If you are concerned about the coming global food crisis – and you should be! – you don’t want to miss today’s op-ed in POLITICO by Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. He really hits the nail on the head when it comes to biotech innovation’s role in feeding a growing world population.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece, called “Don’t forget the world’s food gap”:

Late last month, leaders from around the world convened in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual conference of international leaders to address shared global challenges. While efforts to restore stability and prosperity to our financial system rightfully framed the conference agenda, I was most encouraged by the forum’s consideration of a topic even more fundamental to the survival of people around the globe but one that has received far less attention in the press and among policymakers: In order to feed a global population boom of 9 billion people by 2050, we will need to more than double our current levels of food production and develop a set of innovative strategies to combat a host of global-hunger-related and nutritional issues.

The urgency of this challenge cannot be understated. Indeed, the United Nations has said that world food output needs to grow by 70 percent by 2050 to address this dramatic increase in global population. Today, malnutrition is associated with half of all deaths in children under the age of 5 each year, and more than 1 billion people currently suffer from hunger and poverty. These numbers can be expected only to grow as our population increases by one-third over the next four decades.

Great challenges demand even better solutions, and better solutions can come only from the collaboration and competition of those willing to advance new ideas and technologies. Recently, I agreed to chair the new DuPont Advisory Committee on Agricultural Innovation and Productivity for the 21st Century, which seeks to do just that, by exploring how agricultural innovation can help us meet the food, feed, fiber and fuel demands of the coming decades. Innovation will lie at the heart of the agricultural revolution necessary to accomplish our goal of feeding the world by 2050 without increasing pressure on our world’s already strained and limited resources. In fact, innovation in agriculture won’t just provide more; it can also provide “better” — growing crops with nutritional benefits and developing seed that increases yield worldwide…

Read the rest of the op-ed HERE.