Agri-tech advancements designed to quickly meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may have unintended consequences on the world’s food systems. 

This is according to a new analysis in The Lancet Planetary Health written by a team of scientists. 

There are no quick fixes to ending poverty, eliminating hunger and conserving biological diversity, in light of the urgency to meet the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), flag the authors. 

Symptoms of the ailing food system include unsustainable farming practices, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and the waste or loss of about 30 percent of all food produced. Some two billion people are unhealthy because of their diets and eight million people died in 2019 due to dietary risk factors.

“The food system is in the mess it is right now because we introduce technologies and approaches to managing it without fully understanding all the indirect impacts the intervention can have,” underscores Andy Jarvis, a co-author and the associate director of the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

Displacing demand for environmentally taxing crops
Anticipating trade-offs is crucial to ensuring fixes do not create unmanageable new problems, write the study’s authors.  

For example, protein derived from organic waste to feed livestock could decrease the demand for soybean meal. This could lead to less deforestation caused by soy farming. But decreased production of soybean, which is also used to produce oil for food products, could increase palm oil demand. This could clear more forests for oil palm plantations.

In addition to tapping organic waste to produce microbial protein, called “circular feed,” the authors looked at trade-offs of three other food-system remedying technologies on the horizon:

Using cereals to replenish nitrogen in soils, called “nitrogen fixation,” could decrease the overuse of chemical fertilizers and their unsustainable impacts on the environment, such as water pollution. But this could reduce prices for already over-consumed foods, potentially leading to further increases in non-communicable diseases (NDCs) like diabetes.

Personalized nutrition technologies could substantially reduce NDCs by tailoring diets to people’s genetic profiles and metabolism. But this could lead to a rapidly unsustainable increase in demand for healthy foods. The cost of personalized nutrition could also be out of the economic reach of many. And, were it to become widespread, personalized nutrition would generate high volumes of sensitive personal data.

Automation and robotics could increase the reach of precision agriculture. This could reduce food prices, stabilize food supply and reduce overuse of fertilizers and water, which would benefit the environment. But this could reduce the need for unskilled labor, further threaten the precarious livelihoods of smallholder farmers, and drive more migration to expanding megacities.

“Exciting new technologies are needed for transitioning toward a sustainable food system,” says Ana Maria Loboguerrero, a co-author and the Alliance’s research director for climate action. “But we must be aware that ‘win-win’ technological solutions do not always exist, with losers and winners and trade-offs and synergies across different SDGs.”

Helping the SDGs
The study was led by Mario Herrera, the chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national research agency.  

The authors calculated the potential direct effects of different technologies on the food system (including digital agriculture, gene technology and resource efficiency) and their indirect effects on the SDGs.

The analysis showed most technologies have neutral or varying degrees of positive impacts across most of the SDGs. But in the case of decent work and economic growth for all (SDG 8), reduced inequality (SDG 10) and peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG 16), the results will be mixed.

Some of the SDGs, which were created in 2015 to expand upon 2000’s Millenium Development Goals, are not trending in the right direction. Hunger was already increasing before the COVID-19 pandemic made undernourishment worse. 

The authors stress that rapid action is necessary and the temptation to adopt quick-fix measures. They remark that other unknown negative impacts may be greater now than ever.

The authors conclude, “Change and innovation come with trade-offs, but we now have methods, the science, the targets and the socioeconomic mechanisms in place to ensure that the trade-offs of our actions do not become insurmountable.” 

“Now is the time to put our arsenal of sociotechnical innovation and immense human ingenuity to use to secure the future of our planet and the next generations.”