Food in incredibly cheap. Your government imposes price minima based on Great Depression prices, then compassionately gives away resulting huge surpluses to slum bunnies and the Third World - or burns the food.
Photosynthesis, the fixation of carbon dioxide into sugar, wholly happens at one enzyme - RuBisCO (ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase). 1/3 of all soluble leaf protein is RuBisCO. RuBisCO is the slowest (maybe one turnover/second vs. carbonic anhydrase at maybe a million/second) least efficient (about 3%) of all known enzymes.
If you gene-geneered a RuBisCO with 20 turnovers/second and 10% efficiency - that is still horrible crap for any enzyme - you would increase farm productivity by a factor of 67. What would you get? You would get 10 billion Third World parasites sucking charity. How much research is being conducted towards a better RuBisCO? None. It would be wrong.
There is no problem that science cannot solve short of a world overflowing with stupid and corrupt people.
