By James Wong, Ethnobotanist and Presenter of Follow the Food on BBC World News and BBC.com
Humans have done an amazing job of reducing malnutrition in the past 70 years or so. The Green Revolution in the 1960s saw a huge leap in agricultural productivity, with yields of crops such as wheat increasing dramatically in some parts of the world, allowing food production to match population growth for most of the 20th Century. While these more intensive farming methods produced some negative environmental impacts, for decades the world saw a year-on-year fall in the total number of people going hungry.
But this situation has reversed. We are now seeing an increase in human hunger, with 60 million more people undernourished today than in 2014. All at once, agricultural yields have plateaued while environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and a growing problem with pests and diseases are beginning to impact our supply of food. Meanwhile, not only are there more and more mouths to feed, but those mouths are rightly asking to be fed the right things. The threats to our ability to feed ourselves are unprecedented in many ways. We desperately need another leap in agricultural productivity.
Fortunately, there are now a huge variety of new solutions being developed around the world to ensure our food is plentiful, sustainable, nutritious and affordable. Scientists, farmers and businesses are already trying to mitigate our food problems and stave off widespread food insecurity. If we set our minds to it, we can feed the world sustainably by 2050. And this time, we can learn from the mistakes of the past.
To understand how things can get better, it helps to paint a picture of where you’d like to get to. A food utopia may sound fanciful and impractical, but in reality, many of us already live there. We can go to a supermarket within a few minutes and access foods which meet our basic nutritional needs, affordably and without worrying about where our next meal will come from. Now we need to figure out how everyone can have access to the types of food the middle and upper levels of rich Western societies take for granted.
In the new Follow the Food series, I explore the five utopian dream elements we need our food system to deliver in the next 30 years, looking at on-the-ground examples where people are already attempting to make this happen.
Could every ingredient be environmentally friendly?
Some of the farmers I spoke to while filming this series said that in the past, sustainability was often thought to come at the expense of yield. But, there is a whole new generation of farmers keen to try out more environmentally-friendly methods which would also increase their productivity.
One such farmer is James Smith, a fifth generation fruit farmer in Kent who decided to take his family’s business in a totally new direction, abandoning traditional farming practices in favour of regenerative farming.
Regenerative farming captures a whole range of activities, one of which is agroforestry. Sometimes referred to as “forest farming”, it’s an approach which I had previously dismissed as quite idealistic and not very realistic. However, during filming for this season I’ve seen with my own eyes that many of these ideas are in fact very practical. Farmers have slowly been ditching the stuff based on flimsy evidence, and keeping the things that have worked, and you could really see this in effect at Smith’s farm.
In some instances, these efforts come from traditional wisdom, but in others, they are actually incredibly high tech. The cover crops Smith is using on his farm are in fact newly developed US technology. He uses around 10 different cover crops, all carefully selected for different root and plant height so they don’t directly compete with each other. Together these create a sort of artificial ecosystem to improve soil health. This is cutting-edge biotechnology, with a huge amount of research involved. When you look at it, though, it just looks like a pretty wildflower field.
Could we have choice and variety all year round?
There is sometimes a kind of fetishisation of the food of the past. We’re told that everything would be better if only we would eat seasonal and local foods. The people who say this obviously didn’t live in the past, because in reality seasonality meant restricted choice and poor nutrition. In some parts of the world, people would be unable to make even their minimum fruit and vegetable needs for most of the year, which was not only monotonous, but failed to provide basic nutritional needs.
For all of human history, we have tried to extend the seasonal availability of foods and the trading of food also stretches back far into prehistoric times. The natural season for some crops is around one week a year, but through breeding, storing and processing foods we’ve now made some of them available year round. The question is, can we make food both nutritious and sustainable throughout the year?
Firstly, we need to do away with the idea that local food is always more sustainable. While low carbon transport has an impact, less than 6% of the total carbon footprint from food comes from transport. Growing tomatoes in a heated, lit greenhouse in Northern Europe, for example, is much worse environmentally than importing tomatoes grown in an open field in Southern Europe.
But more artificial or high intensity farming does not always mean worse farming. You can also find different ways to provide plants with what they need in a more sustainable way, no matter the season. We looked at an example of vertical urban farming at 80 Acres Farms in Ohio that had 10 floors of different crops, with everything grown under pink and blue artificial strip lights, all constantly moved and controlled by robots with essentially no human involvement at all. There weren’t even walkways for people to get inside: you were basically running around hoping a robot wasn’t going to slide past and knock you over with a tray of lettuce. But in that one acre of land they were producing 10 acres of crops, year round. This incredibly intensive form of agriculture was able to use 99% less water and produced around 90% fewer carbon emissions than…. .
What’s more, because they can control all the parameters, they can theoretically create crops just as nutritious and flavourful, if not more so. I was also able to visit a hydroponic tomato farm in Portugal where I was shown how it is possible to grow crops without any soil at all that are even more nutritous than those grown outside. In the video below you can see how it is done.
