When you look around the world what do you see? Do you see solutions for today, or solutions for what is yet to come? When we talk about tomorrow, they key is questions must involve innovation - innovation of technology and market knowledge on human wants and needs.
One trend we cannot ignore is the trend of urbanization. Currently the percentage of those living in urban areas is approximately 50%2. By the year 2050 that figure is projected to hit 70%2. In gross numbers the world's population which is nearing 7 billion1 will continue to grow to just under 10 billion by 20501. Furthermore, by the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth's population will reside in urban areas while rural population and rural land space will continue to shrink. Add other trends such as increasing life expectancies and the number of countries joining the developed and modern world in terms of spending power and desired standard of living and one can recognize the need for food in general and specifically in urban settings.
Many countries such as Singapore and the Japan have learned upward mobility in terms of answers to housing problems and congested urban space. This made possible thanks to the likes of steel and other technology. But even if people can be fit into urban areas so to speak, finding ample food source may not be so easy. One possible solution to these future problems may be found in vertical farming.
Vertical farming in a nutshell is a proposal for agriculture to occur in urban settings via the use of technology to produce large-scale agriculture in urban high-rises, even skyscrapers. The father of the modern-innovative idea is Dr. Dickson Despommier. In basic, proponents argue the following benefits that could be produced by implementing vertical farming3:
1. Crops could be grown year round. Additionally, the internal nature of buildings would alleviate natural inhibitors - weather related such as floods, unseasonal warmth or cold, fire, abnormal rainfall or drought.
2. As the world population grows, more and more farm land is needed. Natural land composition and resources are thus being rapidly depleted.
3. Vertical farming could allow cities to become self-sufficient in terms of food production, and in doing so create jobs for a growing urban population.
4. Non-fertile areas such as many cities in the Middle East or Southwest United States to name a few, could generate more food (of course this is also water dependent, but technology in desalination and waste water treatment could make this possible).
Of course there are downsides. No city has actually tested such a system and thus we have only forecasts to go on. Nor do current price projections currently make vertical farming appealing. Nonetheless, this is an innovation that should be followed closely, well funded, researched, developed and explored. As citizens of the world, we should be current and savvy to new innovations that might take some of the plight out of a scarcely-resourced future. Like water, energy, and medicine, we ought to be considering population, urbanization, and food as potential future pitfalls and looking far enough ahead to make sure we won't fall through.
1 US Census Bureau http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/idb/worldpopgraph.php
2 UN Demographic Statistics http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/dyb2.htm
3 the Vertical Farm Project http://www.verticalfarm.com/
