In this article, a continuation of last month’s Innovation and Food Security article, we discuss a few more key factors contributing to the Food Security issues in the world and preview a few potential innovative solutions for these critical factors and explore international groups and organizations collaborating to address the issue of Food Security.

In last month’s article we discussed the challenge of exponentially growing meat consumption and the increasing burden the meat demand is placing on the other resources like land, water and vegetation. Some of the innovative solutions trying to address this growing demand for meat involved developing meat alternatives that can be manufactured thus releasing more land and water resources for cultivation for human consumption (rather than for livestock feed). In this article we look at one more critical factor, access to water, contributing to the food insecurity and malnutrition in the world, especially in developing and under-developed countries in Africa. Lack of access to clean water for safe human consumption and unreliable access to water for food production particularly in rural dry-land areas are factors that contribute significantly to food insecurity and malnutrition.

In terms of innovative solutions to address the issue of unreliable access to water for food production, the solutions fall under three primary areas – biotechnology solutions to create more robust crop variants, solutions in the area of irrigation processes and technology and solutions in the area of water storage and re-use. In the domain of irrigation solutions the concept of “Supplemental irrigation” is becoming increasingly popular, especially in areas with limited water resources. The concept of supplemental irrigation involves supply of small amounts of water to essentially provide precipitation to the usually rain fed crops in the case of low or no rainfall based precipitation. The amount and timing of supplemental irrigation is based on getting an optimal crop yield for amount of water used rather than just trying for the maximum crop yield as in conventional irrigation. Thus under supplemental irrigation there is significantly higher water productivity i.e. the amount of grain or biomass produced per liter of water.

The other domain of potential solutions for the reliable water supply is the area of water storage and re-use. Water harvesting is not a new concept – it is being practiced in various forms and sizes across the world since many years. In the past few years the solutions in water harvesting are leveraging innovations in other related areas to form cost effective and efficient systems. For ex. In a few dry regions, advances in GIS technology are being used to identify the most suitable area for catchment in terms of high water collection and optimal water distribution. Similarly advances in construction technology and material are being utilized to build low cost micro-catchments for rain water harvesting.

Due to the enormity, the scale, the seriousness and the cross-domain nature of the challenges faced under the area of food security, organizations across the world have identified the need for collaborative efforts to tackle these challenges. One innovative example of such collaboration is the “Thought For Food” group – it is a movement that plans to utilize crowd sourcing concepts to inspire, mobilize and leverage the next generation of thought leaders and innovators to think about and come up with potential solutions across the value chain of the Food ecosystem.