The cause of future food shortages may not be a lack of farmland, but a shortage of agricultural workers. Amid low birth rates and rural decline, a joint international research team from KAIST has developed a new data-driven model that incorporates the decline in the agricultural workforce into analysis of future food security (the ability to stably produce and supply food required by the public).

The research findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, show that, in the future, a shortage of agricultural workers could act as a key constraint on farmland use in most regions of the world.

A research team led by Professor Hyungjun Kim from the Department of AI Future (adjunct at the Moon Soul Graduate School of Future Strategy), in joint research with Professor Haewon Chon from the KI Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy (Graduate School of Green Growth and Sustainability), Professor Nicklas Forsell and Professor Taikan Oki from the University of Tokyo in Japan, analyzed the impact of the decline in the agricultural workforce on future food production.

Until now, food security and climate change research have mainly focused on how much farmland can be secured. The approach was to predict the future by calculating whether the climate and soil are suitable for farming and how much food demand will increase.