Complicating a solution to this problem is a dynamic that must be better understood in the West: developing countries often use limited arable land to expand cities to house their growing populations. As good land disappears, people destroy timber resources and even rainforests as they try to create more arable land to feed themselves. The long-term environmental consequences could be disastrous for the entire globe.

Productivity revolution
To meet the expected demand for food over the next 50 years, we in the United States will have to grow roughly three times more food on the land we have. That’s a tall order. My farm in Marion County, Indiana, for example, yields on average 8.3 to 8.6 tonnes of corn per hectare – typical for a farm in central Indiana. To triple our production by 2050, we will have to produce an annual average of 25 tonnes per hectare.

Can we possibly boost output that much? Well, it’s been done before. Advances in the use of fertilizer and water, improved machinery and better tilling techniques combined to generate a threefold increase in yields since 1935 – on our farm back then, my dad produced 2.8 to 3 tonnes per hectare. Much US agriculture has seen similar increases.

But of course there is no guarantee that we can achieve those results again. Given the urgency of expanding food production to meet world demand, we must invest much more in scientific research and target that money toward projects that promise to have significant national and global impact. For the United States, that will mean a major shift in the way we conduct and fund agricultural science. Fundamental research will generate the innovations that will be necessary to feed the world.

The United States can take a leading position in a productivity revolution. And our success at increasing food production may play a decisive humanitarian role in the survival of billions of people and the health of our planet.

Directly related to our challenge to feed a growing world is the necessity of providing a sustainable resource for fuels, chemicals and materials. I believe that agriculture and the wider sphere of plants represent a resource not only for food, but also for the fuel, energy and materials essential to modern society. Scientists have developed biotechnologies – genetically engineered yeasts, enzymes and bacteria – capable of breaking down plants, trees, grasses and agricultural residues (known as biomass) into their constituent chemical building blocks, principally in the form of complex sugars. From this intermediate step, we can produce a wide variety of bio-based products including animal feed, chemicals and – importantly – fuel.

If a significant percentage of products currently derived from petroleum can be produced from biomass, the major industrial economies will improve their strategic security by reducing their dependence on Middle Eastern oil and all countries, rich and poor, can spend far less on oil imports, dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help strengthen their own rural communities while simultaneously building a new bio-based industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide per year.

Shift to bio-based fuels
Bio-based fuels such as ethanol have clear potential to be sustainable, low cost and high performance, are compatible with both current and future transportation systems, and provide near-zero net greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of bio-ethanol on greenhouse gas emissions is particularly significant because the transportation sector relies almost exclusively on fossil fuels and accounts for one third of total greenhouse gas emissions. A shift to bio-based fuels is a long-term approach to the problem of global warming that does not require a shift from automobiles or result in increased costs for US employers and consumers.

Agriculture and the wider sphere of plants represent a resource not only for food, but also for the fuel, energy and materials essential to modern society

As my friend, former CIA director James Woolsey, who has worked with me on this issue, likes to say, this is not your father’s ethanol. We currently derive ethanol from corn and other starches, an energy-intensive process that results in an expensive product. He notes that using biocatalysts, or other technologies nearing commercialization like thermal depolymerization, we can cut costs by orders of magnitude, making bio-ethanol competitive with gasoline even if the price of oil drops to $10-13 a barrel. Equally important, large-scale production won’t require us to plough up marginal land or displace food crops.