Why the world needs renewable food

The future wellbeing and survival of civilization rests upon a single, fragile assumption: that there will always be sufficient food.

If the assumption fails, even in part, catastrophe will sweep the globe in the form of regional famines, refugee tsunamis, the fall of governments, civil and international wars. Any history book can tell you as much – only now we have eight times the population that endured these horrors in the past, multiplying the danger eightfold.

Food is the blind spot of almost every government on the planet. They just assume there will always be sufficient to keep society going, despite the fact that, in two world wars, millions starved in Europe and Asia. They are deeply ignorant of the tottering edifice that is modern industrial agriculture, or its frailty in the face of resource exhaustion, eco-collapse, global poisoning, global heating and geopolitical upheaval.

Climate: Taking just one of these factors, a new paper in Nature estimates that climate-driven harvest losses will knock 18-41 per cent off the average person’s nutritional intake by 2100, with the worst effects among the poor and people living in the tropics. However, successful adaptation by farmers in key foodbowls could offset these losses by up to a third. (Harvest losses in 2100 are estimated at 14-28% for wheat, 12-28% for corn, 22-35% for soybeans and >6% for rice.)

Agriculture is vulnerable to the droughts, floods, storms, heatwaves, fires and other weather impacts of a heating planet. However, the industrial food system also churns out 30% of the greenhouse gases which heat the Earth - making a major contribution to its own demise.

Soils: Every year, farming dislodges 24 billion tonnes of topsoil, which is lost into rivers and blown away by wind, to ultimately end up on the ocean floor, where it will never grow food again. This amounts to 3 tonnes of soil lost to feed every person on the planet, every year: for example, just feeding you today will cost the Earth 8.2 kilos of lost soil. Society is loath to recognise that industrial agriculture is an unsustainable machine that destroys the very resources on which it depends.

Farming doesn’t just shed soil, however. It also degrades what’s left. Many people don’t realise that the modern high-yield cropping systems that fill our supermarkets are in reality a form of mining: the use 180mt of fertilisers and 5mt a year of pesticides over time strips the soil of precious micronutrients and nutrient-cycling organisms. The result has been a serious decline in nutrition worldwide along with a rise in diet-related disorders like heart disease, cancer and diabetes – the big killers of our time.

Currently, around 40% of the world’s farming soils are degraded. At present rates, the UN GEF forecasts, that by 2050 man-made degradation will affect 95%. (Fig 1). Magnifying the crisis, human numbers will reach 9.8 billion, demanding a third more food. Together these forces will place intolerable strains on industrial food production, driving it headlong to collapse in many regions.

Figure 1. Global soil degradation in 2050. Sources: UNEP, UNCCD, GEF

Water: The world is running out of water to grow food and sustain our cities. 70% of the world’s available fresh water is now used to grow food. On average, irrigation yields around 40% of the world’s total food supply. However, with the dramatic growth in megacity demand, fresh water supply is critical in many places around the globe.

Acute water stress now affects half the planet’s population, growing more dire with the each passing year. Major cities – such as New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo Tokyo, Mexico City and Jakarta – face grave water shortages. However, cities can afford to pay more for their water than farmers, so the market ensures water scarcity quickly becomes food scarcity.

Figure 2. Water stress in 2050, will affect food as well as domestic supplies.

Growing food is the most water-intensive thing we do: it takes 50-100 litres to supply the average person’s daily drinking, washing and cooking needs. And it takes 2000-5000 litres of water to supply their daily three meals. World water scarcity is thus likely to drive hunger, even more than thirst.

Half of all the water used on farms comes from groundwater, which is declining in every country on Earth where it is used to grow food. This presages future shocks to both food and water supplies.

Farming ecology: the ‘cradle of life’ that supports farming in every country is in serious trouble as a result of aggressive land-clearing, mechanisation, overuse of toxic chemicals and fertilisers, loss of pollinators and pest-eaters, soil structural decline and other factors. This is recognised by many farmers worldwide, who are desperately trying to develop a ‘regenerative agriculture’ that safeguards its own environment while producing clean, nutritious food. However, the world’s main science effort is enslaved to giant chemical corporations, more concerned with profit than food. Consequently, ‘regen farmers’ and organic growers receive far too little support from academia or science in developing a sustainable food system – and the giant industrial food machine lumbers on down the road to ecological collapse.

