Innovation, ICT & food security

Abstract

Food security is still a major issue permeating the global economy. Further, the salience of food security as an issue has increased dramatically following a global pandemic, a land war in Europe, fuel and fertilizer shortages, supply-chain shocks, and widespread inflation in food prices. Millennium Development Goals – MDGs brought back the issue of food security to the forefront of global innovation, technology, and environmental discussions. The agriculture industry today is becoming smarter, digitized, and more innovation and technological driven and integrated. This paper assesses the role of technology in ameliorating the risk of food security. We use a sample of 106 countries over the period from 2012 to 2018 to test this notion. Our results indicate that technology has a positive impact on global food security. For OECD countries, the impact is mostly on food availability, while for non-OECD countries the impact is mostly on food affordability. Moreover, OECD countries have been seeing increasing importance of technology to their food security in recent years.