EA - Starting the second Green Revolution by freedomandutility

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Starting the second Green Revolution, published by freedomandutility on June 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The Green Revolution may have saved over a billion people from starvation, driven by active efforts by the Rockefeller Foundation, Mexico, the USA and the UN.Food security remains poor in conflict-affected areas, and is threatened by risks such as plant disease pandemics and nuclear war.Since the Green Revolution, we've made immense scientific progress, particularly in synthetic biology and AI.How can we make another large jump in agricultural efficiency, to tackle poor food security in conflict-stricken states now and in the future, and improve global resilience to wide-scale disasters?In development, a lot of work on agriculture focuses on adoption of existing technologies.I want to read more about the kind of frontier technologies we should be prioritising R&D investment in.In addition, do we need to develop new institutions to conduct RCTs (like a J-PAL spin-off focused on agriculture) to generate better evidence for evaluating new farming technologies? Do we need to engage farmers in large-scale RCTs, similar to the way we engage doctors and patients in medical RCTs?I'd like to see more EA work on this, but if there already is some work in this area, please point me towards it!Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org