Can we feed billions of people without destroying the planet?
We are now producing more food more efficiently than ever before, and we have a lot to use for 7 billion people. But it is at the cost of environmental degradation, and the bounty is not benefiting many people.
Sustainable food production, A new primer from the Earth Institute published by Columbia University Press, discusses how to make modern agriculture more environmentally friendly and economically more just. The authors say that as the population may reach 10 billion in 30 years, now is the time to start.
The first author is an ecologist Shahid Naim director Earth Environmental Sustainability Institute. He co-authored this book with his former colleague from Columbia University Susan Lipton and Steve Van Hyssen. Naeem and I discussed the modern food system and the prospects for reform.
In assessing today, you quoted the words of 19th-century British novelist Charles Dickens: “This is the best age, this is the worst age, this is the age of wisdom, this is the age of stupidity.” What are you mean?
This is the best time, because about 40 years ago, with the repeated occurrence of famines, rampant pollution, and the rise of nuclear arsenals that destroyed the earth, human thinking underwent an extraordinary transformation. It doesn’t take much-all we have to do is to ensure that the profits of human enterprises are no longer measured only by GDP or dollars, but by the improvement of human beings and the living world that sustains us. My God, today we have extraordinary technologies based on scientific advancements in all fields, allowing us to easily transition to environmental sustainability. This is indeed the age of wisdom. However, this is the worst time, because while we have this expertise, the environmental debt we have accumulated during the over-industry and green revolution has caught up with us. Yes, we have less hunger and violence, and our health is better. But inequality is at the worst level ever, and food, water, and energy security are at the lowest point in history. This is not a collapsing world, but a fragile world, one billion or two more people will join by 2050. Too many people and governments foolishly embrace fear and protectionism. Isolationism is the biggest obstacle to achieving environmental sustainability. In the mass extinction, climate change, and emerging diseases, the urge to work hard is hard to resist. Therefore, this is neither the best era nor the worst, but a combination of the two.
This”Green revolution“Modern agriculture at the end of the 20th century has produced unprecedented abundance. Did something go wrong?
From the beginning, the green revolution has run counter to environmental sustainability. It tries to greatly increase the scale and efficiency of production, but it pays little attention to the bottom line of human beings. Many people pointed out that the end of the mass famine was a positive result. correct. But the environmental, health and social costs are staggering. Two-thirds of the world has become a pressurized machine running at full speed, like an overworked steam engine, with red meters and rivets popping out. The displacement of smallholders comes at the cost of large-scale operations that benefit the land and the wealthy. Some of the most powerful companies in history are global agricultural groups that emerged from the green revolution. This shows that the main bottom line is profit, not social and natural well-being. The increase in economic inequality and the dead zones in the ocean caused by agricultural runoff can all be traced back to industrialized agriculture. I have always been surprised that these very smart people are often genuinely passionate about ending world hunger, but pay little attention to basic environmental biology. Natural ecosystems can operate within safe operating boundaries for tens of thousands of years. Tropical rain forests, boreal forests, grasslands, mangroves, and even deserts and tundra, unless they face insurmountable external changes, they all have super resilience. The natural ecosystem should be a model for how to realign the world to feed a growing population. This means maximizing diversity, minimizing waste, balancing production and stability, and ensuring that we can feed tomorrow’s children. The Green Revolution built fast, cheap, simplified, and unstable systems, just like American muscle cars in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was supposed to make high-tech, fine-tuned electric cars.
You discussed the “services” that the earth provides us for free, but we don’t think these “services” have any economic value. Tell us some of them.
