SEATTLE, Washington — Founded in 1994, the XPRIZE Foundation is a nonprofit organization that gathers teams of innovators from across the globe to face-off in cash prize competitions. Teams are incentivized to combine their knowledge and assets to develop breakthroughs in technology that offer a positive and sustainable future for the world. The XPRIZE digital roadmap is a development by the organization that aims to create a more food secure and sustainable world by 2050.
The XPRIZE Competition
Previous winners of XPRIZE competitions like The Skysource / Skywater Alliance won $1.75 million for building a high-volume water generator that can work in all climates. Part of the XPRIZE competition is having innovators design a roadmap of breakthroughs in a given domain such as space, the environment or energy. The roadmap of breakthroughs is a detailed report that analyzes complex and intertwined issues to find the best possible solutions within a domain of interest.
Future of Food Impact Roadmap
On October 19, 2019, the XPRIZE Foundation released the XPRIZE digital roadmap called the Future of Food Impact Roadmap, in partnership with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research and the International Development Research Centre. The XPRIZE roadmap is a digital report and interactive website that discovered three main challenges in the world’s core food system and features 12 breakthroughs that offer solutions to these challenges and hopeful innovations for food security. The goal of this project is to create a more sustainable and food secure world by 2050.
Challenges in the World’s Food Systems
The three main challenges the Future of Food Impact Roadmap identifies in food systems are consuming and producing healthier food, creating more lucrative employment opportunities within the food supply chain and managing food systems within environmental limits.
Extensive secondary research, feedback from experts and collaborative work within leading organizations, led to the discovery of these three challenges. Researchers recognized that the world’s food systems are affected largely by socio-demographic, technological, economic, environmental and political trends. Thus, researchers geared the 12 breakthroughs to these challenges to specifically influence changes in these trends that shape food systems around the world.
The 12 Breakthroughs for Food Challenges
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Food System Data Trust: A database that ensures safe, democratized access to data on agricultural activities and consumption. This could allow farmers to see the impact of production practices over time, show data on the effect of food consumption on a population over time and allow knowledge of production practices and technology to spread faster.
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Land Use Revolution: Methods of utilizing natural resources to increase sustainability, limit pollution, increase agricultural production efficiency and restore ecosystems. This would allow farmers to limit the use of water during the constraining times of climate change, improve soil fertility with the decreased usage of chemical fertilizers and revive natural ecosystems for future use.
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Renewable Energy for All: Affordable renewable energy sources that grant access to reliable energy for rural households and farms. This could vastly improve the quality of life for rural households and expand their opportunities. Rural farmers can have access to better technology, lighting, cold-food storage, mobile phones and information.
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Accessible Precision Agriculture: Agriculture technology that is affordable, accessible and obtainable for small-scale farmers. Farmers in developing worlds could then have access to beneficial technology like drones, sensors, satellites and data collection. Rural, impoverished farmers with increased agricultural knowledge can improve their production and livelihood.
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Ocean and Land Biodiversity Stewardship: A method for analyzing, collecting data and realizing the benefits the biodiversity of ecosystems offer. This would give the ability to collect data on how biodiversity is affected by food production, hopefully leading to better production practices that better integrate biodiversity management.
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Food Production in Urban Networks: Bringing food production from agriculture, livestock and fishing to urban areas to lessen the production burden on rural producers and create a more sustainable value chain. This would educate urban dwellers more on food production, shorten supply chains, decrease reliance on industrial farming and bring more innovation for food security.
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Enabling SME Innovation: Fostering an environment that promotes the potential of small and medium-sized food producers. This could give small-scale farmers a level playing field in competing with large-scale producers in terms of promoting innovative production techniques and knowledge. Small and medium-sized producers could have more opportunities for investment and access to data, technology and resources at low risk.
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Extending Food Lifetimes to Reduce Perishability: Innovative and low-cost methods to extend the life of fresh food. This would include monitoring the quality of food, reducing spoilage waste along the production chain and producing knowledge and technology like AI that will help consumers utilize food while it is fresh. Fresh food prices would drop, food could be transported farther distances and fresh, healthy food would be more appealing to lower-income households.
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Alternative and Novel Proteins at Scale: An increase in the production of protein sources that are not derived from animals. A variety of affordable protein sources that are alternatives to meat could decrease the production of meat and greenhouse gases, thus helping the environment. This could bring more balance to the diets of people around the world and bring new knowledge to alternative protein sources.
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Food as Medicine: Shifting knowledge and consumption of food as the foundation of human health. Utilization of technological advances like personalized nutrition, genetics and the intestinal microbiome could help enhance nutrition, wield consumption and improve medical knowledge. With a deeper understanding of how food consumption affects health, farmers could be swayed to grow more diversified, nutritious crops.
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True Cost of Food: A universally standardized structure that takes the hidden external costs of food systems into account when pricing food in order to promote healthy diets. Hidden external costs of food systems include diet-related diseases, harsh labor and natural resource depletion. This could incentivize a shift in the promotion of healthier diets, affordable prices for healthy foods and more sustainable production practices.
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Actionable Technologies to Create New Food Norms: A variety of modern technologies that guide consumers to healthier and more sustainable food options. Examples of this would be AI-integrated phone applications that offer personalized healthy food options and sustainability ratings when shopping in a grocery store or ordering at restaurants.
The XPRIZE Digital Roadmap Serves Global Poverty
The XPRIZE digital roadmap was able to pinpoint challenges that the world’s food systems face and offer highly researched solutions to them. While there are already practices and technology that are helping to accomplish these solutions, like TechnoServe’s $1.6 million project to implement drone use for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, or Shivansh Farming’s introduction of cost-free, natural fertilizer in small-scale Indian farming, the 12 breakthroughs lay the groundwork for further innovations for food security and change within food systems around the world. Impoverished regions around the world could adopt just one of these solutions into its food systems and see a more food secure, sustainable and positive future.
– Dalton Dunning
Photo: Flickr