Lloyd Treinish leads the environmental science team in the Industry Solutions Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

A co-developer of IBM's Deep Thunder precision agriculture system, he contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Our world is getting larger … and hungrier … with every tick of the clock.

Indeed, each second the world's population grows by two more people, and by 2050, food production must increase by at least 70 percent to keep pace.

Unfortunately, about half of the world's food is never consumed due to inefficiencies in the harvesting, storage and delivery of crops. Even in developed nations, about 30 percent of purchased food ends up going to waste, and supply-chain inefficiencies only exacerbate the problem.

To read the entire article, go to LiveScience.com.