Why do we accept losing a fifth of the harvest?
Norman Borlaug asked farmers to come to a wheat field in Sonora, Mexico. Before coming, they had been told that they should keep their distance, but many of them just reached for the wheat heads and put seeds in their pockets to bring home. Borlaug’s years of experiments had produced shorter, rust-resistant wheat that could yield much more grain. The farmers wanted to put it in their pockets. They wanted to take the result home. They could see and feel the results immediately. His work helped set off a revolution in food production that continues to fill our global plates today.
Borlaug’s farmers wanted something they could take home. Our work has to lead to something a farmer can use, something that protects more of the food already being grown.
In his Nobel lecture about a decade later, Borlaug called the Green Revolution a “temporary success.”1 More than half a century later, the work remains unfinished. We continue to accept yields that are much lower than they could be. We continue to accept that insects, diseases, and other organisms can take a fifth of major crop yields or more. We think the gap between what a field can grow and what is actually eaten is much wider than it needs to be and deserves a new, revitalized global scientific effort.
FAO’s 2021 estimates put annual losses from insects and diseases at up to 40% of global crop production. Insects alone were estimated to cost the global economy at least $70 billion a year.2 For a farmer, those losses can mean less food to eat, less to sell, and less money for the next planting.
- Production loss (pounds/year)
- 1.1 trillion
- Avg calories lost per capita/day
- 766
| Production Loss (pounds per year) | Calorie Loss (per capita per day) | |
|---|---|---|
| North America | 81 billion pounds | 900 |
| Europe | 149 billion pounds | 800 |
| Africa | 311 billion pounds | 650 |
| Latin America | 209 billion pounds | 1,150 |
| Asia | 349 billion pounds | 330 |
In January 2025, 153 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates called for urgent investment in ag research to help feed a projected 9.7 billion people by 2050.3
We’ve accepted that insects can eat or damage so much of our harvest. We’ve accepted a way of crop protection that still leaves a substantial part of what we grow unprotected. And, today, in our age of rapid gains in intelligence, we should be asking what a different approach could make possible. When an insect lands on crops, it can mean eating and egg-laying and the loss of food. What if we could change that decision?
The next advance, the next stage, the finishing of the Green Revolution, has to be something that fills this gap. It’s going to require a global scientific effort. It’s going to require surmounting significant technical challenges, and it’s going to require dealing with a warming world. For wheat, rice, and maize, a study in Science projects a 10–25% relative increase in insect-related losses for each 1°C of global warming.4 Protecting more of the world’s food means learning to work with an insect in a growing environment that just keeps changing.
What would it actually take to protect more of the harvest?
It would take really understanding why an insect decides to land, and how to change that decision before it becomes feeding and egg-laying and the loss of food. Changing trillions of insects’ decisions to land requires a different approach. It’s a technically more challenging approach, but answering it could be one of humanity’s most important achievements.
I am but one member of a vast team made up of many organizations, officials, thousands of scientists, and millions of farmers…in my dream I see green, vigorous, high-yielding fields of wheat, rice, maize, sorghums, and millets.
To accelerate the answer means more openness and rapid sharing, a Human Genome Project-like effort with thousands of scientists generating behavioral data that becomes training data for increasingly capable predictive models. It means more labs testing compounds, observing what insects do, and sharing what they learn so that the next experiment begins with more knowledge than the last. It means a community of the world’s top researchers all pointed in the same direction, with the same intention, with the same mission.
- 1Norman Borlaug, “The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity,” Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 11, 1970. nobelprize.org
- 2IPPC Secretariat, Review of climate change and plant health (Rome: FAO on behalf of the IPPC Secretariat, 2021). doi.org/10.4060/cb4769en
- 3World Food Prize Foundation, “2025 Open Laureate Letter,” January 2025. worldfoodprize.org
- 4Curtis A. Deutsch et al., Study of insect-related crop losses in a warming climate, Science 361, no. 6405 (2018): 916–919. doi.org/10.1126/science.aat3466