The concept of “service” is interesting. It divides everything into providers and consumers. In our social system, we know who the service provider is, and the provider knows who the consumer is—they send us bills, and if we don’t pay, we will go to jail. Well, the largest service provider on the planet is the biosphere. It is found all over the world, from the snail fish in the deepest ocean basin to the microorganisms on the highest mountain, to the sandy beaches of the driest desert. It has 8.7 million species and trillions of individual plants, animals and microorganisms. They regulate our air, water and soil. These services are strange, such as the production of oxygen-not only important for oxygen-sucking organisms like us, but also important for the production of stratospheric ozone that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. There are other technologies that sound like denitrification, nitrogen fixation, carbon fixation, and nutrient mineralization. Then there are more familiar services, such as pollination, protecting coastlines from the impact of sea waves, reducing the spread of disease, and the mental health benefits of green spaces and the cultural values that nature provides to people. Compared with the Internet, banking, electricity, and education, these services seem esoteric. However, they are vital to all aspects of life on earth. “Service providers”, such as plants, animals, and microorganisms, are a kind of slave labor. But of course, they don’t care about us at all. They see us as another species in the system. If they are conscious and can form opinions, they will see us as self-deceiving and greedy. If they could, they might send us huge bills every month, and if we didn’t pay, they would send us to jail.
What sustainable practices should we focus on?
Maximize diversity. We should ban monoculture. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 75% of the world’s food comes from more than a dozen plants and five animals. There are approximately 400,000 species of plants, thousands of which are edible. But to a large extent, humans only use 150 to 200. Same as above for animals. There are millions of animals, most of which are edible, although many of the largest and strongest gun-bearing beef eaters cringe when we advise them to eat insects. In fact, unless we all become vegetarians or vegans, many studies have shown that we may not be able to feed 10 billion people by 2050. It’s just that when a person’s plant-based diet is of poor quality and contains starch, animals are a convenient source of protein, just like most people’s grain-based diets are. The diet is complicated, but I just want to say that no matter how you look at it, by turning most of the planet into a food production system, the worst thing we continue to do is to focus on a few species. Nothing is more certain than the fact that the more diverse a system, the more efficient and flexible it is. So why do we grow oil palm, corn, rice or wheat from horizon to horizon? Turning to ancient grains, pasture-raised livestock, diversification of crops, better management of soil organisms, and yes, even eating insects, are all evidence that the world is catching up. If you have no opinion on GMOs, please use these instead of herbicides and make GMOs affordable even by the poorest farmers. Stop wasting food-40% of food is wasted. Use irrigation and use fertilizer in the best way.
You say it’s not just about producing food; it’s about making it distributed fairly and achieving other humanitarian goals. Can you elaborate?
Sustainable food production is independent of social goals. You can build a perfect and sustainable farm using slaves cruelly abused by autocratic farmers. But this is not what we want. What we want is food production to improve human well-being, as suggested by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals-eradicating poverty, improving health, achieving universal education, and so on. We not only want a sustainable world; we want a sustainable world we want. easy to say, hard to do! To some extent, the ecological part is the simplest: maximizing efficiency and diversification. The social part is very challenging. A recent literature survey identified 800 different things that people believe are important to human well-being. They roughly fall into the categories of health, trust in the government, good social relations, and economic equality. Different people have different views on happiness. As the United Nations defines hunger, food is more than just enough food in a person’s stomach to survive a day. This is about maintaining a happy and useful life for yourself, your family, your country, and an increasingly globalized community.
Is “organic” food a scam?
There is no doubt that organic agriculture is more environmentally friendly. There is no doubt that its productivity in many systems may be reduced, and it will almost certainly be much more expensive. Believe it or not, industrial agriculture can be as sustainable as organic agriculture. The problem is that most parts of the world live or migrate to urban environments, and most urban residents in the world are very poor. Food produced in industrialized agriculture is cheap and is the only food that the urban poor can afford in many cases. If organic farming claims to be the only program that can ensure an adequate supply of safe, nutritious food, then it will become a scam. Don’t get me wrong-my small vegetable garden in the country is organic, and I buy organic-but the current market is not about solving usability and accessibility issues. The natural sciences that support organic agriculture are reasonable, but as an environmentally sustainable food solution, it needs to solve a large number of social obstacles.
What can individuals do to make food production more sustainable?
My goodness! There are so many things one can do. Simple things such as minimizing waste, paying a premium for sustainably produced food, maximizing food diversity, and reducing meat consumption. Do not buy any food containing oil palm products. Go to the farmers market. Most importantly, as long as we realize that food is an ecologically and socially complex thing, what a great business we are generating billions of calories every day. Humans have done a lot of amazing things, but nothing is more amazing than the way we produce food. What we need to do now is to get back on track and produce it in an environmentally sustainable way.
