Towards a Sustainable Global Food Supply

Creating a sustainable farm system around the world is absolutely vital to feed a growing world population. And to reduce the tremendous pressures that our current farm system, or systems around the world, are already placing on the Earth and many of the key ecosystems on the planet. We can think about what will happen if we continue with business as usual. And contrast that with what we really need to do, which is to reshape our own behavior with regard to food and to reshape the farm systems that produce food to create an alternative of trajectory, a trajectory of sustainable development. What are the threats of the business as usual path? The chart before you attempts to summarize those risks and to give an expert assessment of how serious the particular risks are in particular regions of the world.

The boxes that are shaded red are major alerts that these are places in the world and kinds of challenges that are of the first order of significance. The boxes that are yellow are like yellow warning signs, things could get bad in these areas with regard to these particular threats. Business as usual, for example, will mean increasing food insecurity in some parts of the world. The places at greatest threat are Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two epicenters of under-nutrition. But also one would add North Africa and the Middle East. Why? Because this is a place where all of the climate evidence suggests there will be significant drying in the future, and therefore, crop production will be under even greater threat than it is today. Certainly the business as usual course will put dangers in East Asia and Southeast Asia as well because there will be places of tremendous water stress. There will be places where higher temperatures play havoc with the food supply. Malnutrition in the sense of deep undernourishment, of course, will continue to have it’s intense epicenter in Sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia. But the other kind of malnutrition, obesity. On a business as usual path is likely to worsen significantly in North America, in many parts of Latin America, it’s already epidemic proportions in Mexico for example, in Europe, and with serious risks in Southeast Asia, in in East Asia. And in India and in other parts of South Asia as well. Land use change we know will have huge costs especially in the rain forest regions. That means in Latin America, in Sub-Saharan Africa. And in parts of Southeast Asia. Soil degradation is already a major crisis in, in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. In many place in south and in east Asia, where the land has already eroded the soils often have been swept away because of trying to grow crops on steep slopes for example. Or in places where the winds blow the topsoil away, as is occurring in many parts of China. We know that biodiversity loss is threatened pervasively. One could say that the threats are moderately or acutely high in every region of the world. One can think about losses in the rain forest regions, one can think about losses in the places likely to experience serious drying such as the Mediterranean basin. One can think about losses of biodiversity in places where population growth is so rapid that encroachments on land that are bound to threaten and profoundly imperil biodiversity as is occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa. The chart in other words by region, by risk. Is filled and while there are a few regions that escape some of the risks, there are no regions that escape all of the risks. And today’s poor regions are of course as is usual with poverty, at extreme peril because they’re already living on the edge. They’re already people living in fragile environments, for example in tropical ecosystems in dryland ecosystems, part of the their poverty has come from the fact that the, natural environment is already fairly inhospitable. But with environmental change, what is now a difficult environment, can be a, an impossible environment to support human life. When that happens, not only will people suffer, will people die, will there be conflict, there will be migration. And there will be environmental refugees created by the millions, the tens of millions, even the hundreds of millions. And we know, sad to say in a world which does not do well with migration. Where newcomers, especially poor newcomers that are forced to move ,uh, can face a very, very hostile environment to when they arrive and so we’re in for a lot of trouble if we maintain this business as usual trajectory. What to do? How to move to a sustainable development trajectory? Again, because of the complexity of the food system, the fact that we’re talking about land use, the fact that we’re concerned about nitrogen use, the fact that we’re concerned about chemical pollutants, the fact that we’re concerned about the vulnerability of crops to higher temperatures or more water stress. Means that the kinds of responses that are needed, also are going to have be varied, holistic in nature, and carefully tailored to local contexts. Boy, that makes this among the toughest challenges that we face because the world is in crisis. The problems will get worse. It’s not easy to say that one region will bail out the others because all regions will have stresses. And also there will be no magic key that suddenly will sweep the world, and make it possible to solve this problem. Each region is going to have to identify its own pathways to sustainable agriculture. What are some of the things that can be done? The first is to improve our ability to grow food. And to be more productive in terms of higher yields, and more resilient in terms of the ability of food crops to withstand the shocks that we know are already coming. Just as Norman Borlaug and his colleagues Emma Swaminathan and Minister Supranamian. That triumvirate made possible the Indian Green Revolution and comparable events in other parts of the world where higher yields came because of the advent of high yield varieties combined with fertilizer inputs and often with irrigation. We’re going to need another Green Revolution of new crop varieties that are going to be especially propitious for the challenges that we face. For some regions this will mean a special importance of drought resistant varieties. Because the frequency of serious droughts is likely to become much higher. We know that certain plants in nature have a high level of drought tolerance. The plant scientists now are attempting to identify those genes and through various means, conventional plant breeding or the use of genetic modification as it’s called, create new crop varieties that also share, the drought resistance. Partly the natural breeding has helped to develop new seed varieties that are better able to withstand bouts of of low rainfall, in other words dry spells during the growing season. GMOs, the genetically modified organisms, or GMO crops have taken the experimental pathway of identifying the gene complexes in naturally occurring, drought tolerant plants. And transplanting those gene complexes into crops that for the food supply. Now many, many people find this idea of genetic modification to be very threatening, very dangerous, and it poses risks to the environment and potentially to human health. So, whatever is done in this research domain of using cutting edge genomics, both to identify potential genes that can add to crop traits that are desirable, and then to transplant them into food varieties to raise the resilience of those crops. Needs to be tightly monitored and tightly regulated. But I would argue, despite some critics of this technology, that we should certainly test these technologies to see what they have to offer. They seem very promising. That by identifying genes for drought resistance or by identifying genes for saline tolerance, for saline soils, or for identifying genes as shown in this picture for the ability of rice to resist submergence. We