Signal Editorial: Crop suitability and food security: the evolution of new technologies

Summary

According to the FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO joint assessment cited in the editorial, between 638 million and 720 million people were in hunger in 2024, and roughly 28% of humanity, or 2.3 billion people, were moderately or severely food insecure. The editorial projects that 512 million people will remain chronically undernourished by 2030, with nearly 60% of them in Africa. Africa's undernourishment rate exceeds 20%, more than double the global average, and hunger continues to rise in West Asia. A meta-analysis included in the special issue reviewed 56 empirical studies from 2000 to 2025, yielding 247 effect-size estimates on the adoption of stress-tolerant crops, and found that livelihood benefits depend on credit access and market linkages alongside crop promotion. Case studies span dryland soil modeling in Najran, Saudi Arabia, irrigation and nutrient management in Egypt's Nile Delta, farmland infrastructure across 30 Chinese provinces from 2003 to 2020, and stress-tolerant crop adoption in Vietnam and Sub-Saharan Africa. Reported technologies include satellite and drone-based precision agriculture, Google Earth Engine data integrated with field observations, and machine-learning methods such as Random Forest and an Agricultural Risk Fusion Network for suitability mapping.