Forget AI. The technological advance that will save the most human lives is being led by two million Indian farmers, who are pioneering advanced natural food production in a revolutionary movement that is spreading almost by the hour.

An overfed but badly-nourished global society has largely forgotten what it means to go hungry. So long as supermarket shelves are a-bulge with empty industrial calories laced with petrochemicals, people tend to forget that no human or community can last long without good food. A super-El Niño bearing down on the world’s agriculture threatens to reinforce the lesson.

The global food crisis has been building steadily for two decades. It is driven by massive uncontrolled soil loss, growing water scarcity, failing farm ecosystems, overuse of poisons, declining nutritional value of food and a climate running rapidly beyond the realm of technical solution.

In India, where climate-driven famines have occurred frequently over thousands of years, the hard-learned lesson that food comes first has not been lost. A farmers group called Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) has received the world’s largest environmental award, the Food Planet Prize 2026, for developing and sharing a new model of science-backed agroecology aimed at securing both food production and the environment that supports it.

Driven primarily by women’s groups, the Andhra Pradesh farming revolution began with just 11 farms in 2018. Thanks to 10,000 eager volunteer trainers it has been taken up by over 1.8 million........

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