If you eat, you’re part of the solution

Hunger was one of the deadliest weapons in the Second World War, with nearly a third of all deaths, around 25 million, due to famine and disease. This shocked the developed world into action on food security. On 16 October 1945, the UN established the Food and Agriculture Organization, spanning 42 countries. Since 1981, 6 October has come to be known as World Food Day, and this year the theme is The Family Farmer.

The global population has more than tripled since 1945, and the number of people worldwide with chronic insufficiency of food stands at just over 800 million, or about 1 in 9 of all people alive today. Appalling as it is, this number has been reducing in both number and proportion in the past two decades, from about 1 in 5. Much of this improvement has been through increasing access to food by tackling poverty. The industrial agriculture that emerged from the war years resulted in year-on-year increases in crop yields of more than 3% – enough to meet the growing demand for food while also reducing its cost in real terms.

Looking ahead, recent research suggests the future may be more demanding. By 2030, we will have to increase food production by at least 50% to meet demands, and the challenges have been widely reported. This might appear trivial, given we kept up with a 300% increase in population since the war, and still managed to reduce hunger. This is indeed encouraging but from now on, we will need a very different approach.

The reason is that previous successes have raised the bar for future challenges: essentially, we have already picked and eaten all the low-hanging fruit. First off, the rate at which yields are increasing has tapered off in the last decade to almost half the maximum post-war gains. Moreover, these gains have been achieved by focusing on the single target of increasing yields at almost any cost, and by ignoring the connected risks. In that time, the costs of unintended consequences have come back to bite us. Most significant among these are the global soil and water crises that could drastically reduce our ability to produce food at a time when demand will be rising.

Perhaps the most ominous portents for the future come from two recent reports. The first is that almost half of the Earth’s wildlife has been lost since 1970: the ultimate canary in the coal mine. This indicates that the spread of agriculture to cover half of our planet’s land surface has come at an awful cost to the global life support system. The second is that we are on track for the worst-case CO2 emissions scenario, meaning that the world is likely to warm by more than 20C in the coming decades leading to runaway climate change, with the greatest impact for global food production in the parts of the world where demand will be highest.

So what is the solution? It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that the answer is likely to lie in the hands of the individual: the average farmer and the average consumer. The potential yield of modern wheat varieties is of the order of 18 tonnes per hectare, but the average global farmer is achieving yields about 10 times lower. Going some way to closing this ‘yield gap’ by changing what the average farmer does could dramatically improve our prospects. However, these changes will have to recognize the real natural resource constraints, especially water. For example, recent results from working with individual farmers in Africa across millions of hectares show that yields can be doubled or even tripled by encouraging a more integrated approach to production. Focusing on soil improvement, these gains can be won at very little economic and environmental cost in terms of increased inputs.

At the other end of the food chain, prosperity will continue to rise and by 2030 nearly 70% of the global population will live in cities: consumers increasingly disconnected from the land. We know that the technological gains in agricultural production have been more or less counterbalanced in many developing countries by changes to a less efficient Western-style diet. In the future, the average consumer could tip the balance in favour of food security by choosing a diet that puts less strain on the environment, with limited meat and dairy intake.

Finally, about half of the food we grow is wasted. In the West, most of the waste is at the consumer end of the food chain, in developing countries it is at the farmer end.

The theme for World Food Day this year is Family Farming: focusing on the role of individual farmers in food security. The future of supply is certainly in their hands, but in the next 20 years, consumers are likely to play an even more important role in deciding the future of food. The final challenge is therefore to develop the kinds of governance systems that support both farmers and consumers to play their part in creating a food system that is fit for its purpose of supporting the health of both our planet and ourselves.

Author: Professor John Crawford is Scientific Director of the Sustainable Systems Programme at Rothamsted Research.

Image: A field of unharvested wheat is seen outside Montigny en Ostrevent, near Valenciennes, northern France July 31, 2013. REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol.