New plant technology could boost food supplies, Bayer CEO says

New plant technologies can help increase food supply and reduce the emissions generated from agriculture, said Werner Baumann, the chief executive of German agricultural giant Bayer AG.

Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Mr. Baumann said new technologies could help plants do what they currently couldn't. For example, corn could be trained to remove nitrogen from the atmosphere for use as a nutrient, the way soy does.

That would help cut the amount of nitrogen fertilizer used and reduce the emissions generated by manufacturing it, he said.

The manufacture of nitrogen fertilizers currently uses around 2% of global energy consumed worldwide, Mr. Baumann said. "This will feed the world and decarbonise it," he said.

Speaking on the same panel, David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, said that when he first took this job six years ago, there were 80 million people "not knowing where their next meal was coming from." Now, there are about 135 million, he said.

The number of people facing food insecurity has increased as a result of climate change, Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, among other factors, he said.

″We are in a hell of a situation,″ Mr. Beasley said.