This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube presentation titled "The Result of Food System 5.0 | Feeding 10 Billion Founder Paul Matteucci" (uploaded 2015-08-08). It is a lecture-style monologue by Paul Matteucci analyzing the global food system (Food System 5.0). He reviews historical gains—feeding ~7 billion today vs ~3.5 billion in 1970, fewer food-insecure people, rising middle class, and yield improvements achieved on only modestly more arable land—and identifies three major challenges: sustenance (growing demand driven more by diet shifts than population alone), environmental degradation and sustainability of resources, and health issues tied to modern diets (obesity epidemic). He frames these as entrepreneurial opportunities, discusses possible pathways to a future Food System 6.0 (including reliance on GMOs and associated risks), and stresses the need to feed ~9–10 billion sustainably over the coming decades.
Chapters
So the results of Food System 5.0 hasn't been all bad. We feed 3.5 billion more people than we did in 1970 planet-wide. So we fed about 3 billion, about 3.5 billion in 1970. We feed about 7 billion today. Moreover, there are fewer food insecure people. It's fallen from about 1 billion people in 1970 to about 800 million today. Still a lot of people, but percentage-wise, it's 800 million divided by 7 versus a billion divided by 3.5. So that's good. 3.5. So percentage-wise, you'd consider it great progress. The middle class has grown from 800 million to over 2 billion, and we'll reach 5 billion by 2030, mostly— most of the growth coming in Asia, South Asia, and East Asia. We produce more fiber, fuel, feedstock, and flowers as well as food. So the food system doesn't just produce food for us. The food and ag system produces a lot of other things. Fiber or cotton. Think about how many people are wearing cotton. Almost everybody has cotton on today. Fuel, feedstock— feedstock is what goes into factories to make chemicals and the like— and flowers, because it's her birthday today. And we can get almost anything from anywhere in the world if we want it bad enough. And we've done this with fewer farms and farmers, Only 10% more arable land. So we're feeding twice as many people 30 years later on only 10% more land, increasing yields about 2% a year until 2000 and roughly 1.2% since. But we have created 3 enormous challenges. And the reason why the word challenges is crossed out here is because the best thing about being an entrepreneur is you get to look at all the world's problems and all the challenges as an opportunity. Opportunity for innovation, creativity, for building businesses. So the first giant opportunity, population growth and development. Birth rates are declining all over the planet now. Even places where women are having 5 children during their reproductive lifetime, They used to have 7 or 8. So birth rates are declining all over the planet. Some people believe we have already reached peak child. We have 2 billion children in the world, and they believe that we're stable. We're never going to have more than 2 billion children in the world at one time. But these children have to work their way through the reproductive— their reproductive lives before that actually causes population to either decline or flatten out. It turns out that the increasing demand for food over the next 30 years is caused more by changing diets than it is by increased population. So population goes from 7 to 10, you're thinking, well, I need about a 30 or 40% more food, but what's really changing it is the move— is the shift of people from the middle class, from poverty to the middle class. And that's causing people to change their diets, eat more animal protein, etc., and putting a lot more— That's a lot of meat. demands on the food system. Second giant problem, destruction of the environment. Current food production methods create an array of environmental problems and are depleting nonrenewable resources. So the problem statement is, how do we consume more food without destroying our ability to continue to produce food in the future? How do we maintain the productive capacity of the planet? And then the third problem is modern diets and changes in eating customs have engendered tremendous health problems and And we call that the obesity epidemic. So how do we reduce or eliminate obesity-related disease? Yeah, I know, preaching to the choir here. Okay, 3 big challenges: sustenance, health, and sustainability. Right? So those 3 challenges break down into a lot of other challenges. When entrepreneurs focus on things, they break problems down and they try to solve. one problem that has hopefully a big market. But the point here is that my thesis is that this doesn't get changed, the food system doesn't evolve to 6.0 by somebody trying to solve the sustenance problem or the health problem or the environmental problem. People are going to try to solve smaller problems than that, like antibiotic resistance, like how do I make farmworker health, how do I improve farmworker health, how do I get rid of water shortages, how do I make the soils continue to be productive? There's other stuff too besides the big problems. There's treatment of animals, improving local farmers' income and local communities, preserving cultural identity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's other stuff that the food system does that isn't part of the 3 big problems. So what does Food System 6.0 look like? Well, there are multiple candidates. One school of thought says, well, we don't really have to do anything. It'll get us to being able to feed 10 billion. Of course, this is a big bet with no insurance. And it's not going to prevent water shortages or climate change. It's going to require a reliance on GMOs to do it. We'll talk a bit about that. It doesn't improve future health outcomes, because if we don't change anything, we're going to have the health outcomes we have now, by definition. It won't save our wild oceans or our soil resources, and it's likely to degrade our ability to produce food in the future. So the idea here isn't just to figure out how to feed between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050, but how to do it in 2060, 2070, 2080. The great thing about this problem is that because birth rates, female reproductive rates are declining all over the planet, is that if we can figure out how to feed between 9 and 10 billion, we may have solved the problem forever. Now, these lines, things shift these lines. You can't say it, but at least there's hope at the end of the rainbow. So if we can figure out how to feed 9 9 to 10, we can probably make it all the way.
