Essay

The Tech is Always Greener on the Other Side

7 August 2026

You can buy a banana today for less than the change in your pocket, grown thousands of miles away, without a second thought. Almost nobody in the queue knows that roughly half the world’s bananas, and nearly all the ones that get exported, are a single variety, Cavendish. or that a soil-borne fungus called Fusarium Wilt TR4 can kill an infected plantation outright and leave the ground unusable for decades. This threatens 1.7M hectares by 2030 - about 30% of all banana plantations. The fruit is still on the shelf, so as far as most of us are concerned the problem doesn’t exist. That gap between a threat that is real and a public that has no reason to notice is, I think, the central problem with funding climate and food technology.

I work in deep-tech investment, and I went in assuming venture capital was the natural home for this. I still think VC has more potential here than anyone else does. But the more agri- and climate-tech I see, the clearer the mismatch becomes, and it’s worth being honest about why beyond the usual line that “bio is slow and risky.”

The first issue is defensibility. Much of climate tech is built on top of established stacks whether that be gene-editing a crop for drought tolerance or coaxing more out of a battery. The clever part is often a novel arrangement of otherwise generic components, which means tangled licensing and deep prior art often resulting in highly specific and thin patent protection. Investors who will happily take technical risk get nervous about defensibility risk, and this field is full of it.

The second is scale. I usually tell founders to start with a small problem that sits inside a large market. Climate solutions tend to do the opposite: a brilliant fix for one crop, one region, one failure mode, with no obvious route to the next use case.

The third is the regulatory patchwork. Even when something works, regulation decides where it’s allowed to. In 2026 the EU moved to treat certain gene-edited crops as equivalent to conventionally bred ones rather than as GMOs that will apply until around 2028. The UK is also split down the middle, with England moving ahead of Scotland and Wales. So capital flows towards whichever market has the most established framework and the loudest demand, rather than towards where the need is greatest.

But the deepest problem is the banana one. When this technology works, it is invisible. It doesn’t produce a viral product; it prevents a disaster most people never learn was coming. That makes it almost impossible to argue in the language investors use. You can price a return. You cannot easily price a famine that didn’t happen. So the most important work in the field is also the most thankless, and the returns only become legible once you’re the last solution left standing.

There’s a quieter discomfort underneath all this, too. A great deal of this innovation is pitched as serving the global south, but the economics tend to be shaped by what keeps Western supply chains stable and cheap. And much of it makes food systems less legible, not more. vertical farms tuck the whole process behind a factory wall, and the eater ends up further than ever from where their food actually comes from. If there’s one thing people are sensitive about other than health - it’s food. Just look at the backlash from Arla’s Bovear trial for a recent example.

So what would change the incentives without gutting the mission?

Reframe the return. If a technology’s job is to avert catastrophe, then return on investment has to count the catastrophe averted: hectares kept productive, harvests not lost and not only the money saved this quarter.

Build for growers and consumers, not just yield. The tech that survives will be the kind that stacks traits people at both ends of the supply chain can actually feel the benefit of.

Make food legible. Most people have no idea what’s in their fridge or how it got there. If the banana came with the story of TR4 attached, perhaps the invisible wins would stop being quite so invisible.

Two questions I keep circling, and I’d genuinely like other people’s answers. Is it possible to treat “climate”, “energy” and “food” as separate verticals when they’re so interlinked? If we do, where do wildlife and the oceans sit? Has biotech over-indexed on human disease at the expense of the systems that feed us — and if it has, who decided that, and why?