That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes because of the nature of the crop. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, logistics, economics, you name it.
The only things this will do is allow some company to patent this, and then sell it under restricted conditions that will be unfavorable to those who are hungry.
Yield increase is not really a winner if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.
We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
For one thing, it greatly changes the calculus of a Mars mission. A long–term Mars mission needs food, and growing that food on Mars seems like an obvious choice at first glance. But reliably growing food on Mars requires some fairly sophisticated technology: LED lighting, fine automatic control of atmospheric gasses (otherwise the O₂ from the plants would rapidly become a huge fire risk), similar for the water, refrigeration, and an extra large power plant to run it all. Up until now it looked like it would be cheaper to make regular shipments of food and water from Earth to Mars than it would be to make regular shipments of spare parts to keep all of that machinery working. A 50% increase in calories per square foot means that you only need 67% as much machinery, and therefore only 67% as many spare parts.
Even if this created no other benefits, which I find hard to believe, it would be worth it just for a successful Mars mission.
Although I'm skeptical for mars, bigger plants will deplete their substrate very fast, it could be a limiter.
Very much true. We eliminate the global hunger if we can eliminate food wastage in US supermarkets alone.
US supermarkets literally throw away enough food to feed all of famine struck countries, and probably even twice.
> We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
I push for an idea of unification of the world under a single global democratic government.
The solution to the global problems, must be global.
This means trade barriers, tech-transfer, and not bombing the shit out of places.
Today we have the most nutritious foods in history. Don't make things up.
Today's potatoes are 4-6 times bigger than 19th century ones. Tomatoes 3-5 times. Most fruits, got just enormous.
Even "watery" leafy greens are actually getting more meatier, and starchy, and with more folates as everybody seem to be crazy about them.
We are already overproducing food, that doesn't prevent us to try to produce more.
Where I'm from (New Zealand) there are various schemes in place to encourage farmers to retire low productivity land and fence/plant buffer zones around waterways.
With food: "oh, this apple has scratch marks from insects, throw it in the bin" — this is just one of them. "Best before" dates in the past results in lot of untasted food go to waste too. Etc.
The market, at this point, has produced concentration of power and hasn't sold distribution problem.
Creating something that can produce even more is not gonna help.
The result here would be only more profit for some players, it's not going to help with world hunger. It's not going to take prices down (potatoes/rice price is not a blocker, but margin is nice). But it certainly will have a systemic cost that we will all share for a gain we will not.
Problems we do have but that they are making worst:
- poorer and poorer soils;
- big companies making it hard for small player to even exist;
- weak nutritional content of our food;
- food chain dependency on a few players;