The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

Normally when we think of digitization we’re thinking of online applications for loans or working from home during COVID or blah-blah-blahing away on smartphones, but digitization also applies to a few techs that are extremely ag-centric. First, the obvious application: genomics. We’ve all heard of genetically modified organisms, the culmination of a series of digital technologies that allow us to modify characteristics of plants to make them more resistant to salt, drought, heat, cold, pests, and/or fungus. There’s also something called “gene editing,” which is pretty similar to the making of GMOs, but the tweaks to the genome are more targeted and could—theoretically at least—occur naturally or via more traditional methods such as crossbreeding. Gene editing simply speeds up the process from dozens of generations to one. The bottom line is that technologies now exist to hack plants and get them to spend more energy on propagating (that is, growing the bits that humans ultimately eat). That increases yields while reducing input requirements. Perhaps the best example of what can be achieved with everything from crossbreeding to selective breeding to genetic modification and genetic editing is contemporary corn.