A global food crisis may be only a decade away | Sara Menker
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2017
⏱️ 18 minutes
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Summary
Sara Menker quit a career in commodities trading to figure out how the global value chain of agriculture works. Her discoveries have led to some startling predictions: "We could have a tipping point in global food and agriculture if surging demand surpasses the agricultural system's structural capacity to produce food," she says. "People could starve and governments may fall." Menker's models predict that this scenario could happen in a decade -- that the world could be short 214 trillion calories per year by 2027. She offers a vision of this impossible world as well as some steps we can take today to avoid it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features technology entrepreneur Sarah Manker, recorded live at TED Global 2017. |
| 0:08.5 | Since 2009, the world has been stuck on a single narrative around a coming global food crisis and what we need to do to avoid it. |
| 0:25.4 | How do we feed 9 billion people by 2050? |
| 0:33.5 | Every conference, podcast, and dialogue around global food security starts with this question and goes on to answer it by saying, we need to produce 70% more food. |
| 0:40.9 | The 2050 narrative started to evolve shortly after global food prices hit all-time highs in 2008. |
| 0:49.6 | People were suffering and struggling. |
| 0:52.6 | Governments and world leaders needed to show us |
| 0:55.0 | that they were paying attention and were working to solve it. |
| 1:00.0 | The thing is, 2050 is so far into the future |
| 1:03.0 | that we can't even relate to it. |
| 1:06.0 | And more importantly, if we keep doing what we're doing, |
| 1:10.0 | it's going to hit us a lot sooner than that. |
| 1:14.3 | I believe we need to ask a different question. |
| 1:18.5 | The answer to that question needs to be framed differently. |
| 1:25.4 | If we can reframe the old narrative and replace it with new numbers that tell us a more complete |
| 1:32.1 | picture numbers that everyone can understand and relate to we can avoid the crisis altogether |
| 1:42.0 | i was a commodities trader in my past life and one of the things avoid the crisis altogether. |
| 1:47.2 | I was a commodities trader in my past life, |
| 1:49.7 | and one of the things that I learned trading is that every market has a tipping point. |
| 1:53.6 | The point at which change occurs so rapidly |
| 1:56.7 | that it impacts the world, |
| 1:58.6 | and things change forever. |
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