Investing in Agriculture: Far-Reaching Challenge, Significant Opportunity: An Asset Management Perspective

The growing global population, with its increasing need for energy and food, presents a challenge for the planet: How can the ever-increasing demand for these resources be met in a sustainable manner? This is of particular importance in light of climate change: Emissions of greenhouse gases from energy and food production causes climate change. More people means more demand for energy and food production, and more demand for production means more carbon emissions. The focus of this paper is on how we can try to meet this challenge of boosting agricultural productivity to meet the needs of the Earth’s ever hungrier population. The paper looks at this challenge through 2050, and presents as-of-yet unpublished data from agricultural models.The changing patterns of climate can potentially have severe impacts on agricultural productivity both ecologically as well as economically. Due to shifting precipitation patterns, movement of insect populations, more dramatic shifts in daily temperature regimes, and other large scale ecological changes that come with climate change, agriculture will most likely be severely impacted by climate change. The move to increase production for biofuels to reduce transport emissions is a further feedback loop linking agriculture to climate change. Skillfully managing this interaction between agriculture and climate change is a grand challenge.Our conclusion is that it is going to be hard to meet the challenge and all available technologies will be looked at and massive investment will be required.