Sustainable agriculture is paramount to global prosperity

As the world’s largest sector, the food industry accounts for around 10% of global GDP¹ employing over one billion people². The widespread adoption of farm machinery, high-yielding crops and synthetic fertilisers in the 1960s has allowed for increasing food production to feed the world’s rapidly expanding population.

Although this mass industrialisation of the global food system has fuelled economic development and globalisation, the productivity gains have come with enormous costs – from climate change to food waste, wellbeing to biodiversity loss, water unavailability to inequality. Today’s global food system is no longer a viable model for the world population's long-term needs. While this presents an enormous global challenge, it is also an immense opportunity for sustainable innovation.

Soil degradation

Soil presents one of the most important risks, and opportunities, for the sustainability of our planet. Fertile soil is one of the few natural renewable resources available to us, with the capacity to store more carbon than you would find in vegetation and the atmosphere combined³.

However, as a result of large-scale intensive farming practices over the last 60 years, the world’s soil has been eroded faster than it can be replenished, releasing significant amounts of stored carbon in the process. If current practices continue, the world’s top soil – where 95% of food is grown – is on course to be completely drained of fertility within the next 60 years, depriving us of both the world’s most essential source of nutrients and an important carbon store⁴.

Biodiversity loss

Between 2000 and 2010, 73% of global deforestation was caused by the need to make room for commercial agriculture⁵. More than 50% of all human calories come from just three plants: rice, maize and wheat, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). This means we rely on a slender thread of genetic diversity⁶. This becomes particularly worrisome if a vulnerability to changing climates arises or a new pathogen strain emerges, as the lack of genetic variability could leave the entire crop at risk.

Antimicrobial resistance

Even if the impact of climate change is limited and yields are bolstered, the excessive use of antibiotics in animal farming means they are becoming less effective as pathogens develop resistance to treatment. This leaves humanity vulnerable to new, highly resistant super bacteria that we’ll be unequipped to medicate. The inefficacy of many antibiotics against previously treatable diseases is already killing 700,000 people per year, and this is predicted to rise to 10 million by 2050⁷.

Food waste

Of the edible food produced, an appalling third is uneaten. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that the equivalent of six garbage trucks of food are wasted every second⁸. Nearly one tenth of the greenhouse gas emissions in the West are released growing food that will never be eaten⁹. And still, 11% of the world’s population is malnourished⁸. What’s worse is that the world’s nearly one billion hungry people could be nourished on less than a quarter of the wasted food in the US and Europe alone⁹.

The United Nation’s global food security report found famine was rising again in 2017¹⁰. Jarringly, the same report exposed the alarming rise in obesity; 815 million people are malnourished while more than 700 million are obese.

With the global population expected to reach nine billion by 2050, agricultural productivity must increase by over 60% if we’re to be fed – stretching our unsustainable agriculture industry to its very limits².

Fortunately, the shift to technology-enabled, environmentally-friendly, sustainable farming is already well under way.

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Source and reference

1. Do the costs of the global food system outweigh its monetary value, World Bank Blogs, June 2019
2. Food, Agriculture and Decent Work, FAO’ Statistical Yearbook, FAO, 2012 [PDF, 2.77MB]
3. Soil Carbon Storage, Nature Education, 2012
4. The world needs topsoil to grow 95% of its food – but it's rapidly disappearing, The Guardian, May 2019
5. Living planet report, Aiming Higher: 2018, WWF, October 2018 [PDF, 15.19MB]
6. No Time to Wait: Securing the future from drug-resistant infections, WHO, April 2019
7. Cities and Circular Economy for Food, Ellen Macarthur Foundation, January 2019
8. Waste: uncovering the global food scandal, Tristram Stuart, 2009
9. State of the food security’, FAO, 2019
10. Hexagon, HxGN AgrON Auto Steering
11. Croda, agrochemicals
12. Chr. Hansen, Good Bacteria

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