Right now, the world’s farmers produce enough food to feed the entire population 1.5 times over. That’s enough to feed about 10 billion people. Yet, due to a myriad of different issues, only a fraction of that food ends up reaching a human mouth. An astonishing 821 million people still go to bed on an empty stomach most nights. That’s roughly one out of every nine people on the planet. An even greater number, roughly one in three, suffer from some form of malnutrition. It’s arguably one of the greatest collective failures of our species.
But there’s hope. The UN’s World Food Programme, the largest food aid organization on Earth, has set out on a mission to end hunger by the year 2030. It’s an extremely ambitious goal, and in order to achieve it, the WFP has deployed a phalanx of technological tools — everything from hydroponic farms to blockchain-powered iris scanners — to aid in the fight. Will humanity’s technological innovations give us the edge we need to end hunger? That remains to be seen, but the battle has already begun. Welcome to The Food Fight.