The world’s population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050, according to the most recent report from the population division of the United Nations (UN) Department of Economic and Social Affairs. That’s an extra two billion mouths to feed, all from the same amount of land and other natural resources.
At present, we have around 821 million undernourished people, and 672 million who are obese, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) 2018 figures. The challenge, then, is not just to fill stomachs, but to even out those extremes and work towards a food system that is equitable, prioritises health, and is sustainable for both people and the planet.
This is where the University of Nottingham’s Future Food beacon comes in. Launched in 2017, Future Food is one of the University’s six Beacons of Excellence – Rights Lab, Precision Imaging, Future Food, Propulsion Futures, Green Chemicals and Smart Products – carrying out research to collectively address all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
“We are faced with the need to provide sufficient nutritious food for a growing population, while at the same time tackling diet-related diseases of affluence, such as diabetes and obesity,” says Prof David Salt, director of the Future Food beacon.
“Innovations in our key research areas – future-proofing agricultural systems, food for health, food for sustainable livelihoods, and food processing and manufacturing – lie at the heart of this challenge. We must develop new, resilient crops and livestock, ensure better access to healthier, safer, more nutritious food for everyone, and take into account ethical concerns.”
The Future Food beacon’s researchers have expertise across the food chain and have so far published 38 papers in peer-reviewed journals; 24 research proposals have been awarded just under £10m in total.
As part of the investment in the beacon, there have been new appointments in research fields such as crop molecular genetics, phenomics, evolutionary and functional genomics, microbiome, sensory science, environmetrics, computer vision, and bioinformatics. One of the new research fellows in functional genomics, Dr Sina Fischer is researching what happens to a plant when it duplicates its entire genome and how that affects its resilience to various environmental stresses. Her findings are relevant to key food crops such as wheat, as many crops have duplicated their genomes during their evolutionary history.
For Fischer, joining the Future Food beacon as a researcher was partly about joining a larger team making a contribution to human health. “There is a huge network here,” she says. “It is vital for a researcher to have a collaborative network. The beacon has enabled me to meet other researchers, talk about their projects, and start new projects.”
The beacon also includes researchers at University of Nottingham Ningbo China and University of Nottingham Malaysia. Dr Hui Hui Chai, a teaching fellow at the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia, is studying the potential of bambara groundnut in crop diversification.
“It’s imperative to grow a variety of crops in an area and for those crops to be resilient,” says Chai. “We know bambara groundnut is drought-tolerant and has good nutritional composition. However, its pod yields can be low and erratic. This is an issue I am aiming to combat in my research through breeding and agronomic studies.”
Given the global nature of the challenge, Future Food beacon colleagues at all three University of Nottingham campuses are working to develop partnerships within the UK and around the world, in China and Brazil and across the African continent in particular.
In the UK, the Graduate Centre for International Agriculture (GCIA) is a collaboration between the beacon and Rothamsted Research, funding 25 PhD studentships. In Brazil, Future Food is working with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) on soils, animal production, livestock infectious diseases and crop quality. And in China, the beacon has a series of projects including limiting cadmium and arsenic accumulation in rice, developing precision nutrition – bespoke diets reflecting individual and environmental characteristics – for livestock, and controlling antibiotic resistance in livestock.
The beacon’s networks also include other stakeholders in the future of food, such as farmer organisations and the private sector. One project links a “bean-to-bar” premium chocolate maker in Nottingham, Luisa’s Vegan Chocolates, with cocoa growers in Colombia. Using hand-held DNA sequencing equipment, researchers and farmers will measure the microbes fermenting the cocoa beans, in order to better understand the fermentation process. This project will improve both the livelihoods of the growers and the chocolate for consumers.
“The overall aim with all our programmes is to facilitate a cross fertilisation of disciplines,” says Salt. “At present, more than a quarter of the world’s population are not getting the goodness they need from what they eat, so we need to make some big strides if we are to change that by 2050. At the Future Food beacon, we are bringing top researchers together from a broad range of backgrounds in a world-class university setting, because that’s the way to make important scientific leaps that have global impact.”
