World Resource Institute report on a “Sustainable Food Future” — My takeaways.

I read the “Creating A Sustainable Food Future” report by the world resource institute last year and was amazed by the clarity and depth of the 80-page report. Similar to the IPCC report, it is a synthesis of hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and intergovernmental reports. Here I try to share some of the insights in a non-technical way. I order the take-aways in the following three categories: Status Quo, future stresses and response strategies. Additionally, I share a personal thought at the end of the article that I felt confronted with while engaging with the report.

Status Quo:

• Agriculture is the number one cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss worldwide.
• Currently, half of the fertile land on the planet is used for agriculture. Two-thirds of this area is used for animals such as cattle, sheep and goats. Together these animals account for half of the emissions in agricultural production. Yet even in countries like the US ruminant meat only provides 3% of the calories.

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• “The large global rise in consumption of animal-based foods is both unnecessary and unhealthy. Half of the world’s population already consumes 50 percent more protein than needed and, contrary to popular understanding, plant proteins can readily meet protein requirements in balanced diets that contain enough calories.”
• Smallholder farmers (Farms with a size less than two hectares/0.2km²) only makeup 12% of agricultural land but provide 35% of the worlds food.
• The practice of flooding rice fields is the source of 10% of all global agricultural production GHG emissions. But to be fair rice also produces 20% of all calories consumed worldwide.

Future Stresses:

• The report is based on the assumption that there will be close to ten billion people by 2050. Based on current trends such as increased standard of living in many parts of the world and the associated changes in diet, the report projects that meat consumption will increase by 88% between 2010 and 2050.
• So if we take our current system to provide demanded food to all humans it would have devastating consequences. Almost all forests would have to be cleared for agriculture, thousands of species would go extinct and the 2°C goal of the Paris agreement would be missed even if all emissions from all other sectors would be entirely eliminated.
• Many countries plan to increase the amount of area used for bio-fuels, some even 4-fold. Going from this premiss biofuels would only provide 2% of energy needs by 2050 but increase the food gap (the difference between the amount of food we can produce and the amount of food needed) from 56 to 78 percent. Bioenergy poses an unnecessary competition for farmland and forests since a hectare used by a solar farm can provide 100 times more usable energy than a hectare used for energy crops.

Response Strategies:

• The reports state that theoretically, we could provide for all current and future (10 billion) human beings without the need to cut any more forests or improve the productivity of the land or invent anything new. It would just entail that almost everyone consumes a mostly plant-based diet grown from plants with high calorific value, no food is wasted, and everyone eats only as much as they need to meet their nutritional demands. They continue to state, that this would be highly desirable but by their estimations “unrealistic”. I personally think we should aim for that scenario as much as we can and use it as a guiding star, but prepare for an insufficient execution.
• If we want to provide for everyone with the land that we have we can also increase the efficiency of the yield per area of land. Over the last 60 years, we could successfully do so as shown in the graph. But in this time breakthroughs such as the widespread use of fertiliser and using scientifically bread seeds occurred and moreover the amount of land that is irrigated was doubled. But being able to keep this trend alive would not be enough, we would have to get more productive at an even faster rate than we did over the last 60 years. This approach is highly dependent on yet-to-be-proven or even invented technologies and thereby hold a lot of risks. Mentioned in the report are technologies such a precision farming, where fertilisers or treatments are used much more focused through the use of cameras and software in tractors or pills that make cows produce less methane when they burp and fart.

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• Many approaches suggested are less reliant on technology and are based around different practices such as Implementing more agroforestry, which means using land not for mono-cultures put several species including trees. This has been proven to work: Farmers in the Sahel-Zone have managed to regenerate trees in an area bigger than Denmark and additionally boosted the yields.

Agroforestry in the Sahel Copyright @ V. Bonneaud, CIRAD

My Opinion

If I look at the information laid out by the World Resource Institute and I accept that:

• Fertile land is a limited resource on planet earth,
• We are most likely gonna experience a population of ten billion people or more. And,
• Believe that everyone should have access to enough food.

I come to the conclusion that a plant-based diet poses a moral obligation for everyone who is able to feed themselves this way since the alternatives are:

• Accepting the risks involved in deteriorating even more forested areas and losing more biodiversity.
• Accepting the risk, that technology is not able to keep up evolving at the pace and magnitude required.
• Accepting that not everyone will have access to food.
• Accepting the risk for current and future generations in regards to climate change.