can get major advances. What you’re looking at in this picture is a transplanted gene from a species of rice that is able to tolerate being underwater for several days and still survive. To the kinds of rice that are normally grown in Bangladesh, in India, in Pakistan or other parts of Asia, that don’t have that submergence trait. Turns out, wonderfully, taking that gene for submergence and putting it into popular, high yield traits for rice, has led to high yield, submergence-tolerant rice a wonderful breakthrough for farmers in Bangladesh that suffer repeated episodes of submergence of their rice. Those who say don’t even go that way with technology aren’t thinking, in my opinion, clearly enough about the needs of that farm family in Bangladesh to have this kind of variety. We shouldn’t dismiss a whole class of technology, because while it may pose risks those risks are controllable, monitorable and the technology itself can offer important breakthroughs. Now, relatedly is a second step of what can be done. And this is to make crop varieties more nutritious. Not only to grow better in harsh conditions, but to express more nutrients and this is the idea that you’re looking at, in this picture of so-called Golden Rice. This is a, a crop that has been developed by the International Rice Research, Rice Research Institute, in Los Banos, Philippines the Rice Research Institute that helped bring the Green Revolution in rice. Now what scientists at IRRI, I-R-R-I, are doing is to put in genes that express beta carotene, a precursor for vitamin A. So the children who eat this rice, and you see how it’s golden or looks more red, a little bit more like a carrot carrot color then have the vitamin A that they need for health. And we’ve already identified that vitamin A deficiency is one of the key kinds of hidden hunger. How wonderful it will be if a nutritious rice that provides a basis for vitamin A can successfully be diffused and taken up by populations of rice eaters around the world. A third direction for us, absolutely essential is known as precision farming or information rich farming. This is already being used in high income countries by relatively wealthy farmers who can afford high tech approaches. But in coming years, because of the declining costs of information technology, it will increasingly be used by by poor farmers as well. What precision farming means is having a much more precise application of fertilizer, for example. Just in the places where the soils require it. Not in the places where it’s not used and just in the amounts that can be taken up by the plants without experiencing the harmful side effects of the massive run off or loss of that fertilizer, both into the waterways and into the atmosphere. Precision agriculture depends on information technologies, on detailed mapping of soil types, often on on global positioning systems that can tell a farmer exactly where that farmer is in the field, and what’s happening in the soil in that part of the farm. That relates more to, to a more general category of, better nutrient management through better soil testing, soil mapping using a, a local chemistry. Even reading the qualities of the soil on handheld devices. Or from satellite, it will be possible to get a much more detailed resolution of soil needs. What needs to be added here, what needs to be added there, where’s fertilizer not needed or needed only in very small amounts? And that sort of nutrient management of the soils offers places with soil nutrient depletion a massive potential boost in yields, Africa  being number one in the line for that. It also offers the chances for places that use far too much fertilizer, like China, to cut down very, very sharply on the fertilizer use. Another breakthrough is water management. Of course, we need to apply less water to get more crop per drop, because we’re depleting the scarce water we have, and the conditions will get tougher in the future. Not only because of the depletion, but because of the climate change. Another major breakthrough that offers us a real boost will be better harvesting, storage, and transport of crops. To avoid the very large losses, sometimes estimated as, as much as a third, or even 40% of the crops to post-harvest loss, to pests, to rotting to rodents, to physical loss of the crops left to exposure to rains and so forth. Simple means of more effective storage systems at very,very low cost and better incentive systems and empowerment of local farmer cooperatives to invest in community-based storage facilities offer a tremendous hope for reducing losses in the value chain of agriculture. With big gains not only for farm incomes, but also big gains in effective productivity of the farm systems, and our ability to ease up on the big human pressures, on the farm systems. Next I would argue that better business models  for poor smallholders is vital not only for ending extreme poverty but also for making all of these investments in more efficient crop varieties, more efficient irrigation more efficient water management, more efficient storage. There is productivity through aggregation into farmer cooperatives. Farmer based organizations, new kinds of models, new connections to local, regional, and global value chains that are already proving their worth. And finally, we have to take responsibility ourselves for our health. And for the way we approach the issues of food. When we have massive epidemics of obesity. We know that something is seriously wrong. A lot of it comes from the fact that we have heavily subsidized the wrong kinds of foods. We’ve heavily subsidized carbohydrates or trans fats, or other kinds of, of foods stuff that are absolutely unhealthy in the ways that they’re being consumed right now. And, our economic incentives have often played against the very kinds of foods that are better for our diets, for our health. We have subsidized in effect the feed grains that have led to massive and the evidence shows from a health point of view, an environmental point of view, overconsumption of beef in the United States and Europe. To the point where so much meat is eaten that it’s bad for human health, contributing to cardiovascular and other diseases, and it’s exceedingly bad for the environment when we are deploying ten or fifteen kilograms of feed grain for every kilogram of beef that is consumed. Tremendously multiplying the burdens on the land, on fertilizer use, on water supplies, aggravating all of the natural problems. We’re also aggravating these problems by diverting food production, or what should be food production, into the gas tank. In the United States through absurd subsidies driven more by politics than by any common sense or ecology, we’ve turned a significant part of our annual food and feed grain production, especially of maize into ethanol for automobiles. It’s a miserable deal because so much resources used to produce that ethanol. It’s creating no savings for the natural environment but what it is doing is diverting a tremendous amount of food and feed grain away from the the food systems. It’s pushing up food prices. It’s putting extra pressures on the natural environment. It is being done at the behest of a few powerful companies with powerful lobbies in Washington. And Europe isn’t off the hook because it has a similar problem of biofuels diverting valuable farmland in Europe. The pathway to sustainable development involves behavioral change, public awareness, taking responsibility, and the mobilization of new systems and new technologies that can dramatically reduce the pressures on the natural environment. And help to make our economy and our way of life more resilient to the environmental changes that are already underway. It’s a huge problem and a huge challenge. It’s an unsolved one. It’s one of the areas that will require the most intensive kinds of problem solving, at local levels all around the world, during the period of the sustainable development goals from 2015 to 2030, the years that lie ahead.

