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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TECH ALONE WON’T FUTURE-PROOF THE FOOD SYSTEM, EXPERTS WARN  
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Rich Bellis
June 18, 2026
Agfundernews.com
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_ There’s broad consensus that the food system needs updating but
little agreement about how to do it. Calls for ambitious policy
responses to climate and geopolitical risks in the current food system
are growing louder. _

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Governments and businesses have more tools than ever for spotting
vulnerabilities in the food system before they trigger global
disruptions. That’s good news as the climate crisis and geopolitical
turbulence intensify.

 

The bad news? These technologies won’t achieve much if they’re
only used to patch a system in need of an overhaul, speakers at the
Hello Tomorrow Summit in Amsterdam.

 

The politics of progress

 

The problem with resilience, said Giga Futures consultancy founder
Christine Gould during a panel on the topic, “is that you bounce
back to a status quo that is fundamentally not working.” For the
most part, the current food system is operating as designed, to
deliver yield and shelf-stability at scale. “But we’re living in a
world where that’s no longer enough,” she said.

 

There’s broad consensus that the food system needs updating but
little agreement about how to do it.

 

Take, for example, the vision outlined by Marc Canal, a senior fellow
at McKinsey Global Institute, which published a report this year
called “A Century of Plenty.” It argues that humanity already
possesses a “progress machine” capable of generating huge leaps in
prosperity—increasingly decoupled from carbon emissions—to deliver
Switzerland-level living standards to today’s poorest populations by
2100.

 

Surveying the past century and modern advancements, “it’s almost
weird to think, okay, now all of a sudden we’re going to stop,”
Canal said. That’s true even in “this more-conflict world” where
pessimism runs rampant, he said in a presentation at the event that
urged continued tech development, private-sector innovation and a
“new narrative” to inspire it. One slide read, in part, “The
opportunity is real. Growth is good.”

 

Giuseppe Borghi, who leads Earth observation development at the
European Space Agency, agreed that “we should have a very positive
view of the future,” citing “a lot of elements that were not
available 50 years ago, 80 years ago.” But he cautioned that “the
political element” is “what we are missing.”

 

The ESA has been building digital models to monitor and predict the
interacting effects of human activity and natural processes, Borghi
said. The ongoing project draws on satellite, meteorological,
supply-chain, precision-agriculture and other data to “detect subtle
elements a few weeks or months before the damage is coming,” he
said. (“The commercialization of space is helping a lot in this
direction,” Borghi added.) The goal is to arm policymakers with
“actionable insights” before crop failures, floods or fires spiral
out of control.

 

Even so, Borghi described tech deployments like this as “simple
engineering” relative to the political coordination required to
utilize them well. To “put together different cultures, put together
different strategies and so on is the critical element,” he said.

 

Policy and technology in food security

 

This argument and others like it have grown louder lately,
particularly as shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz have hit
fuel and fertilizer prices. The think tank IPES-Food, which has
criticized some forms of digitization in agrifood as business plays
that prop up a brittle and unjust food system, released a report last
month calling for policy measures to reduce volatility, stabilize
prices and rebalance power across the value chain.

 

Gould emphasized Friday that “it can’t just be technology” that
bolsters food security, saying governments “need a new vision” to
support it.

 

For example, state agencies are well-positioned to repurpose and
mobilize interventions for which “the business case never panned
out,” as with vertical farming, she said. Gould cited U.S. President
Abraham Lincoln’s creation of the land-grant university system in
1862, during the American Civil War, as a model of ambitious policy
responses in periods of “extreme vulnerability.”

 

Tech can play a powerful role, she said: AI can help spot intellectual
property “sitting maybe latent or dormant in one sector and match it
to another,” for example, or find a crop “over in this region here
that might be perfect” in another as climate patterns shift.

 

“Who funds that, at the end of the day?” is a big question, Gould
said, but industry isn’t likely to do it alone. Corporate risk
management teams “are thinking very, very short term,” she said,
“like breeding corn varieties for the next five years.”

 

She argued policymakers need to go beyond reactive resilience measures
and take an “antifragile” approach, a term the statistician Nassim
Nicholas Taleb popularized in his 2012 book of that title. In the
process, they can draw on public-sector and institutional prototypes,
Gould said: “We can learn some of the capabilities from how
militaries prepare and bring that into our innovation agenda.”

 

If this sounds hard and complicated, it is. But “complexity is the
new normal,” she said, “and we have to lean into it.”

 

 

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