There is a crunch coming .. the climate in which agriculture was born has changed for all time.
“There is a growing demand for food and a shrinking resource base with which to produce it… to solve that, we really need a food revolution .. we need to create a food supply that is climate-proof and sustainable.
… in the future cities will grow a third of the world’s food, another third will be grown on farms that are regenerative and we will probably produce a third in the world’s deep oceans.
There is now coming a sustainable food revolution – its going to be bigger than the green energy revolution – is Australia going to lead it ? .. or are we going to miss that huge opportunity to double our GDP ? basically getting into the knowledge base of how you produce sustainable climate-proof food”
Julian Cribb – author, journalist, editor and science communicator
“We just assume that we have been able to eat this well or live this well for as long as we have and we assume that that will continue - we don’t want to face the reality that in fact there are challenges out there that are very real – food security is a big one.
We often hear that we (Australia) are going to be the food bowl of Asia .. but we wont be if we don’t do something about our soils and we don’t do something about water .. that short -termism crowds out all of the detail that we should be looking at.”
John Hewson – former politician, investment banker, political commentator and board director
A great conversation on the future, and in particular the future of food, on this week's Q&A Future Alert (21 Oct 2019)