Is there enough food for everyone already?

If we really cannot afford to expand farmland any further, yet need to reduce our use of substances such as fertilisers, where is the food needed to feed our growing population going to come from? Well, here’s the thing. It’s kind of already here. There is enough food currently being produced on Earth to feed 10 billion people. To explain, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at the University of Cambridge, Rachael Garrett...

Racheal - The overall problem is that some people on this planet are eating more than their fair share. They're eating a lot of beef and pork, and all of that requires a much higher amount of land than eating the same amount of protein and calories from plant-based products. And another problem is that we're not just talking about food supply. A big challenge to feeding people is how much that food costs. And many people are simply too poor to be able to afford the prices that are being offered on markets. And in some really extreme cases that we are seeing increasingly throughout the world these days, there's many conflict zones where people just lack physical access. So there's a lot of dimensions to food security, and not all of them come down to how much land we have under agricultural production. And then finally, the ways that we're feeding people just can't go on forever. So we might be just managing to keep up our current consumption levels right now. But in the process of farming the way that we're farming right now, we're actually undermining the capacity of the land to keep producing this way indefinitely. The amount of greenhouse gas emissions involved, the pollution from fertilisers, the impacts on pollinators from harmful pesticides, the massive amount of soil loss and fertility decline, they're all undermining the basis of the existing agricultural areas. And they're leading to declines in yields in some places and causing significant cost to human health and ecological health, especially to all of those really poor labourers all over the world that have the most immediate interaction with the land.

Will - Is it as simple as the fact that we have enough land, but it seems that the meat is bearing the brunt of how much is being used. And if we didn't do that, we'd have far more to play with.

Racheal - Absolutely. We need to talk about reducing the overall amount of land that we're demanding, and there's no way we can do that in the future with population growth if we don't actually try to change how much meat that people are consuming. And the other issue is we're not just talking about reducing demand overall. We're actually just talking about reducing the growth in demand because demand just keeps growing and growing and growing disproportionate to population. So it's not the amount of people that's the problem, it's their levels of wealth and their changes in their diet based on urbanisation and access to supermarkets. And also just different advertising. Because of advertising and because of misinformation, people think that they need a lot more protein than they actually do. And I've actually worked with nutrition professors on this before, and we found that if you just decrease the amount of protein that you were consuming by 25% and shifted just 25% of that remaining protein away from animals to plant-based products, you could cut the amount of emissions that the American population was contributing to through their food consumption by 40%. So these are small changes that are not going to leave somebody hungry. We're not talking about them going completely vegetarian or vegan. These are small changes that they can make that will make a massive, massive difference. And all of that would also reduce water use, which is really important in the context of climate change. When access to fresh water will be decreasing in many areas, we're currently wasting about a third of all of the food that we produce. So we just need to get smarter about reducing food waste at that consumption and in our own homes, but also at the level of supermarkets and throughout the whole supply chain.

Will - So all of these problems are huge and global and all encompassing. <laugh>, I don't want to put you on the spot here, but what on Earth do we do about it in terms of where the food is made? How much of the land is used? What on Earth could we begin to do about it?

Racheal - These things might sound so big that they're overwhelming, but you can look at it from two different perspectives. You can look at it from the individual perspective, and I don't want to rule that out. I mean, individual consumption choices can make a difference. And I think most importantly, they make a difference in terms of our own cultural change, our own awareness and our own comradery, and the movement that we're building as individuals to care more about the planet and to care about what we're consuming. But I do think a little bit too much attention is paid to that labour and not enough is paid to the other kind of broader structural factors that are involved in creating these problems. First of all, for example, if you're talking about companies in the supply chain, if you actually pay attention to what retailers are doing and regulate those processes better, or focus on greater transparency about their sourcing rules, then all of a sudden you could walk into a supermarket as a consumer and only be faced with options that are sustainable. You know, that would be a much better situation than being overwhelmed with all the information and not knowing which products contribute to deforestation or which ones have very high methane emissions embedded in them, et cetera. You know, which ones are not paying a living wage. We need to take that onus, that burden away from every individual person by tackling these things at the level of the supply chain. But then you can kind of abstract more and more and talk about how we are even designing our economic systems and our food systems? And we need to talk about that. So many of our sustainability challenges come down to the same underlying causes, which is that we've not prioritised fairness and justice in our economic system. And we've for too long really gotten hung up on metrics like GDP growth and overall consumption. And we're not paying attention to things like, what is their actual wellbeing? How happy are they? And so I really think that a lot of this comes down to transformation. Transformation of our economies, transformation of our cultures. A lot of economists now are finally <laugh> questioning decades and decades of classic economic thinking. But in the Amazon where I work a lot, you also have Amazonian scientists and practitioners and policymakers calling for socio bio economies, which is designing the economies in the food systems and the Amazon are around justice, diversity and around welfare. So it's about actually thinking, what do we want out of the land? What do we want out of the economies? How can we build on the diversity and value that we already have in our amazing ecosystems and our amazing countries and design something that works better? And so of course you have to take incremental steps, get there, but I think we need to start talking about that. What do we actually want out of this system? Not just how do we tackle food supply? How do we tackle climate change? How do we tackle biodiversity independently, but how can we change things in a way that really gets its synergies for all of those and doesn't just boil down to solving one problem in one minute location, and then displacing it to another.

This issue remains complex, but the way forward is there. But it will take all of us, at all levels of the production and consumption chain, to be willing to change for the sake of current and future generations. And so I put some of the points discussed in this show back to Martin Lines, and asked what he thinks we need to consider going forward too.

Martin - We have a landscape that can produce enough food for 10 billion people. We have more than enough landscape, but we need to be sensible about what we choose to produce and where we choose to produce it. We are currently choosing to produce a lot of our vegetables and fruits in other countries where we could do it here. We're bringing in their water resource in a depleted southern Europe. Why are we not looking around at what we could produce well in the UK? And then what may we need to bring in from other nations and think about how we trade those products?

Will - And that kind of implies a certain dietary shift that we should perhaps be more open to.

Martin - I really think we do and I often hear from lots of people, we must stop eating meat. And I'm saying actually we need to eat quite a lot less meat, but we need the right animal in the right place doing the right job. If you want enhanced grass, meadows and beautiful areas, they need to be grazed or managed. What's the point of starting a tractor up to mow a Meadow when I can put some animals on and then sort of get the biodiversity in the insect life that works with animals. So we've got to get them win-wins and work out how we get the right amount of livestock in the landscape to deliver the right outcomes and fertilise the soil where we grow our food from.

Will - And deliver that equally to the people who need it the most in a minimally wasteful way. That sounds like, it sounds like common sense.

Martin - Yeah. And if we look at the figures, we're wasting up to 40% of the food we produce. That's kind of crazy. In the processing system, how much we throw away. And then as consumers, we buy two for one and then don't eat it. Bread that goes off. We have huge waste and we really need to sort of only buy what we need, concentrate on where there is waste, making sure it gets recycled in a system that can put fertility back in the ground, but we should only buy what we need to eat.

Will - As a farmer on the front line, what is your advice to the general public who are hearing this and might be concerned?

Martin - Really think about what you eat. Where's that food coming from? Can you change your diet a little bit to be more seasonal? So we are only eating what's really available at the time and think about where that food comes from and make sure the packaging, the label is, respectful of where it's been produced. So there's a truth and honesty around whether it is a local produced or a regional produced product at the time of year that it's an abundance.