Growing crops in these confined environments, where all the nutrition and flavour can be tweaked while using far less land, water and carbon could be crucial for year-round food security and food availability. It is one tool in a toolbox, but it’s a useful solution in the appropriate place.
Could every meal be healthy, nutritious and taste great?
A big dream for our agricultural future is to ensure food is not only plentiful, but better quality. There are already moves to make crops both more flavourful and more nutritious. In the UK, for example, soils are extremely deficient in an essential mineral called selenium. Some farmers are now spraying selenium onto soils to top up what isn’t naturally there, giving us more nutrition.
But we also know that one of the biggest barriers to fruit and vegetable consumption is flavour. It doesn’t matter how nutritious something is if no one’s going to eat it. Sales of grapefruit, for example, have skyrocketed since pink grapefruit was developed through radiation breeding. Pink grapefruit are sweeter because they contain fewer bitter compounds, but they don’t contain more sugar. Not only are they more palatable, they are actually more nutritious.
If we can identify the genes which control the characteristics for traits that people like, we can encourage people to eat food they otherwise would never have considered. Frustratingly, a lot of breeding so far has done the opposite: selecting out nutritional compounds. But wouldn’t it be great if we could breed these nutrients in, and also improve their flavour profiles?
Genetic modification is clearly controversial, although less so among the scientific community. People are interested in it because it’s more precise and it’s faster than conventional breeding. Given the urgent threats that are facing us, reducing the time it takes to breed a new crop is a huge potential boom. Of course, this can be misused. But there’s a huge potential benefit in its ability to do good things.
Can we make sustainable food affordable for everyone?
It’s very easy for me at home in west London, UK, to think that issues of food accessibility and affordability is a problem that exists in developing countries. But in reality, there is a food bank just two streets from me, providing ingredients for meals to people who cannot afford to buy them. Food poverty is a huge international problem which has been getting worse in recent years, even before Covid-19 hit incomes and supply chains.
The first and most important thing is for people to be able to get fruit and vegetables at all. But much of the debate about healthy food overlooks a key problem: inequality. Accessibility and equality in the food system is the number one determinant of food outcomes. We need to figure out how we can make food more affordable, either by making it less expensive, or by tiering it based on people’s incomes – as I saw in action in Los Angeles, US. It means residents in wealthier areas have to pay a little bit more for their weekly shop, but it means those in poorer areas can access healthier, better quality food.
Globally, we have a growing population which is in many cases much more affluent. In places like China, many people are able to afford meat for the first time ever, leading to a huge explosion in the demand for meat. Of course, if you’re protein deficient, being able to afford meat for the first time is not a negative thing. But there’s a key need to find sustainable sources of protein in order to increase the total quantity. Sometimes that may involve non-animal substitutes such as beans or meat analogues. But we can also eat more sustainable sources of animal protein, such as mussels, which don’t require many inputs and lock a huge amount of carbon in their shells.
Could food be grown abundantly everywhere?
Food is severely threatened by climate change. On top of the general trend towards a warmer and drier climate, we are also getting more extreme weather events.
This isn’t a theoretical thing that could happen in the future: it is affecting harvests today. We were in Hamburg filming for the series when the enormous July floods hit southwestern Germany. We visited a farmer whose soil was completely washed away by these floods. Farmers’ livelihoods depend entirely on their soil health, and it was heartbreaking to see a farmer actually looking to buy soil from somewhere else to replace his fields. He told me he couldn’t even have pictured a farmer buying soil. Along with sunlight, it’s the one thing you usually get for free.
But many places are now looking to find new technological solutions that allow them to improve yields, resilience to climate change and sustainability hand-in-hand. Precision farming is an interesting example of this. This is a kind of technology we’ve never had before, which uses technologies such as drones, satellites and GPS to map out the conditions in a field. It can precisely calculate what nutrients or other agricultural additions are needed in specific small pockets of land, helping farmers to do things in a smarter, more efficient and more informed way. It can also reduce negative environmental impacts, such as runoff from nitrogen fertiliser sprayed on a field that doesn’t need it.
Perhaps the most impressive solution we covered in the series was at the University of Illinois, where scientists are working to make photosynthesis more efficient using a combination of different techniques including genetic modification. They are trying to figure out ways to make plants better at adapting to different light levels, for example, or how to change the architecture of leaves to make them more efficient at photosynthesis.
This could allow us to produce more crops with the same amount of resources, as well as increasing the ability of crops to absorb atmospheric carbon. It was really going back to the biological drawing board to figure out what we could do. The research included a focus on crops such as cow peas, a hugely important source of protein in Asia and Africa.
Throughout filming the series, it made me optimistic to encounter so many people who are on the case to find solutions around the world, and who have such a genuine passion and dedication for the cause they are looking at.
The one thing that unites many farmers is that they are really passionate about the environment in general, because they have a heritage to live up to, and want to pass this on to the next generation. They may not necessarily all agree about what the best thing is to do for the planet. But they’re all increasingly interested, and really open to innovation and science.
CREDIT: BBC World News
