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Add it all up and the state’s agricultural exports— the aggregate share of fruits, vegetables, nuts, meats and dairy—totaled an impressive $38.09 billion in 2023. Crises looming? But the rosy picture of agricultural progress that California’s dominant food-growing statistics offers obscures an alarming trend occurring in the U.S. as a whole and, even more direly, on a global scale. A recent New York Times article about the transformative nature of our food sources and supplies points to climate change and other looming global disruptions as potentially causing major challenges in the food chain that the U.S. has come
to rely on and mostly take for granted. “In the United States,” the article says, “investment in agricultural research and development has fallen by almost a third in this young century, and the failure to invest in improving agricultural productivity, especially of healthier foods, basically traces to complacency.” All told, the article’s author believes that agricultural research and development spending needs to at least triple to keep pace with booming demand. Food prices, too, have shot up meteorically over the past several years. With the recent global pandemic and its impact on food supplies and costs aside, adjusted for inflation, the wholesale cost of worldwide food has grown by 50% since 1999.
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