Fragile food chains: All the world’s cities have one thing in common: not one of them can feed itself. All are supported by tenuous industrial food chains that typically snake for 2000-3000 kilometres across nations, continents and oceans and round the planet. These chains are easily snapped by floods, wars, pandemics, oil crises and politics, emptying supermarket shelves within 24-28 hours. In the modern food supply system, a megacity can starve in under a week. Anyone who lived through Covid may recall times when various food chains failed.

Combined threats: Food also provides a chilling instance of the synergy between the massive threats created by humans to our own future. Not only does climate change threaten food production directly – but it also amplifies the loss of topsoil, the scarcity of fresh water and collapse of agroecology, multiplying all these threats. And the conversion of farmland to desert that results, releases more carbon from the soil, accelerating climate change.

These threats to world food security are completely interlinked, meaning they cannot be tackled one at a time. Together they threaten system of food production that has fed humanity for 10,000 years – but, with population growth, can plainly no longer do so.

So what is the answer, you may ask?

Renewable Food

The solution to the looming world food crisis is the same as for the energy crisis. Renewable food is the analog to renewable energy – with the salient different that it will create far more jobs, more opportunities, new enterprises, new wealth and new industries. It will restore health to both landscape and a sickening society.

In brief, renewable food will feed everyone on the planet, healthily and reliably, by recycling the water and nutrients now used to produce food by agricultural or aquacultural means. At present these are mostly thrown away in the most colossal act of waste in human history.

There are three main pillars to a renewable world food supply:

1. Regenerative farming, now being pioneered by innovative farmers worldwide, which aims to prevent the damage caused to the food system by industrial agriculture and improve the health, safety, freshness and nutritiousness of food.

2. Urban food, produced by recycling the water and nutrients currently discarded in urban waste, sewage and drainage systems, using technologies such as hydroponics, aquaponics (fish and vegetables), aeroponics, plant, animal and microbial cell cultures, food printers, entomoculture etc. These urban methods can reduce by up to 90% the amount of land and fresh water required to feed our cities, while providing them with a fresh, healthy, climate-proof food supply sufficient for all, in all countries.

3. Deep ocean aquaculture of marine plants and animals, grazing and carnivorous fishes on large rafts located in the deep oceans where currents remove all waste and nutrients are pumped up from the deep ocean to irrigate seaweeds (algae) at the base of the food chain. Unlike coastal fish farms, deep ocean farms do not pollute or destroy wild ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrass beds. This is a relatively new technology and requires rapid development.

Each of these pillars is potentially capable of supplying a third of the world’s food needs on a renewable basis – unlike the present corporatised food chain, which devours itself. By locating them in or close to big cities in all countries, they can enable every nation to grow adequate food for its own citizens without depending on imports from food-rich countries. This will end hunger and, to a large degree, help to end poverty.

Renewable food has two other major benefits that nobody talks about: it can prevent most wars and it can also end the 6^th Extinction of life on Earth.

Over the past century, two thirds of all wars, civil and international, have been fought over food, land and water. It follows that eliminating food insecurity is the best way to reduce the tensions that fuel conflict, making renewable food the most powerful ‘weapon of peace’ on the planet.

Second, replacing industrial agriculture with renewable food will free up almost half of the planet for rewilding and this, in turn, will help end the 6^th Extinction. This can be achieved through a globally-funded Stewards of the Earth scheme, diverting part of the world’s present $2.1 trillion military spend into restoring forests, grasslands and wetlands employing indigenous people and former farmers.

Renewable food thus offers practical solutions to a wide range of threats to the human future – including food insecurity, global heating, eco-collapse, global poisoning, conflict, hunger, refugeeism and poverty.

It is high time the world began to sit up and pay attention, if it does not wish to starve.

• Julian Cribb is the author of two international science books on the food crisis and renewable food: The Coming Famine (2010) and Food or War (2019)