Beyond productivism versus agroecology: lessons for sustainable food systems from Lovins’ soft path energy policies

Half a century ago, the world faced a seemingly insurmountable energy crisis. Demand for energy was rising in lockstep with economic growth. Supply was predominantly from exhaustible resources (oil) bound to rise in price through time. And nuclear power, once thought too cheap to meter, was too costly to build and dreaded by the public. Today, we face a similar challenge in agriculture. Demand for food and other agricultural products is rising with population and economic growth. This growing demand is met by supply that is encroaching on the last remaining fertile lands (causing tropical deforestation) and using high inputs of water, nutrients and pesticides (depleting freshwater resources and polluting the environment) (Tilman et al 2001). And geneticallymodified food, a technological breakthrough, is dreaded by a large section of the public. In 1976, Amory Lovins proposed a ‘soft path’ for meeting the energy crisis (Lovins 1976), as a radical alternative to the business-as-usual ‘hard path’ solution of meeting rising energy demand through reliance on ‘rapid expansion of centralized high technologies to increase supplies of energy’. Lovins’ approach differentiated between energy and energy services. We need energy services, which are the end benefits of energy use such as cooling, lighting, and hot water. Their consumption depends on how effectively we utilize the service and how efficiently we convert energy into the services demanded. Lovins advocated three fundamental pillars for energy policy: (a) promote energy efficiency—which means we would need less energy to provide the services (heat, light, etc.); (b) promote energy conservation—lowering the energy services needed per capita; and (c) invest in renewable energy—which is a sustainable resource, unlike the exhaustible fossil energy resources that have fuelled economic growth since the industrial revolution. Through producing and using energy services more efficiently we could meet our needs using locally sourced and environmentally friendly renewable energy (Lovins 1976). Lovins (1976) warned that ‘it is important to recognize that the two paths are mutually exclusive.because commitments to the first may foreclose the second, we must soon choose one or the other. ’ Some ‘soft path’ ideas have since been applied to water systems (Gleick 2003) and could equally provide insights to our current food system challenges (Ramankutty et al 2018). About 800 million people remain undernourished today and nearly 2 billion suffer from micro-nutrient deficiencies. At the same time about a third of food produced is wasted and agriculture is one of the greatest environmental threats. Indeed, there is an ongoing vociferous debate (often termed ‘productivism versus agroecology’) regarding the best solutions, with some scholars arguing for a sustained focus on productivity improvements through new agri-food technologies such as precision agriculture and genetic engineering, while others argue in favour of food sovereignty and a transition to alternative farming systems using agroecological methods (Fraser et al 2016). Numerous global assessments have already shown that a hard-path strategy focussed on increasing food supply alone will be insufficient to meet our food system challenges (e.g. Foley et al 2011, Erb et al 2016, Springmann et al 2018). While a transition to alternative farming systems can have many benefits (Garibaldi et al 2017), they also entail important trade-offs such as lower yields and higher food prices (Ramankutty et al 2019). At the same time, it has been shown that demand-side solutions have great leverage (e.g. West et al 2014). In fact, demand-side solutions have an amplifying effect that is often unappreciated in food system sustainability discussions (figure 1). When per-capita food demand is reduced,