View source for Five Key Steps Towards a Food System That Can Address Climate Change and the Food Crisis




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From http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=642 :

"Five '''key steps towards a food system that can address climate change and the food crisis'''

1. Move towards sustainable, integrated production methods

The artificial separations and simplifications that industrial agriculture has brought upon us have to be undone, and the different elements of sustainable farming systems must be brought together again. Crops and livestock have to be reintegrated on the farm. Agricultural biodiversity has to become the cornerstone of food production again, and local seed saving and exchange systems need to be reactivated. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides must be replaced by natural ways of keeping soil healthy, and pests and diseases in check. The restructuring of the food system along these lines will help to create the conditions for near-zero emissions on farms.

2. Rebuild the soil and retain the water

We have to take the soil seriously again. We need a massive global effort to build organic matter back into the soils, and bring back fertility. Decades of soil maltreatment with chemicals in many places, and mining of soils in others, have left soils exhausted. Healthy soils, rich in organic matter, can retain huge amounts of water, which will be needed to create resilience in the farming system, to deal with the climate and water crises that are already encroaching on us. Increasing organic matter in soils around the world will help to capture substantial amounts of the current excess CO2 in the atmosphere (see “Earth matters”, p. 9).

3. De-industrialise agriculture, save energy, and keep the people on the land

Small-scale family farming should become the cornerstone of food production again. By allowing the build-up of mega-industrial farm operations that produce commodities for the international market rather than food for people, we have created empty countrysides, overpopulated cities, and destroyed many livelihoods and cultures in the process. De-industrialising agriculture would also help to eliminate the tremendous waste of energy that the industrial farming system now produces.

4. Grow close by and cut the international trade

One principle of food sovereignty is to prioritise local markets over international trade. As we have seen, international trade in food, and its associated food processing industries and supermarket chains, are the food system’s chief contributors to the climate crisis. All of these can largely be cut out of the food chain if food production is reoriented towards local markets. Achieving this is probably the toughest fight of all, as so much corporate power is concentrated on keeping the trade system growing and expanding, and so many governments are happy to go along with this. But if we are serious about dealing with the climate crisis, this has to change.

5. Cut the meat economy and change to a healthier diet

Perhaps the most profound and destructive transformation that the industrial food system has brought upon us is in the livestock sector. What used to be an integral and sustainable part of rural livelihoods has become a mega-industrial meat factory system spread around the world, but controlled by a few. The international meat economy, which has grown fivefold in recent decades, is contributing to the climate crisis in an enormous way. It has also helped to create the obesity problem in rich countries, and destroyed – through subsidies and dumping – local meat production in poor countries. This has to stop, and consumption patterns, especially in rich countries, have to move away from meat. The world needs to return to a decentralised system of meat production and distribution, organised according to people’s needs. Markets that supply meat from smaller farms to local markets at fair prices need to be restored and reinvigorated, and international dumping has to stop.  

Cooking the planet for dinner

Proponents of the Green Revolution boast of how its basic recipe of uniform plant varieties and chemical fertilisers saved much of the world from starvation. Defenders of the so-called Livestock and Blue (aquaculture) Revolutions sell a similar story about uniform breeds and industrial feeds. The narratives, however, sound less convincing today, with nearly a quarter of the planet going hungry and with crop yields stuck on a plateau since the 1980s. In fact, they read more like horror stories when the environmental consequences are considered, especially as the world learns more about the contribution that these transformations in agriculture and the larger food system make to changing the climate.

The scientific consensus is that agriculture is now responsible for around one third of all human-made GHG emissions. But lumping all forms of farming into a single pile hides the truth. In most agriculture-based countries, agriculture itself makes little contribution to climate change. Those countries with the highest percentages of rural populations and whose economies are most dependent on agriculture tend to make the lowest GHG emissions per capita. [14] For instance, although Canadian agriculture is said to account for only 6 per cent of the country’s overall GHG emissions, this works out at 1.6 tonnes of GHG per Canadian, whereas in India, where agriculture is much more important to the national economy, per capita GHG emissions from all sources are only 1.4 tonnes, and only 0.4 tonnes from agriculture. [15] There is a difference therefore in the kind of agriculture that is practised, and one cannot just point a finger at agriculture in general.

