Bogdan Gogulan, CEO of space-tech private equity firm NewSpace Capital, explains the role that earth observation satellites can play in eliminating hunger.
Hunger numbers stubbornly high for three consecutive years as global crises deepen, was the alarming headline of a recent press communiqué released by the United Nations.
The release summarised a report, released in late July 2024, which showed that around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023 – equivalent to one in eleven people globally and one in five in Africa.
The report also warned that the world was falling well short of achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger, by 2030. Indeed, the world had been ‘set back 15 years’, with levels of undernourishment comparable to those in 2008 and 2009.
Food insecurity, then, is a huge problem today, and one that ruins not ‘just’ the lives of individuals but whole communities. It can lead to the loss of life and livelihood, to cripplingly poor health, to the sale of livestock – sometimes someone’s only way of making money – to early marriage or to forced prostitution.
Consider the social cost of the 713 and 757 million people undernourished in 2023 – about 152 million more than in 2019 when we look at what the UN calls ‘the mid-range’ of 733 million.
How do we address this? Can we? The answer is yes, we can. And space-enabled technology is at least part of the solution. With space-enabled technology, we can tackle the problems facing modern agriculture; agriculture which we need to feed the planet, yet which also harms it, aggravating insecurity.
One way is by eliminating food waste, which makes up 1.2 billion tonnes, or 15 percent of all the food produced. Space-enabled tech enables the estimation of yields and then the optimisation of the movement of agricultural products by providing data on the conditions on roads and the weather in close to real time.
Another way space-enabled technology supports agriculture – thereby strengthening food security – is by evaluating the quality of the soil. Current agricultural practices cause massive soil erosion, amounting to about 24 billion tonnes – representing a loss of about $480 billion – a year.
They also strip some 60 percent of organic carbon from the soil. By analysing various metrics (moisture, degree of erosion, organic matter content, etc.) satellites can help to maintain the sustainability of the soil over time. They can also monitor the quality of water, and how much water crops need, so supporting irrigation management. This alone is huge in respect of its contribution to food security: improved irrigation, the WEF has shown, could cut water usage in half.
Space-enabled technology is also the spine of environmental intelligence. In other words, satellites are behind our understanding of weather in real-time, climate over longer periods, and the likelihood (as well how we respond) to extreme weather events.
These, naturally, can have a huge impact on agriculture; by fully adopting satellite technology, we can empower farmers to make the choices and changes needed to boost their yields, empower policymakers to design climate legislation that works, and empower emergency services to deal with wildfires and other events swiftly and well, or prevent them from taking place in the first instance.
Even if we set aside these myriad, space-enabled benefits, satellites could have a massive impact. And that is by boosting productivity in more basic ways, by enabling precision farming that produces far higher yields and then detecting the pests that risk destroying those yields ahead of time.
The World Economic Forum believes pest control alone, made possible by hyperspectral and optical satellite imagery, could save close to a billion tonnes of crops every year.
The financial health of those who farm and therefore feed is an essential part of eliminating food insecurity. And by optimising agriculture, satellites boost the earnings of those farmers. A cost reduction of just 5% would amount to savings in input of up to $8 billion.
Cutting food waste, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, could add $175 billion to growers’ earnings. Meanwhile, the global appetite for space-enabled agricultural data and insights will grow – to nearly $1 billion by 2030, according to analysis by McKinsey & Co.
Hunger numbers are stubbornly high, and alarm is the only appropriate response to the findings of the UN’s latest report. Food insecurity is one of the great evils that we face as a species, and one worsened by worsening climate change, population growth and problems in distribution that mean the people who are already fed get more, and those who don’t have enough get less.
But there are solutions, and the full embrace of those solutions would have a meaningful impact. A commitment to supporting the sector that generates those solutions, now and in the longer term, would drive the technology towards its fullest potential and open the door for yet more effective innovations that could help us address not just food insecurity but numberless other global challenges as well.