How the Food System Threatens the Environment

So we have a big problem. The problem is how to grow enough food and the right kind of food for a healthy and growing population. And we’ve seen that the problem’s going to get tougher as the population grows. And as the environmental threats multiply in the coming years. But the problem’s even more complicated. And that is that agriculture itself is one of the major causes of environmental threat.

The agricultural sector is the single most important sector from the point of view of human-induced climate change, and other environmental damages to the planet. I always find this a little bit counterintuitive. I think the automobile age, that must be the big, damage to the environment the energy system and fossil fuels. Of course those are huge factors in climate change and in environmental costs. But if we look at a particular sector of the economy we come back to the original one, to food production itself. And to agriculture more generally as the key human activity that puts the most pressures on the planet. What kinds of pressures? I think it’s worth mentioning quickly, before delving more deeply into three of them, the range of pressures that the agricultural system and farm practices put on the planet. First is greenhouse gasses.

We’ll turn to this in some detail, but the farm sector is a major emitter of the three main greenhouse gasses; carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. And this by itself means that farm practices need to be rethought as we desperately need to move to a low carbon and a low greenhouse gas emission world.

The second major impact Is through something very rarely discussed in in in the, the public but of increasing concern among specialists and that is on the nitrogen cycle. There’s a natural nitrogen cycle our atmosphere is 79% nitrogen in the form of N2. That kind of nitrogen is inert odorless without taste and not very useful, actually, for us. But nitrogen in it’s reactive forms of nitrates and nitrites and ammonia and ammonium, ion, and, its other reactive forms is absolutely vital for us and for all the rest of, living, species. Because nitrogen’s the backbone of amino acids and of proteins, it’s absolutely core to our metabolism, and to every aspect of our lives, including the ability to grow food. It’s for that reason we put a lot of nitrogen on the soil in the form of nitrogen-based fertilizers, to help feed the nutrients to our crops so that our crops feed us. But the damage of that human intervention into a natural nitrogen cycle is enormous. We’ll look at that in just a moment.

