Looking at this list, it looks like the focus is on relatively low-cost interventions that will make a big difference, though not necessarily on the high-cost interventions that will be most important. Those would be things like insuring the industrial capacity for rapid vaccine/antibiotic development and deployment and better surveillance to catch risks early. And there is the question of how to deal with those political factions that work to undermine public health responses, as we saw with COVID-19.
Related is the possibility of massive crop failures caused by pathogens, whose spread might be aided by monoculture systems. We lost the gros michel banana due to a blight, and the Irish Potato Famine, which may have killed over a million people, was caused by a blight. There do exist crop blights that attack multiple crops. Perhaps a plant biologist can weight in as to what the worst case scenarios might be. For that, food storage is particularly relevant. A massive shift to indoor agriculture has such problems that it might not be realistic. It is not clear that these kinds of environments would themselves be safe from the blight, and they depend fully on an industrial base that would also be at risk.
That said, these sound like great projects that would deliver benefits orders of magnitude greater than their costs. Have you identified any needs in the Philippines in particular?
Looking at this list, it looks like the focus is on relatively low-cost interventions that will make a big difference, though not necessarily on the high-cost interventions that will be most important. Those would be things like insuring the industrial capacity for rapid vaccine/antibiotic development and deployment and better surveillance to catch risks early. And there is the question of how to deal with those political factions that work to undermine public health responses, as we saw with COVID-19.
Related is the possibility of massive crop failures caused by pathogens, whose spread might be aided by monoculture systems. We lost the gros michel banana due to a blight, and the Irish Potato Famine, which may have killed over a million people, was caused by a blight. There do exist crop blights that attack multiple crops. Perhaps a plant biologist can weight in as to what the worst case scenarios might be. For that, food storage is particularly relevant. A massive shift to indoor agriculture has such problems that it might not be realistic. It is not clear that these kinds of environments would themselves be safe from the blight, and they depend fully on an industrial base that would also be at risk.
That said, these sound like great projects that would deliver benefits orders of magnitude greater than their costs. Have you identified any needs in the Philippines in particular?