The UN didn’t offer any technological solutions when Elon Musk offered it $6.6bn to solve world hunger. The world’s richest man had issued the challenge after World Food Programme chief, David Beasley, said in October last year that 2% of Musk’s wealth could end world hunger.

Two weeks later, Beasley published the UN’s plan. He said $3.5bn would go towards food and logistics to provide the 42 million people facing hunger with a meal a day for a year. 

A further $2bn would fund cash and voucher programmes in places with functioning markets, allowing people to choose the food they eat while supporting local economies, Beasley said.

It is unknown if Musk followed through on his pledge. Accounts show he donated $5.74bn to charity later that month, but they do not specify who the recipient was. Regardless, the whole incident showed the scale of the challenge facing the world’s food system as it faces up to combined threats of Covid, conflict, climate shocks and, now, rising supply chain costs.

Musk’s $6bn would no doubt go a long way to addressing world hunger, but it would only fund the UN’s plan for 12 months.

And the UN is focused on the most stricken countries such as DR Congo and Afghanistan. In the UK, where more and more people are going hungry as a result of rising food prices, solving hunger could be a relatively more expensive proposition.

So perhaps it’s time to think about what needs to change in the long-term so the food system can function more successfully. That doesn’t just mean producing enough cheap food, but doing so in a way that does not continue along the path of environmental devastation.

One option is to explore the technological advancements in which the UK increasingly is making a name for itself. The Grocer picked out 10 of the most exciting startups in the agri-tech sector last week, such as the Small Robot Company helping farmers tackle their worker shortfall, or Better Origin using insects to reduce the amount of soy in chicken feed.

The public appears to be in full support of these initiatives, lending its voice to even the more controversial issues. New research by Mintel, for example, shows 30% of Brits believe GM food is a good solution to global hunger, a figure that rises to 44% for those aged 16 to 34.

There remains some doubt, however, about the genuine impact these advancements could have. After all, it was agricultural innovations like nitrogen fertiliser and crop genetics that drove many of the problems we now face. Not least food and agriculture’s immense contribution to the climate breakdown. As the World Economic Forum said in a recent report, historic productivity gains have “come at alarming environmental and health costs”.

Supermarket food chains have long been designed around extracting maximum value for minimal cost out of farmers and producers, and as a result, here in the UK we are paying less for our food than we should. This system not only pushes farmers to often sacrifice environmental considerations due to cost, but that when prices soar like they are currently, there is far less room for the food chain to seek out alternatives because the leanness of supply chains has banished them from existence.

The other solution, therefore, would be to focus on correcting these issues at their source. Move away from food chains made vulnerable by a reliance on small numbers of highly uniform crops and look instead to biodiversity-friendly farming that uses more traditional approaches to food production.

Ultimately, the answer likely lies in a combination of the above. As the World Economic Forum put it, change is needed at all levels in farming, from agri-industrial operations to the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers in a way that combines traditional skills and with new technologies. The question is whether this transition can happen quickly enough in a world beset with urgent issues.

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