In response to the Ukraine crisis, Europe is sidelining key sustainability goals to ensure food security. Anne Charlotte Bunge, PhD student at the Stockholm Resilience Center, explains how our food security is faring in the midst of multiple crises and how we should respond both acutely and in the long term. An interview about the importance of resilient agriculture and a plea for pulses in a sustainable diet.
We are in the midst of a major planetary health crisis. Planetary health describes the state of health of human civilization and the surrounding environment on which it depends. Human and planetary health are strongly interrelated.
The current agriculture and diet, especially in the western world, is contributing significantly to the destruction of our environment. If we want to solve both crises, a change in the food system - from production to consumption - is an important approach.
What does the current food crisis look like? Why is the war in Ukraine fueling it?
There is currently a lot of talk about a 'current' food crisis, which is theoretically true. But it's not as if Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and then we suddenly had a food crisis. Of course, this was preceded by a long process.
Our current global food system is unjust at all levels. This is why the crisis affects countries differently. My research focus is on food systems in Scandinavia. Here, as in other Western countries, we are confronted with higher food and energy prices and the resulting inflation. Fertilizers are becoming scarcer and, above all, more expensive.
The situation is very different in countries of the global South: The food systems were already very weakened in previous years. There have been repeated price increases since 2011. Agriculture is often confronted with unpredictable environmental disasters and the resulting crop failures. In areas that are already dry - this also applies to some Mediterranean countries - there are more and more areas that can no longer be used for agriculture due to water shortages caused by long periods of drought. Many African countries are particularly dependent on wheat from Russia and the 'breadbasket' Ukraine. The disruption to supply chains has led to acute famine there.
Egypt, for example, imports 90 percent of its wheat from these two countries. There are also other supplier countries: the USA, Canada, the EU. So why is Egypt dependent on grain from these two countries? This is due to our socio-politically very unjust world system. Poorer countries are dependent on cheap wheat imports. The EU, on the other hand, can afford grain from the USA or Canada. We also produce grain for our own consumption.
The food supply has always been affected by crises. What is new is that the current crises are interlinked, mutually reinforcing and thus intensifying each other.
The director of the World Food Program, David Beasley, put it very aptly: Environmental disasters, the corona pandemic, rising prices and the disruption of supply chains from Ukraine and Russia as the icing on the cake have created the 'perfect storm'.
How did Europe react?
A major achievement of the EU is the Farm2Fork strategy from 2020 as part of the Green Deal. This set out the halving of pesticide use in the EU and the protection of biodiversity - both of which are essential in order to secure food supplies in the future. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, various interest groups have tried to undermine these goals. Their main arguments are, firstly, yield: "We need to produce as much food as possible now." And secondly: "Organic farming needs more land for the same yield (this is true per se), so conventional is better."
In response to the Ukraine crisis, some EU countries - including Germany - have temporarily jettisoned some of these Farm2Fork strategy goals. Food security for the future is currently not very politicized.
What does global agriculture currently achieve that sustainable agriculture perhaps cannot?
It can produce mass through large-scale monocultures and the use of pesticides and fertilizers. The credo: when food is scarce, we have to rely on mass production. The fact is, however, that this type of agriculture is not crisis-proof, is highly susceptible to extreme climate events and the food supply cannot be maintained if supply chains are cut.
However, there is no food shortage in Europe! There is also no global food shortage, but food is distributed unequally.
For example, the production of animal-based foods (especially red meat) requires an enormous amount of resources. 80 percent of cultivated land is used for this purpose. However, animal foods only contribute to 18 percent of the calories consumed globally and only 37 percent of protein requirements(Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Science). An absurd ratio!
This is currently not emphasized enough in the public debate.
What ad-hoc solutions are there that can mitigate the current crisis without sidelining sustainable development?
Scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research propose three key measures for the EU to mitigate the acute crisis while ensuring human health and long-term sustainable development:
- The livestock must reduced so that grain can be consumed directly by humans rather than as animal feed. If the EU reduced its demand for feed grain by a third, we could compensate for the shortage of grain and oilseeds from Ukraine, according to estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
- Less animal-based food. To achieve this legume cultivation and consumption must be be greatly expanded. This will reduce our dependence on fertilizers and gas from Russia, while at the same time producing large amounts of calories and protein.