A third major way that the farm system impacts on the planet is the destruction of habitat for other species. Not entirely surprising when we consider that 40% of the total land area of the planet is agricultural land whether the arable land or the meadows and pasturelands. Humanity’s already grabbed so much of the land area for us, but it’s grabbing more, especially in the form of deforestation, and the rain forests that are at risk right now are places of incredible and irreplaceable biodiversity. And so one of the major ways that the earth is vulnerable to the sixth rate extinction wave that we have already discussed is through the tropical rain forest deforestation, which is part of the ongoing process of clearing lands for arable and for pasture land.

There are many other ways, which I’ve mentioned, where the environment is at threat from farming activity. The pesticides, the herbicides, the other chemicals that are used in farm production are a major threat to biodiversity. And especially the massive amounts of water that are used, around 70% of the total human use of fresh water goes through agriculture with only 10% going through household use and the remaining 20% or so for industrial processes. Agriculture is a voracious user of water and that water, itself, is under threat. So, for all of these reasons, the agriculture sector Is a key driver of anthropogenic environmental loss, and we’re going to need to change technologies and processes and patterns of land use to make the food system compatible with a sustainable planet. Let’s have a look at the first of those three drivers that I discussed. Climate change, nitrogen cycle, and land use where I want to look more deeply at the role of agriculture.

This pie chart shows us the estimated total amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted, allocated across the various sectors of the economy. The power sector for example, through the burning of coal, oil and gas, is responsible for a massive amount of CO2 emissions, and for an estimated 24%, roughly a quarter of the total greenhouse gas emissions.

The transport sector, the internal combustion engine in the cars and in the trucks, is responsible for an estimated 14% of total emissions. Industrial processes, for example, steel production or petrochemical production, another one-seventh or 14% of total greenhouse gas emissions. The non-energy sphere is responsible for around one-third of the total greenhouse gas emissions. That is CO2 emissions, methane, nitrous oxide, and chemical pollutants from specific chemicals like hydrofluorocarbons that are not the emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Within that category, agriculture plays a huge role. Of course, agriculture emits greenhouse gases in the transport sector in tractors and in transport of food. It emits greenhouse gases in the industrial sector for the production of chemical fertilizers. But there’s a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions that is not directly from fossil fuels at all. This includes for example, the emissions that come from clearing forests. As the trees are chopped down, as they are burned, as they decay, CO2 that was sequestered in the forests are emitted into the atmosphere. And several billion tons every year of CO2 come from deforestation. Agriculture also is a major source, as I mentioned earlier, of the second and third ranking greenhouse gases. Methane, CH4, is emitted in certain crop productions such as paddy rice. And it’s also emitted through livestock, through the ruminants who through the natural processes of their digestion give rise to quite a lot of methane emissions, both from the front and the back of the animals, I should mention. And this also contributes to the increasing concentration of methane in the atmosphere, a very powerful greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide, N2O, is also emitted from agriculture. It is one of the ways that nitrogen-based fertilizers degrade.

Instead of being taken up by the plants, they volatilize,  go into the atmosphere, they go into the the water supply. And one of these parts of the nitrogen cycle is from, the livestock and from the fertilizer use, into increased emissions of nitrous oxide. And this also adds to the total amount of greenhouse gases that agriculture contributes to the overall process. When you look at it, more than one third of total emissions are due to land use change such as deforestation, and the direct emissions of greenhouse gasses from agricultural production.

It’s astounding. Roughly one third of total greenhouse gases directly come from the agriculture sector, and there are bits and pieces more through the fertilizer manufacturing and through the direct expenditure of fossil fuel based energy as inputs to agriculture on top of that one third. So we see that indeed the agriculture sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, and to climate change. As well as the first sector to lose from this. This is a terrible two-way problem that needs to be addressed through improved agricultural processes, as I’ll be discussing shortly. Let me turn to the nitrogen cycle. The nitrogen cycle vital for life has been overtaken by humanity. Absolutely extraordinary. In nature the N2 molecules in the atmosphere are converted into reactive nitrogen through various biological processes of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, as well as through physical processes, of lightning, for example, that breaks the very strong triple bond of the N2 molecule and by disassociating the N2 molecule, leads to the formation of ammonia and other reactive nitrogen. In that normal process the cycle from N2, to reactive nitrogen compounds like nitrates, nitrites and ammonia, and then back through respiration uh,and through through biological processes to back to N2 is a natural nitrogen cycle. But humanity is now creating even more reactive nitrogen than nature itself. We’re doing it in our industrial plants at a mega scale, 100 million tons or more per year of nitrogen-based fertilizers. Back in the early years of the 20th century, two great chemical engineers, Haber and Bosch, developed a process that some consider to be the single most important innovation of the 20th century, one that almost none of us has heard of, in fact, but changed the world. The Haber-Bosch Process, so called, is a way, through application of high amounts of energy and the use of various identified catalysts, to break that N2 bond to create in a chemical process in, in a factory basis, ammonia. And that ammonia can then be used to provide the base stock for urea and other nitrogen-based fertilizers. Up until the Haber-Bosch Process, the nitrogen that was deposited on the soils either came from the manures of farm animals or it came from the mining of excrement off the coast of Peru and Chile of bats and birds, the so-called guano which was being mined as a nitrogen source for fertilizer for Europe. But it was being quickly depleted.

