At the beginning of the year, I recommended a resolution to those in positions of authority: to relentlessly pursue ways to decouple economic growth from unsustainable exploitation of the natural world. So, it was great to listen to Ellen MacArthur at a Green Alliance debate last week and hear the one-time yachtswoman argue that increasingly companies were finding ways to decouple growth from resource scarcity. She was evangelising about the circular economy - an extreme version of recycling.
As I was listening, I wondered what Ellen would make of the challenges facing agriculture. How do we produce the food we need while recovering farmland wildlife? This will be the focus of this week's blog.
I have spent the past nine months as part of a group invited by the Agriculture MInister, Jim Paice MP, to discuss how we can reconcile the challenges of increasing food production and improving the environment. This exercise is known as the Green Food Project and the initial findings will be published tomorrow.
Some have argued that the response to the challenge of feeding a growing global population is so-called 'sustainable intensification'. The Food Ethics Council have just brought out edition of their magazine entitled “Sustainable intensification: unravelling the rhetoric”. It is available here. It includes a number of thought-provoking articles from a range of contributors including my colleague Abi Bunker.
This collection of articles demonstrates the range of views that exist on what we need to tackle the challenges facing the system: bigger farms or farms in all shapes and sizes; hi-tech intensification or an ‘agroecological’ approach; increasing production to match projected demand or trying to tackle unsustainable patterns of consumption?
When navigating our way through this maze of conflicting views, there are some facts which are worth bearing in mind...
...the world already produces enough food for everyone – but the distribution of wealth and access to food is so inequitable that nearly one billion people are hungry while another billion are overweight. On top of this, around a third of the food the world grows is wasted, and a lot of productive potential goes into highly inefficient and resource-intensive ways of producing food – like growing grain to feed to livestock.
...according to the FAO , if current patterns of food consumption persist, 60% more food will need to be produced globally by 2050 (compared with 2005-7). But even if this is achieved, over 300 million people may continue to suffer chronic hunger because they lack access to food. Conversely, it would be possible to feed all of the earth’s population with a less than 60% increase, if bold policy decisions are taken now to change the trajectory of progress.
...many systems of food production currently in use are unsustainable. To quote directly from the Foresight report on the Future of Food and Farming: “Without change, the global food system will continue to degrade the environment and compromise the world’s capacity to produce food in the future, as well as contributing to climate change and the destruction of biodiversity.”
Globally, problems include soil loss and loss of fertility, salination, over-extraction of water, heavy reliance on fossil fuels and emission of greenhouse gases and pollutants. In the UK, the phenomenal increase in yields farmers have been able to achieve has unfortunately come at the cost of declines in other ecosystem services and biodiversity. To me, and to many others, all this means that we should be looking at radical changes in how we feed people: business as usual with a bit of increased efficiency thrown in is not going to be good enough. It also means that the need for change is urgent. And this is exactly what we have been exploring through the Green Food Project. But more on that tomorrow.
Today, why not have a read of the Food Ethics Council magazine and let me know what you think.
Hi Martin,interesting that we already produce enough food,I have always thought the amount we waste is scandalous,for sure during the period 1939 - 1955 when rationing in force or just finished then waste was almost zero,unbelievable that a third of what is grown is wasted and I always think the fact they say it is uneconomic to transport some food to populations that are undernourished and need it is a cop out as we manage to transport oil anywhere that has the money.
Do not think farm size matters as some of the very large farms in UK are up there with the best and it could be argued their size and so profit per farm gives them better opportunity than a smaller farm trying to make ends meet on 100 acres.It is surely how committed to wildlife the individual is and think that means that there are lots of these different thing that can be done with no one solution but a combination of them.