- The food waste must be drastically reduced must be drastically reduced. 30 percent of the food we produce is wasted. We simply cannot afford this in the current situation or anywhere else. Wheat that remains unused in the EU accounts for around half of Ukraine's wheat exports.
Other measures include a fund to help farmers switch production and a different way of taxing food. In Germany, for example, vegetables are taxed more heavily than meat. This needs to be reversed. Environmental and social costs should also be taken into account in order to reflect the real price of products.
A corresponding action plan for decision-makers was signed by over 600 high-ranking scientists within just a few days in March 2022. A clear sign of where we are heading!
Why is resilience important in food production?
Resilience plays a role in various disciplines. Materials research always asks which material is most resistant to weather, storms, etc. In psychology, resilience means that we can cope well with stress or bad events.
There have always been crises and disasters. They are an inherent part of our society and planet Earth. Therefore, food systems must also be more resilient.
On the one hand: How can agriculture manage to make soils climate-ready or create alternatives with polycultures in order to better cope with crop failures of one variety? On the other: How do we share food fairly? How can we avoid disrupting supply chains?
What do safe food systems look like?
In times of crisis, it is often the small farmers who are responsible for the food supply in their area. Both in Western countries and in the Global South, we are suddenly dependent on alternative, small-scale food systems, local food producers such as organic food or community-supported agriculture. Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, such concepts have experienced a major upswing in Europe.
In some African countries, it has been shown that local small-scale farmers react more flexibly to crop failures or climate disasters as they can organize themselves more easily. Women in particular are currently creating new communities and looking for alternatives to wheat. Many initiatives are also supported by the World Food Program. Unfortunately, small communities have too little power at a political level, which is why their approaches are not implemented on a large scale.
So how do we manage to transform the food system?
In order to achieve the transformation towards sustainable food systems, we need above all fair structures. The 'North-South divide' must be eliminated. We must listen to climate and environmental research in order to secure the food supply in the global South.
Five agricultural groups (the four so-called ABCD companies plus the Chinese company Cofco) currently control the majority of global grain distribution and thus the distribution of animal feed. Many farmers are dependent on their specifications. By redistributing subsidies to small farms, we preserve local supply instead of promoting a few large companies, which in turn exert more power on politicians to advance their own, often profit-oriented interests. However, the Common Agricultural Policy - the EU-wide support and development program for agriculture - still largely works this way.
And on the nutrition side?
A drastic reduction of animal-based foods in our diet!
It would be better to follow the Planetary Health Diet, which uses far fewer resources. Pulses are real power crops here: they don't need artificial fertilizers because they are nitrogen suppliers for the soil and excellent sources of nutrients. When we talk about interrupted supply chains, we know that pulses can be dried or canned for decades.
Many farms specialize in meat production. For many, a changeover seems almost impossible, especially in a short space of time. What is your answer to this?
We talk a lot about intergenerational justice in the context of climate change, but hardly ever about the fact that our food systems also need intergenerational justice.
All the decisions we make now will have an impact on food security in the future.
At the moment, we are allowing ourselves to use even more land for even more animal feed in order to maintain the same level of meat consumption. We are accepting that even more soil quality and biodiversity will be irretrievably lost. This is at the expense of future generations, whose food supply we are massively endangering.
It is not just about insufficient quantities of food, but also about the fact that food production will become more and more expensive: artificial pollination due to insect mortality, increasingly poor soils that yield less, etc.
Politicians really need to think about this. A lot of things are actually laid down in our laws: Debt maximums in our financial laws, brownfield sites for biodiversity, etc. Many things are simply being 'repealed' at the moment. Nobody knows how future generations are supposed to cushion all of this.
Eating habits are formed in childhood. What advice would you give to someone who likes to eat meat five times a week? Where do you start?
The best thing we can do as a society is to offer children sustainable food in schools and get parents on board.
What advice would I give to someone who has 60 years of taste experience behind them? I would try education and also apply the 'nudging principle': People who are not interested in nutrition may not even notice when more sustainable food is on the plate in public institutions, hospitals, etc. The public sector can certainly achieve great things in society.
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