Food production will need to increase by 25-70 over today's levels to support a global population of more than nine billion by 2050. Scaling current farming practices by creating more arable land through deforestation and increasing pesticide and fertilizer application is unsustainable and insufficient to meet these growing needs. Mitigating global hunger will require material changes to improve the productivity of our farming systems. Today, despite the negative environmental externalities, growers spend $80 billion annually on pesticides globally and still lose 20-40 of crops on the field due to pests and disease every year. As our climate changes to bring warmer conditions that favor the emergence of new diseases and increasing disease pressures, these losses are expected to increase by 10-25 for every degree of atmospheric warming. Increasing microbial resistance to traditional chemistries, a lack of investment in RD for new active ingredients, and escalating pressure from regulators and consumers to phase out widely used chemical pesticides have left growers with a shrinking list of products to effectively protect their crops. Caught between intensifying global food demands and a dwindling toolbox to deal with increasing disease threats, growers are hungry for new solutions.
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