can drastically reduce the cost of meals, but buying in bulk requires money, space, and security. In addition, saving money with bulk purchasing requires more than having sufficient cash to make the purchase, or space to stockpile it. Stores with better prices and quality are often only accessible by car. Buying in bulk also requires longer-term investments as well, including good freezing and refrigeration, and pest-free storage spaces. Most urgently, an individual must have the knowledge that they will not be evicted before they can eat that food. If someone does lose housing, the cost of food rises even more. That’s because even without buying in bulk, married people can cook, store food, and plan their meals for a fraction of what those meals cost in restaurants or convenience stores. This connection between secure housing and food access underscores the interconnectedness of food security with other sustainable development goals (SDGs) [41]. Addressing food insecurity requires addressing other forms of precarity and access to housing. As I explore in “Technology, policy, and food security,” these issues are also intertwined with access to land.
Alternative Approaches To Food and Agriculture
Some of the financial barriers to accessing food can also be offset by local food production. Municipalities offer gardening opportunities through community gardening programs, as shown in Figure 3 . These gardens can increase the food supply and provide a host of ancillary benefits, both directly to the participants and to the natural environment. The benefits of community gardening include providing ecosystem services in addition to food production [42]. Ancillary benefits, including mental and developmental health, are sometimes also motivation for these gardens. Germany’s long-standing approach to community gardening grew out of public health concerns for children having space to play. Figure 4 shows a modern “Schrebergarten,” or Kleingarten (small garden). Named after a pediatrician who advocated for children’s mental health, the Schrebergarten quickly morphed from play into spaces for food production [43]. Throughout German-speaking countries, these small plots can be rented for a relatively small sum (on the order of a few hundred euros per year), and gardeners often enhance these plots with a very tiny hut, allowing their gardens to act both as social and food production spaces [44].
Local food production and community control are important steps to achieving interconnected goals of adequate food, housing, and security.

Figure 3.
(a) Community garden in Karoi, New Zealand. Photo credit: Pakoire, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. (b) Community garden built near a dog run and public school in Queens, New York City, NY, USA. Photo credit: Tdorante10, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. (c) This community garden in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, LA, USA, is part of a broader set of instruments to provide fresh food to members of the community. Photo credit USDA/Kirsten Strough, public domain.

Figure 4.
(a) This kleingarten, or Schrebergarten, features cultivated land and small huts. Photo credit: Matt.smz86, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. (b) Community garden association sign. Photo credit: August Geyler, Creative Commons AttributionShare Alike 4.0 International license.
Gardens continue to provide benefits beyond food production. While current research efforts to formally measure these benefits are nascent, early evidence demonstrates that growing food locally and being directly involved in gardening, has enormous health benefits including eating more diverse foods and more producing and cooking more, which can lead to improved mood and social engagement[45], [46]. When urban gardening efforts occur in a community context, the benefits also strengthen ties and deepen engagement with other aspects of local society [47], [48]. Community gardening efforts can also act as an entry to food sovereignty and other local democratic movements [49]. Civic engagement and community gardening are intertwined.
In “The Stop,” Saul and Curtis [38] describes the decades-long transformation of a Toronto food bank to a community food center. This institution links food security and community gardening to broader social engagement related to poverty and democratic engagement, including helping poor people advocate for policy change while creating links with the middle class. They underscore this with the chapter title, “Gardens Won’t Save The Planet, But They’ll Make It A Whole Lot Nicer Place To Live” [38]. In that same vein, community gardening will not solve food insecurity, but local food production and community control are important steps to achieving interconnected goals of adequate food, housing, and security.
We have seen that food insecurity has roots in the concentration of land and wealth and related policy choices. Food reuse and redistribution initiatives and community gardens hold promise to improve food security, but these are likely limited. But community-centered agriculture, community or collective gardens, and individual gardens do more than increase food security. Doing for oneself can increase civic engagement and an individual sense of agency for people at risk of hunger. Community gardening, individual gardening, and collective agriculture are all wonderful ways to help people experience self-reliance. But people need land to garden, and whether they buy, rent, or borrow that land, the cost of land and its location compared to work, often creates insurmountable barriers to many people in terms of being able to put in the hard work and reap these benefits.
Technology, Policy, and Food Security
Technological advances have already radically improved agricultural productivity, rendering moot food scarcity predictions from Malthus to Ehrlich [2], [3]. Data technologies and agricultural approaches based on a system-level understanding of environmental processes hold promise in continuing to improve agricultural productivity, along with the systems used to deliver and produce food in ways that can improve access and reduce waste. As the previous sections have shown, technological improvements in food security are situated in a social context, meaning that any solution to food and agriculture challenges must involve changes within governance structures or society as well as technological improvements.
Many of the challenges that relate to large-scale agriculture and food availability have less to do with technology and more to do with intentional choices. At both the commercial and local scale, initiatives for fun have promise. At the local scale, community gardens and community food centers are incomplete solutions but do address fundamental human needs for food and agency. Issues related to food and agriculture are extremely complex, nuanced, and context-specific. Individually, none of the approaches reviewed here are sufficient to solve these, often structural-level, social challenges related to food insecurity. Addressing food security and making agriculture sufficient for human and environmental needs requires changes at both the large-scale and small-scale levels for the practice of food production, delivery, and consumption. Effecting these changes necessitates fundamental alterations in both agricultural practice and land use. This includes crop choices and agricultural practices as well as ensuring that people who want to raise their own food are able to do so. The policies necessary to make these changes will not occur on their own. Massive organization and advocacy will be necessary to create a more equitable, healthy food system that meets human nutritional needs without further environmental harm. Local food production, community gardens, and community food centers can serve as sites of development for solidarity and advocacy surrounding food policy and the connected social programs necessary to achieve food security. These local efforts are necessary because the scale of changes required is huge.
Maintaining accessible, affordable , food requires people to be engaged in governance and willing to demand that companies and individuals who control markets, land, and prices are taxed and prevented from exerting monopolistic price control. Solutions like price controls or profit limits on food, along with social support to guarantee that life’s basic necessities can be met, should be accompanied by sufficient and stable housing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This piece was immensely improved by successive edits from multiple colleagues. I thank them for their time and patience in improving my clarity.
Author Information
Ketra Schmitt is an associate professor at the Centre for Engineering and Society and an associate member at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine and serves as a board member for the IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology. Email: ketra.schmitt@concordia.ca.
_____________________
To read the full version of this article, including references, click HERE.
____________________