One third of global food production (1.3 billion tonnes) is wasted and never consumed. Photo / Getty Images
One third of global food production (1.3 billion tonnes) is wasted and never consumed. Photo / Getty Images
With forecasts of nine billion people on the planet by 2050, food production will have to be up to the job. Here’s how.
The very phrase "feeding the world" conjures up the idea of grand centralised plans. But research shows that, in spite of industrial agriculture's most grandiose claims, ecological agriculture is the most viable way to feed us all.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation claims that to feed nine billion of us well in the year 2050, as people become more affluent, global agricultural production will need to increase by 70 per cent. Various critics dispute this claim.
"Do we have the protocols or recipes to do it? Definitely," says Steve Wratten, Professor of Ecology at Lincoln University. "But getting governments to adopt it has a major barrier - international corporations."
As a scientist, Wratten has spent a long and successful career developing ways to control pest insects with ecological tactics instead of synthetic pesticides. Yet, he insists, the biggest obstacles to food security worldwide are not scientific; they're political: "Monsanto's vision is to dominate the world food market."
It's not hyperbole; three companies control half of the world seed market, and Monsanto is the largest of them. Recently the company has been trying to buy up its nearest rival, pesticide behemoth Syngenta.
So dominating world food production seems achievable. But what about feeding the world? "Agroecology can double yields in 10 years; conventional agriculture cannot," Wratten says.
That bold assertion is backed by research. In 2010, Olivier De Schutter, Special Rapporteur to the UN, released a groundbreaking but little-heeded report on agroecological farming methods. His worldwide review of scientific literature found that introducing agroecological practices tends to dramatically increase crop yields, particularly for small-scale subsistence farmers.
Agroecology, broadly stated, is the practice of designing farm systems that mimic natural ecosystems - using nature, rather than industrial products, to ensure long-term stability. Agroecology pays attention to diversity, local weather, water retention, soil protection, healthy insect populations. Such farms may be agroforests, mixed animal farms or anything in between. What they are not, is monocultures.
Advocates of genetic engineering love to tell the media that we need GE crops in order to "feed the world," especially as populations grow.
But experience has shown that not to be the case. A Canterbury University research team led by Professor Jack Heinemann recently compared five decades of crop yields from the US, where GE seeds now dominate the landscape, with yields from Western Europe, where farms remain GE-free. For various major crops, European productivity now outstrips American farms. As American farmers adopted GE crop systems in the first decade of the 21st century, their herbicide use skyrocketed, but yields stayed stagnant. During the same time period, European yields rose as farmers got smarter about their technological choices.
Are there some wise uses of synthetic biotech in agriculture? It depends how closely you look. During the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use expanded massively; this, combined with high-yielding seed varieties, increased crop yields, particularly in the developing world. From 1950 to 1984, with soils drunk on easy nitrogen, world grain production more than doubled.
However, it also turns out that the much-lauded nitrogen fertilisers are quasi-addictive, and end in an addict's downward spiral. A high dose of nitrogen causes microbes to accelerate the breakdown of soil organic matter - essentially burning through soil resources, and leading to depleted soils over time.
There are no quick-fix answers to the question of fertility - but getting organic matter back into soils would be a strong start. Soils in many farmed areas have lost their nutrition. Last year, researchers at the UK's University of Sheffield announced that if business-as-usual continues, British farm soils have only 100 harvests left in them.
They don't come in a sack or a spray can, but agroecological solutions do exist. Cover cropping to protect the soil, growing green manure crops that are turned back into the soil, growing pastures and using appropriate grazing strategies are all part of the picture.
Getting organic matter back into soils is also win-win for the climate. More carbon in soils means less carbon in the atmosphere. Organic-matter-rich soils also withstand climate change better; they hold more water to survive droughts, and absorb more water during intense rain events, decreasing the likelihood of flooding and erosion.
The elephant-in-the-room question, of course, is how to achieve all of the needed changes. "Pouring money into agriculture will not be sufficient," De Schutter's UN report argues. "This will not happen by chance. It can only happen by design, through strategies and programmes backed by strong political will."
One of the difficulties with changing farm practices, whether in New Zealand or in Nigeria, is how money channels the flow of information. There's money to be made in selling a farmer a sack of fertiliser or patented GMO seeds, but little money to be made in teaching that farmer how to save their own seeds, or how to grow leguminous crops that bring atmospheric nitrogen into the soil for free. As a result, in many countries, agrichemical company representatives pushing products have become de facto public agriculture instructors.
Rewards also help to shift behaviour. In the EU, farmers receive government subsidies for ecological practices that enhance soil quality, biodiversity and other environmental benefits.
After more than half a century of corporate-led agriculture, is it time for a new era of public investment in farmer education and farm ecologies? Worldwide, dinner plates - and lives - may depend on it.
Global challenge - food production
Photo / Getty Images
World hunger is not caused by lack of food; it's caused by economic inequality. We grow enough food to feed us all, but we're not distributing it well. At present, already a billion people are chronically hungry, and two billion are malnourished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
One third of all food produced (1.3 billion tonnes) is never consumed, according to the World Food Programme.
In a bid to counteract food wastage and reduce inequality, France just passed a trailblazing new law banning supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food. Instead, stores must donate the food to charity or for animal feed. The French national assembly unanimously passed the law in May.
In the longest-running trial comparing agrichemically grown field crops with organic crops, over decades of monitoring, the Rodale Institute (USA) found that organic yields were just as good as conventional yields; and in conditions of drought and stress, organic yields were higher.
Crop diversity is the key factor enabling organic farm productivity to match industrial farm yields, according to a recent review by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Crop rotations and intercropping (growing multiple crops together) are the key practices.
In the US agricultural system, it currently takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food. Half of that energy is spent on processing, packaging and transport.
A vegetarian diet may take about half as much land to produce as an average meat-eater's diet, depending on where you are in the world. But the devil is in the detail; a diet of heavily processed, imported vegetarian foods cancels out many of the environmental benefits of vegetarianism.
Globally, confined animal feeding operations - better known as "factory farms" - consume half of all corn grown in the world. An estimated 70 per cent of all agricultural land is used to raise animals or grow animal feed.
While traditional aid organisations still talk about "food security," farmer-activists worldwide are now calling for food sovereignty: all people's right to define their own food and farming systems. For food sovereignty, access to land and equitable trade rules are just as important as making sure food is grown, argues international peasant movement Via Campesina.
Peasant farmers grow 70 per cent of the world's food.
At least 60 countries have banned or severely restricted genetically modified (GMO) crops.
In the US, an estimated 80 per cent of all processed foods contain GMO ingredients.
In one of the most far-reaching reviews of agroecological practice, British researchers found that across 286 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 poor countries, agroecological techniques improved crop yields by an average of 79 per cent.
Photo / Getty Images
Farms using agroecological practices are often more resilient in times of climatic disaster. In Nicaragua, following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, farms that used agroecological practices such as terracing, green manures, crop rotations, on-farm trees, living fences, contouring and mulches retained 40 per cent more topsoil and experienced significantly less erosion and fewer landslides.
Food production is responsible for an estimated 20 to 30 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. On farms, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greatest potential for greenhouse gas mitigation lies in storing more carbon in soils.
This global challenge series has been made possible with support from Lincoln University. Lincoln University is among our more progressive on these issues, with three overarching organisational goals; to feed the world; protect the future; and live well. It's with these three goals in mind that every Lincoln course is now designed, and first and second-year students are required to undertake courses in understanding global challenges and the opportunities that lie in solving them.
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