Sara Menker grew up in 1980s Ethiopia and witnessed privilege and poverty. She came from a middle-class background and joined MorganStanley in New York after graduation, but Menker never stopped thinking about food security. While working on Wall Street, she noticed inefficiencies in the global food system and quit in 2 014 to start G r oIntelligence, which uses artificial intelligence to predict agricultural trends. The company has now raised $125 million in funding and has opened offices in New York, Singapore and Nairobi, Kenya. The company uses thousands of data sources to predict the direction of soybean prices, the impact of climate change on cropland, coffee bean cultivation in Brazil, and other related conditions.
In 2017, she gave a TED talk on the global food crisis and is still worried about how to solve the world's hunger problem.
I grew up in Addis Ababa in the 1980s. That era
It was very different from today, but it has largely shaped who I am today. I grew up in a fairly well-off, middle-class family.
My mother was a seamstress and worked for EthiopianAirlines. My father worked for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Ethiopia was special in one way: it was never colonized and thus became the heart of the African nation. Leaders of African countries would discuss issues such as decolonization in Addis Ababa. This also made me feel that I was always connected to the world growing up. Addis Ababa at that time, even with all its problems, was still somehow a melting pot of foreign affairs and a cosmopolitan city of many different nationalities.
Even without the personal experience of starvation, you must have known and been affected by it.
It's true. First of all, I come from a big family, my mother
I have 24 siblings. Secondly, growing up, there was no avoiding this problem. In this country, fuel is rationed, food, sugar, toilet paper are rationed, no matter who you are, no matter if you live in Addis Ababa or elsewhere, there are no exceptions. At one point during the New Crown pneumonia outbreak, there was a shortage of toilet paper and everyone was busy stocking up, but I had 80 rolls here. They asked me, "How did you stock up so much?" In my opinion, isn't that what living a life is all about? Always worrying that things will run out. That's the idea we were brought up with, that you can't take anything for granted, that anything can disappear.
I decided at the time that I would only work in the finance field in commodity-related work, which was the only part of the whole finance industry that I felt connected to the real world and the things I cared about. One day, I made up my mind to trade and said to my boss, "Give me the gas trade." He said no. I said, "You must give it to me to do. So he agreed, and I started doing natural gas trading. Then he got a promotion and I took over his job. But in the end, I lost my passion for the job and just went to work every day like a robot. I was good at my job and really liked my boss and fellow employees, but the energy industry didn't quite fit my interests.
Take a look at the inflationary pressures and food inflation around the world today and you'll find the state of affairs alarming. Food prices are getting higher every year, and even the United States is not immune. But the U.S. is fortunate enough to be self-sufficient in all areas involving food. Now that the global currency markets are in shambles due to the new crown epidemic, it's easy to look at the reality of the economy and see that our food system is quite tight. The reason for the inflation is in fact because we are facing unprecedented shocks on both the supply and demand sides at the same time. Let's say the vegetable oil market and the Canadian drought last year, where the price of oats increased by 70% year over year because the main source was in Canada. Structural incompetence is a major weakness of the market, which is unable to adjust to this type of event. Meanwhile, per capita demand has grown more than we expected. The supply side struggles to catch up, but overall we are stuck in a vicious cycle. We have yet to find a way to fix the system, and that is what worries me the most.
