Climate activists like us are aware of the world's necessary transition to clean energy sources. We trust that renewables will provide us with sufficient clean energy as systemic change occurs. However, it is much harder to wrap our heads around the concept of a sustainable global food system. That transformation would require a confluence of elements-equitable access to livelihoods, cross-cultural food options, affordable food sources-and an agricultural food system that does not destroy ecosystems, pollute environments, or contaminate the atmosphere.
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Today's food system has been carefully cultivated for flavor and convenience. What were exotic luxuries in many of our childhoods are now everyday staples. If I wanted to find mirin for my favorite San-J low-sodium, gluten-free, vegan, and kosher recipe, I would expect to be able to find it at a local grocery store. I would also expect to be able to pick up some organic or heirloom products at the same time. If any of those products were unavailable, I'm sure I would roll my eyes in indignation. 🙂
The translation of abundant and diverse sets of food choices into what Cornell agricultural economist Chris Barrett calls the New York Times is a "food polycrisis" seems almost too abstract to digest. Yet the past decade has failed to produce reliable global patterns of annual improvements in hunger, Barrett says. U.S. investment in agricultural research and development has fallen by nearly a third in this young century, and "the failure to invest in improving agricultural productivity, particularly in healthier foods, is essentially a matter of complacency," Barrett points out.
Spending on agricultural research and development would have to at least triple to keep pace with growing demand. That innovation is not on track to keep pace with climate change; over a 30-year horizon, insurer Lloyd's recently estimated a 50 percent chance of what it called a major global food shock.
A few years ago, it was possible to come up with a long list of solutions that both addressed the problem of emissions from food production and deviated from industrial agriculture. What happened?
- Capturing carbon in the soil is proving more difficult than proponents thought.
- Climate-friendly regenerative no-till farming methods now seem less like miracle cures.
- Vertical farming has seen limited growth, partly due to its enormous energy requirements.
- Genetically modified varieties could fill the gaps, but they are unpopular and sometimes even illegal in many parts of the world.
Global challenges to food security
We can start at the national level to determine what is likely to escalate into a food system crisis.
Obesity continues to rise, and the average micronutrient content of dozens of popular vegetables has declined. Most American farms are losing money, but more than half of America's land is used for agricultural production. In fact, more than a third of the world's land is used to produce food, and 70 percent of all fresh water is used to irrigate farmland.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one in eight U.S. residents is food insecure. "But it doesn't have to be this way. No one should have to go hungry," said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley. "It's a humanitarian crisis, it's a moral failure, and it's a policy choice."
Scientists estimate that the impact of a shift to a plant-based diet could significantly reduce emissions, delivering half of the emissions reductions needed to keep the planet from warming more than two degrees. Even with that knowledge, trends toward vegetarianism and veganism have not increased, but per capita meat consumption in the US and UK has increased dramatically over the past 50 years.
The food system has been disrupted in recent years by the Covid-19 pandemic, regional conflicts and climate change. Global hunger levels have not declined for three years in a row, with around 1 in 11 people going hungry in 2023. According to the World Food Programme, 282 million people in 59 countries went hungry last year, 24 million more than in 2022. And global food shortages are leading to record levels of human displacement and migration.
About three-quarters of the world's agricultural land is vulnerable to significant climate disruption, says NASA's Jonas Jägermeyr, "so pretty much everywhere you look, things are going to change in some way." And that likely means the food you eat is at risk, too, as climate threats loom large in the years ahead. Even where politics are relatively stable, market incentives are often perverse, infrastructure is often inadequate, and support systems are lacking for smallholder farmers trying to innovate their way to greater crop stability and abundance.
NASA's Jägermeyr calls the challenge of providing sustainable food "the challenge of our generation." We need to save the food system from what he calls a "quadruple crunch."
- The problem of productivity and hunger: agricultural yields are still growing, but not as fast as before and not as fast as demand increases.
- The risk to ecosystems threatened by fertilizer runoff, deforestation and other pollution
- The challenge of nutritional deficiencies, as the foods we grow more of generally become worse for us as time goes on - rates of malnutrition have increased by 21% since 2017
- Climate: The effects of climate change have reduced overall global agricultural productivity growth by 30% to 35%.
These factors, he says, are "reshaping most of the breadbaskets on the planet. It's pretty complicated. And the scary thing is we have to solve all of them."
The climate crisis is particularly affecting the quantity, quality and accessibility of food, and is marked by changes in the frequency, intensity or duration of extreme weather events. "For policymakers, it's important to understand where the vulnerabilities lie in different systems and how they're connected," Ramya Ambikapathi, a senior research associate in global development at the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, told the advocacy group Food Tank.
The future of food systems may look different than we expect
The pressures on the current food system are not a sign that it will necessarily fail, only that it must change. Even if that progress comes, securing a stable and abundant future for food on a much warmer planet will require disruption. But disruption is only part of the problem. Adaptation and innovation will also transform the global food supply. Diets will change, as will the farmland that currently produces staple crops-corn, wheat, soy, rice. More threats will surely come, reinventing the entire food system as we know it.
According to the World Resources Institute, the world may need to add the equivalent of two Indias to existing farmland to meet food needs in the second half of this century. But adding farmland also means cutting down forests, which shop carbon, to graze more animals, which produce carbon.
But all is not lost. Economist Barrett now sees plenty of promise on the horizon: biofortified crops; new techniques to capture nitrogen from the air, cutting the use of fossil-fuel fertilizers; resilient varieties, such as flood-tolerant rice, which are already transforming the rice fields of South Asia.
Rather than one quick fix, we need to accept that we need a whole host of tools in our food system to ensure the world eats enough and stays healthy.
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