West’s ‘dust bowl’ future now ‘locked in’, as world risks imminent food crisis
By: Nafeez Ahmed
Tags: Environment, Climate Change, News, World, Food

And this wouldn’t just affect poor countries of the Global South, but would increasingly impact richer, industrialised nations. The Climatic Change study finds that “some parts of Europe, South-East Asia, USA and Russia” will be “seeing an increase in the population at risk of undernourishment.”

In other areas, the situation will be much worse. For instance, “most of South America and Africa, Australia and central Asia will see 50 percent or more of the population at risk of undernourishment.” Although not as bad in some Western countries, food security will be a rising issue:

“For example, Australia and the UK, both showing significant undernourishment by 2050, have projected population increases of 50 and 23 percent respectively for 2050 whereas crop (wheat) production for these countries will decline significantly due to unfavourable climate conditions (60 and 16 percent declines reported for Australia and the UK respectively).”

Even in the US, where wheat production could initially increase over the next few decades by 24 percent according to this model, production will be exceeded by “a 40 percent population growth” that will strain food supplies.

Food systems at the crossroads

While some of the longer-term climate impacts outlined by the Four Twenty Seven report are now unavoidable, what of these other projections? How much can we change, and how much can we avert?

Most experts agree that it’s not yet too late to change the way we produce food around the world in a way that can lead to a more stable and resilient system. Even if various impacts kick in, we may be able to ensure that their fallout is minimised. But doing so requires fundamentally re-thinking our relationship with food, and the planet.

According to Sara Walker of the World Resources Institute, one of the quickest and most effective areas where we can act is in relation to food waste. One third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. Some of this happens along the supply chain; a lot of it in the West happens at the point of consumption. According to the Rapid Transition Alliance, in North America, 58 percent of food wastage occurs at consumption, compared to just 6 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. But in the latter, 36 percent of waste occurs in storage and handling, compared to just 6 percent in North America.

A quarter of all water used for agriculture is expended on wasted food. If food waste was eliminated this alone would go a huge way toward shoring-up stability across the food system and meeting the needs of the most vulnerable.

Walker also recommends that we need to “shift diets to less water-intensive foods. These are generally the same foods suggested for healthy diets — it’s about being more plant based.”

And she calls for governments and companies to invest in more sustainable farming practices designed to “restore soils to hold more water, capture rainwater for reuse, use drip irrigation, and choose crops suitable for the growing area.”

Some of these changes come under the umbrella of ‘agroecology’, which attempts to apply ecological principles to agriculture and a regenerative approach to natural resource use as well as the social and economic contexts of production.

A recent paper in Nature Climate Change found that regenerative farming practices can contribute to help drawing down carbon from the atmosphere, sequestering it in and restoring soils — by as much as 30 percent a year of the global mitigation needed to remain within 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

Last summer, the UN’s Committee on World Food Security released a major report from its High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE), calling for agroecological methods to be pursued as the key to sustainable food systems.

“Food systems are at a crossroads,” the report warned. “Profound transformation is needed to address Agenda 2030 and to achieve food security and nutrition (FSN) in its four dimensions of availability, access, utilization and stability, and to face multidimensional and complex challenges, including a growing world population, urbanization and climate change, which drive increased pressure on natural resources, impacting land, water and biodiversity.”

At the report launch in Rome, HLPE Project Team Leader Dr Fergus Sinclair told attendees that change is urgently needed to avoid crisis: “Unless we have a major transformation of food systems that affects what people eat and how it is produced, transported, processed and sold we are not going to solve current problems.”

We haven’t even touched upon many other critical elements of the crisis: such as the catastrophic decline in bee populations among other pollinators, which according to the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is driven by a combination of intensive industrial farming practices, including mono-culture (growing one crop in one area, as opposed to cultivating crop mixtures or rotating different crops), excessive pesticide and fertilizer use, pollution and climate change; or soil erosion under industrial practices, which by 2050 may by itself reduce up to 10 percent of crop yields according to the FAO; or the declining efficiency and increasing production costs of fossil fuel inputs into industrial agriculture, which is not only driving carbon emissions to dangerous levels, but means that industrial agricultural production is bound to becoming increasingly expensive and inefficient over time.

The mounting evidence on the coming global food crisis demonstrates how ineffective and piecemeal our current approaches are. We still think and act in entrenched disciplinary and sectoral silos, and even our scientific assessments are extremely narrow — largely capable of focusing on only one dimension of the crisis at a time, and incapable of comprehending their synergistic consequences.

When viewed together it’s clear that the coming decades will see escalating converging pressures on the global food system which will increase the probability of breakdowns year on year — and this will be the case even as we attempt to transition to something better.

The transition to sustainable agroecological methods means much less emphasis on machines and fossil fuels, and more emphasis on people. A study in November published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems by a team of US food science experts, calls for recognition that “fossil fuel- and chemical-intensive management” must be replaced “with knowledge-intensive management.”

Translation: this means that “the greatest sustainability challenge for agriculture may well be that of replacing non-renewable resources with ecologically-skilled people, and doing so in ways that create and support desirable rural livelihoods.”