TIME TO RETHINK EVERYTHING PART FOUR: THE SMART FARMING REVOLUTION

摘要

Prions in our beef. Insecticides on our grapes. Nitrates in our rivers. Modified genes in our corn. What next? Never has the food on our plates seemed so heavily sauced with worry. At the same time, the signs of much deeper problems are all around. Agricultural test plots-once ranked among the most boring bits of the rural landscape-are now the scenes of pitched battles between agribusiness giants and the opponents of genetically modified crops. Meanwhile, British farmers are quitting in droves, especially after last year's outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Most ominously, the world's population continues to climb. And despite the rise of high-tech agriculture, 800 million people don't get enough to eat. Admittedly, that's often due to a lack of money-the world actually produces enough for everyone, at least for now. But by 2050 we will have 9 billion mouths to feed, 3 billion more than today. Finding food for all those people will tax farmers'-and researchers'-ingenuity to the limit. Yet already, precious aquifers that provide irrigation water for some of the world's most productive farmlands are drying up or filling with seawater, and arable land in China is eroding to create vast dust storms that redden sunsets as far away as North America.