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Food is the future

 

Here in affluent societies with grocery stores full of food we might not understand how in some poorer countries the situation as regards the food availability is becoming inbearable. Some time back as I was travelling in India, I asked those people what are biggest concerns. It soon turned out that tow issues stand out among others: food and fuel. The rising prices of those basic commodities have driven people with very limited resources close to the edge: as one taxi-driver said to me in Delhi: his family simply cannot afford to buy food from the market the way they could do previously. Besides, his occupation as taxi-driver didn’t help: soaring fuel price made his business worse.

There some recent estimates that anticipates severe and chronic food crisis in only five years from now. These estimates have come from UN, several research institutes but also from investor community. See what mr. Jeremy Grantham the founder of GMO, successful global wealth management firm, writes in his report from the last June(1). Grantham has for a long time represented the rare voice of socially concerned investor. The global food production is under sever constraints, reasons varying from overuse of fertiliser and other bad farming practices to the growing needs of global middle class. One thing is obvious: crisis will hit badly those countries that are ill equipped to manage the situation.

In all of our innovation hype we should keep in mind that much more of innovation should be focused to tackle these global issues instead of bringing to the world one more new gadget. But for anyone thinking of what could be the nr1 profession of future, one answer is obvious: the organic farmer. And there is a lot room for young entrepreneurs. In US, the average age of the farmer is 57 of age

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