And there was a crisis at the end of the 19^th century, what are we going to do with the encroaching nitrogen scarcity? Along came Haber and Bosch, the Haber-Bosch Process, nitrogen-based fertilizer. And what was then a world population of under two billion became during the twentieth century a population of more than three times that, and now reaching 7.2 billion people. And it was the advent of nitrogen-based fertilizer, among other things and including, of course, the high-yield seed varieties and other agronomic advances, that made it possible to produce enough food to support 7.2 billion people, even if, I must add, a large number of them, 3 billion, are not well-nourished on that food supply. But, with all that nitrogen now being converted from N2 into reactive nitrogen, we have a mega problem.

And the mega-problem is shown in this complicated flow chart of what happens to that nitrogen when it is used in the farms and then it runs off. In some ways, it enters the water supplies, nitrates, causing a danger to the water supply. Some of it runs into the rivers and the sea and we’ve already seen how that leads to algal blooms and nutrification.  some of it enters the atmosphere, no

t as N2O, but as NO2, which causes smog in our cities. And so from the fertilizer deposit come a host of problems. There’s addition to greenhouse gases. There is acidification of soils by the nitrogen that is put into the soils. There is the worsening water quality that comes from the nitrates and the nitrites running into the water supply. There is the damage to ecosystems of eutrophication of the estuaries. There’s the fall of air quality as the noxes, the NO2s, NO3s, and other, effects of the nitrogen enter the urban atmosphere to create smog, to create tropospheric ozone, and to create massive health hazards, in our cities. So here is a, a dilemma, that is a mega dilemma, and hardly discussed in our day to day life. We need the nitrogen for our food production, and yet the consequences of the nitrogen on the physical environment in multiple ways, from climate change to eutrophication to urban smog to poisoning of our water supplies, is growing. This map comes from a study showing estuaries around the world suffering from eutrophication, from nitrogen and phosphorous based fertilizers. A huge problem, these are the dead zones in our coastal areas, killing vital parts of the marine ecology. And the problem is growing and it is likely to get worse unless we address how to use nitrogen in a more responsible way.

Third area that I wanted to mention in-depth is the forests. And just to point out that the forest loss that is occurring in all of the great rain forest regions, in the Amazon and the Congo Basin and, and in the Indonesian Archipelago have multiple drivers that differ across regions. In the Amazon most of the loss of the rain forests has come through the clearing of the rain forest to make way for new pasture land and new farm land, or because of the building of infrastructure such as roads in the Amazon. In southeast Asia where there’s also a large loss, the drivers are somewhat different. The drivers there are logging for tropical hardwoods in huge demand for China’s booming economy, and also for clearing the rainforest to grow tree crop plantations, of which the fastest growing, taking over large areas in Indonesia and Malaysia, is palm oil. In Africa there is yet another driver and that is peasant small holder agriculture. Not clearing especially for tropical logging or for tree plantations or even for large pasture land, but just the spread of small holder farmers into the forest margin. And often a huge use of the forests, and an unsustainable use for fuel wood and for charcoal. In the wealthier regions of the Amazon in Brazil, and in in Southeast Asia, the fuel wood problem is not as severe because there are alternative energy sources. But in the Congo Basin for example, and in other forest areas of Africa where populations are very, very poor and where alternative fuel sources such as natural gas or or electricity are not available, charcoal is used in such large amounts that that is a key driver of the deforestation and a key driver of the loss of habitat. Clearly in each of these areas, in order to preserve habitat, protect biodiversity, reduce the greenhouse gas emission consequences of deforestation, actions are going to need to be introduced that are responsive to the particular challenges in those areas, and the particular needs of the local populations. This will play an enormously important roll in helping to reduce the rate of uh,climate change, but also will be absolutely vital if we are to succeed in heading off the massive loss of biodiversity