Moreover, when we break down agriculture’s overall contribution to climate change we see that just a small section of activities account for almost all of agriculture’s GHG emissions. Deforestation caused by land use changes account for around half the total, while, with on-farm emissions, the biggest culprits by far are livestock production and fertilisers. All of these sources of GHGs are closely linked to the rise of industrial agriculture and the expansion of the corporate food system (see Box 1 above, “Earth matters”, and the article “Real problems, false solutions”). So too is our food system’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels and the significant carbon footprint generated by trucking and shipping inputs and food all around the world, wrapped in all manner of plastics.

Since most of the energy used in the industrial food system comes from fossil fuel consumption, the amount of energy it uses translates directly into the emission of GHGs. The US food system alone is calculated to account for a formidable 20 per cent of the country’s fossil fuel consumption. This figure includes the energy used on the farm to grow the food, and the post-agricultural processes of transporting, packaging, processing, and storing food. The US Environmental Protection Agency reported that US farmers emitted as much carbon dioxide in 2005 as 141 million cars in the same year! This hopelessly inefficient food system uses 10 non-renewable fossil-fuel calories to produce one single food calorie. [16]

The difference in energy use between industrial and traditional agricultural systems could not be starker. There is much talk of how efficient and productive industrial agriculture is compared with traditional farming in the global South but, if one takes into consideration energy efficiency, nothing could be further from the truth. The FAO calculates that, on average, farmers in industrialised countries spend five times as much commercial energy to produce one kilo of cereal as do farmers in Africa. Looking at specific crops, the differences are even more spectacular: to produce one kilo of maize, a farmer in the US uses 33 times as much commercial energy as his or her traditional neighbour in Mexico. And to produce one kilo of rice, a farmer in the US uses 80 times the commercial energy used by a traditional farmer in the Philippines! [17] This “commercial energy” that FAO speaks of is, of course, mostly the fossil-fuel oil and gas needed for the production of fertilisers and agrochemicals, and that used by farm machinery, all of which emit substantial amounts of GHGs. [18]

But then, agriculture itself is responsible for only about a quarter of the energy used to get food to our tables. The real waste of energy and the pollution happen in the broader international food system: the processing, packaging, freezing, cooking, and moving of food. Crops for animal feed may be grown in Thailand, processed in Rotterdam, fed to cattle somewhere else, which are then eaten in a McDonalds in Kentucky.

Transporting food consumes huge amounts of energy. Looking at the USA again, it is calculated that 20 per cent of all the commodity transport within the country is to move food, resulting in 120 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. The US import and export of food accounts for another 120 million tonnes of CO2. Add to that moving supplies and inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, etc.) to industrial farms, transporting plastic and paper to the packaging industries, and moving consumers to increasingly faraway supermarkets, and we get a picture of the tremendous amount of GHGs produced by the industrial food system’s transport requirements alone. Other big GHG producers are the food processing, freezing, and packaging industries, which account for 23 per cent of the energy consumed in the US food system. [19] It all adds up to an incredible waste of energy. And on the subject of waste, the industrial food system discards up to half of all the food that it produces, in its journey from farms to traders, to food processors, to stores and supermarkets! This is enough to feed the world’s hungry six times over. [20] Nobody has begun to calculate how much GHG is produced by the rotting of all this thrown-away food.

Much of this tremendous global waste and destruction could be avoided if the food system were decentralised and agriculture oriented more towards local and regional markets. Small farmers and consumers would get closer together again, and large agribusiness would be cut out of the food system. Healthier food, happier producers and consumers, and a sustainable planet would be the result.

Yet, as today’s decision-makers contemplate what to do in the face of the current food crisis and the accelerating collapse of the planet’s life-giving systems, all they offer is more of the same, with the addition of a few useless techno-fixes. The corporate food order is thus clearly at a dead end. It proposes industrial agriculture and globalised food chains as a solution to the food crisis. But these activities drive climate change, thereby severely intensifying the food crisis. It is a vicious spiral that spews out extremes of poverty and profits, with the chasm between the two growing ever deeper. It is way past time to overhaul this global food system."
(http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=642)


[[Category:Agrifood]]