on a single narrative around a coming global food crisis

and what we need to do to avoid it.

How do we feed nine billion people by 2050?

Every conference, podcast and dialogue around global food security

starts with this question

and goes on to answer it

by saying we need to produce 70 percent more food.

The 2050 narrative started to evolve

shortly after global food prices hit all-time highs in 2008.

People were suffering and struggling,

governments and world leaders

needed to show us that they were paying attention

and were working to solve it.

The thing is, 2050 is so far into the future

that we can't even relate to it,

and more importantly,

if we keep doing what we're doing,

it's going to hit us a lot sooner than that.

I believe we need to ask a different question.

The answer to that question

needs to be framed differently.

If we can reframe the old narrative

and replace it with new numbers

that tell us a more complete pictures,

numbers that everyone can understand

and relate to,

we can avoid the crisis altogether.

I was a commodities trader in my past life

and one of the things that I learned trading

is that every market has a tipping point,

the point at which change occurs so rapidly

that it impacts the world

and things change forever.

Think of the last financial crisis,

or the dot-com crash.

So here's my concern.

We could have a tipping point

in global food and agriculture

if surging demand

surpasses the agricultural system's structural capacity to produce food.

This means at this point supply can no longer keep up with demand

despite exploding prices,

unless we can commit to some type of structural change.

This time around,

it won't be about stock markets and money.

It's about people.

People could starve and governments may fall.

This question of at what point does supply struggle

to keep up with surging demand

is one that started off as an interest for me while I was trading

and became an absolute obsession.

It went from interest to obsession

when I realized through my research how broken the system was

and how very little data was being used to make such critical decisions.

That's the point I decided to walk away from a career on Wall Street

and start an entrepreneurial journey

to start Gro Intelligence.

At Gro, we focus on bringing this data

and doing the work to make it actionable,

to empower decision-makers at every level.

But doing this work,

we also realized that the world,

not just world leaders,

but businesses and citizens like every single person in this room,

lacked an actionable guide

on how we can avoid a coming global food security crisis.

And so we built a model,

leveraging the petabytes of data we sit on,

and we solved for the tipping point.

Now, no one knows we've been working on this problem

and this is the first time that I'm sharing what we discovered.

We discovered that the tipping point is actually a decade from now.

We discovered that the world

will be short 214 trillion calories

by 2027.

The world is not in a position to fill this gap.

Now, you'll notice

that the way I'm framing this is different from how I started,

and that's intentional, because until now

this problem has been quantified using mass:

think kilograms, tons, hectograms,

whatever your unit of choice is in mass.

Why do we talk about food in terms of weight?

Because it's easy.

We can look at a photograph and determine tonnage on a ship

by using a simple pocket calculator.

We can weigh trucks, airplanes and oxcarts.

But what we care about in food is nutritional value.

Not all foods are created equal,

even if they weigh the same.

This I learned firsthand

when I moved from Ethiopia to the US for university.

Upon my return back home,

my father, who was so excited to see me,

greeted me by asking why I was fat.

Now, turns out that eating

approximately the same amount of food as I did in Ethiopia, but in America,

had actually lent a certain fullness to my figure.

This is why we should care about calories,

not about mass.

It is calories which sustain us.

So 214 trillion calories is a very large number,

and not even the most dedicated of us

think in the hundreds of trillions of calories.

So let me break this down differently.

An alternative way to think about this

is to think about it in Big Macs.

214 trillion calories.

A single Big Mac has 563 calories.

That means the world will be short 379 billion Big Macs in 2027.

That is more Big Macs than McDonald's has ever produced.

So how did we get to these numbers in the first place?

They're not made up.

This map shows you where the world was 40 years ago.

It shows you net calorie gaps in every country in the world.

Now, simply put,

this is just calories consumed in that country

minus calories produced in that same country.

This is not a statement on malnutrition or anything else.

It's simply saying how many calories are consumed in a single year

minus how many are produced.

Blue countries are net calorie exporters,

or self-sufficient.

They have some in storage for a rainy day.

Red countries are net calorie importers.

The deeper, the brighter the red,

the more you're importing.

40 years ago, such few countries were net exporters of calories,

I could count them with one hand.

Most of the African continent,

Europe, most of Asia,

South America excluding Argentina,

were all net importers of calories.

And what's surprising is that China used to actually be food self-sufficient.

India was a big net importer of calories.

40 years later, this is today.

You can see the drastic transformation that's occurred in the world.

Brazil has emerged as an agricultural powerhouse.

Europe is dominant in global agriculture.

India has actually flipped from red to blue.

It's become food self-sufficient.

And China went from that light blue

to the brightest red that you see on this map.

How did we get here? What happened?

So this chart shows you India and Africa.

Blue line is India, red line is Africa.

How is it that two regions that started off so similarly

in such similar trajectories

take such different paths?

India had a green revolution.

Not a single African country had a green revolution.

The net outcome?

India is food self-sufficient

and in the past decade has actually been exporting calories.

The African continent now imports over 300 trillion calories a year.

Then we add China, the green line.

Remember the switch from the blue to the bright red?

What happened and when did it happen?

China seemed to be on a very similar path to India

until the start of the 21st century,

where it suddenly flipped.

A young and growing population

combined with significant economic growth

made its mark with a big bang

and no one in the markets saw it coming.

This flip was everything to global agricultural markets.

Luckily now, South America

was starting to boom at the same time as China's rise,

and so therefore, supply and demand were still somewhat balanced.

So the question becomes,

where do we go from here?

Oddly enough,

it's not a new story,

except this time it's not just a story of China.

It's a continuation of China,