There are so many worth efforts going on to fight hunger through improved agriculture. An excellent HuffPost Green article gives a long list of worthy efforts. Perhaps with enough such creative, innovative approaches, we really can conquer the coming world resource challenges.
But the article tells a second story as well. Every incidence of food insecurity, every crisis situation, every sustainability issue, is unique. Thirty percent of African produce is lost due to insufficient storage--but how to get the produce from storage to the area of greatest need? What if those areas suffer unexpected (or expected) drought? So there are lots of "green bullets," but no one "silver bullet."
This poses challenges for research--how many people is each new approach going to help? It's a problem for policy, too--how do I spread resources for greatest effectiveness?
A few of us have looked at this problem as an opportunity. There is a whole subfield of computer science called "automated decision support." The achievements in this field have helped decision makers--engineers, designers, analysts, planners--find the good options out of huge numbers of possibilities.
To my knowledge, these powerful tools haven't been applied to food insecurity yet. Perhaps the time has come.
No comments:
Post a Comment