Farming for the future

Recently, I overheard two students in the Library Café discussing the potential effects of climate change on what we eat. “Could you imagine? I mean fish and bananas, yuk!” They were referring to a recent news article proposing that climate change will affect our crop production to the extent that we will have to start replacing the potato in our diet with bananas. I didn’t think any more of this conversation until the next morning when I opened the paper to the headline “Climate change threatens coffee crops”. Clearly this is not a good week for food. Forget the displacement of millions of people, an increase in severe weather events and the associated loss of life. Losing 60% of our coffee? Now that’s serious.

Certainly, agriculture was a reoccurring theme at the London Climate Forum, which was hosted on Imperial’s campus last weekend. Agriculture will not only be severely affected by climate change but it is also a major contributor to the warming of our planet in the first place. At least 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture; for every one kcal of food we produce we consume nine kcals of fossil fuel.

For every ONE kcal of food we produce we consume NINE kcals of fossil fuel

Speaking at the forum Duncan Williamson, senior policy advisor for food at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), described agriculture as “the biggest environmental problem on the planet” and stated that “the global food system is doing untold damage to our environment”. It is true that many farming practices are huge contributors to the build-up of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Add to this the amount of carbon released when forests are cleared to make room for farmland and it’s clear that we cannot sustain our current farming methods, not without doing untold damage to the environment anyway.

There is one huge problem that we have in trying to combat this. By 2050 the world’s population is predicted to grow to around 9 billion, an increase of 2 billion people over the next forty years. Hunger and malnutrition are still the number one risks to human health worldwide, posing a greater threat to human life than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. In fact, as I am writing this article there are at least 925 million undernourished people in the world. We can’t even seem to feed the world’s population as it stands, let alone 2 billion more.

Whilst a lack of coffee may seem trivial in comparison to world hunger — and let’s make no bones about it, it is — the loss of coffee production serves to highlight serious knock-on effects that climate change is likely to have on global agriculture. And it’s more serious than a lack of morning caffeine fix. The export of coffee is crucial to the economies of countries such as Brazil and Ethiopia. So, the fact that coffee is a highly climate-dependent crop means that an increase in global temperature of just a few degrees could put the livelihood of the millions of people that grow and produce it at serious risk.

Crops aren’t the only aspect of our food systems which are set to change due to global warming, as pointed out by Trewin Restorick, the CEO of independent environmental charity Global Action Plan. In a speech discussing the current state of climate change and sustainability he proposed that businesses around the Indian Ocean are having to adapt to the effect that climate change is having upon marine life. As the ocean is warming tuna are swimming lower down in the ocean and are consequently more difficult to catch. Whilst this may be good news for tuna, it certainly isn’t good news for a number of global economies.

It’s not all bad though; there are solutions that could help us to feed more people whilst also doing less harm to our environment. After all, the objective of the London Climate Forum was not to cast gloom and doom but instead challenge us to think about the ways in which climate change can be prevented and ultimately overcome.

This is where a talk given by Duncan Williamson (senior policy advisor for food at the WWF) and Ed Dowling (Founder of Sustaination) provided some valuable insight. In fact, the good news is that there are too many possible solutions to write about in this article. One solution that seems particularly interesting, especially to us London-residing students, is the creation of urban food systems. As Ed pointed out, “when you’ve got more than 50% of the world’s population living in cities it makes a lot of sense to grow food there as well.” Community and rooftop gardens will reduce the amount of miles that our food travels and subsequently the amount of greenhouse gasses produced in its transport.

Watching what we eat is also going to be an important factor in reducing the effects of agriculture on our environment. Eating less meat is certainly a way to consume less fossil fuels whilst also feeding more of the Earth’s population. We already produce enough food to feed roughly 11 billion people, so considering that the world is home to around 7 billion people we should have enough food right? But the fact is we don’t. Many of the crops that we grow end up feeding livestock instead of people. Not only does this mean that we still have starving people in the world, it also considerably contributes to climate change. Roughly 25 times more energy is required to produce one calorie of beef than to produce one calorie of corn. With roughly 2 billion more people to feed by 2050, it’s time we started reconsidering our global food system.

So, as much as I jest about the prospect of a life without coffee, and I’ll be honest I’m still reeling from that one, London Climate Forum was a serious statement. That our press should need to threaten us with coffee withdrawal and chips made from bananas to get us to engage with climate change is absurd. Fittingly, as I finish this article the newspaper sports a picture of climate change protesters in St Andrews. They hold a sign reading “Nature doesn’t do bailouts”. Time to re-focus on climate change? I think so.