With our planet's population due to peak at around 9 billion by the middle of this century, how we are going to feed ourselves is a major issue.

Sustainably feeding this number of people is not impossible, even just using land already under cultivation, but this will only be the case if we extend the use of best farming practices and address issues of poverty and inequality, to ensure that food is distributed equitably. See, for instance, this article by scientist Colin Tudge. We will also need to avoid diverting large areas of land to producing bio-fuels and reverse the trend towards using more and more land to grow crops to feed intensively farmed livestock, when that land could be used to feed far more people directly.  Finally, we need to act quickly to limit human induced climate change, which if it continues unchecked is likely to reduce the amount of land available to agriculture and reduce the productivity of much of the rest.

To address the issue of the need to shift the balance of our diet away from consuming large quantities of meat and dairy products, Friends of the Earth has launched the Food Chain Campaign, aimed not just at changing people's eating habits, but also at getting changes to legislation and subsidy regimes, which currently encourage intensive and unsustainable systems of meat and dairy production.

Best Farming Practices

There is a widespread fallacy that to maximize food production requires mono-cultures, with high levels of mechanization and high levels of input - of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc.  This is not the case.  Highest levels of productivity, from a given area of land, are achieved by complex systems that integrate a variety of crops and animals, in a balanced way that actually reduces the need for inputs and is also much more sustainable.  What highly mechanized, high input, simplified farming systems are good for is maximizing profit, by massively reducing labour costs.  

Not only do industrial farming systems not make optimum use of the land, in terms of maximizing food production, they are also based on concentrating land ownership in the hands of a few rich farmers and, increasingly, big corporations. This concentration of land ownership and the limited demand for labour in such systems increases inequalities, reduces millions to poverty and contributes towards the inequitable distribution of the food that we do produce.  Feeding people is therefore intimately connected to the issue of land reform.

This does not mean that there is no role for appropriate mechanization and some use of external inputs, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc, but the best farming systems only need such inputs on a more limited scale, to supplement the recycling of nutrients and the biological control of pests and weeds that can achieved by working sensitively and skillfully with natural systems, rather than against them.  Far from being primitive and outdated, such systems are actually far more scientific, in the way that they exploit our growing understanding of complex natural systems.

Finally, there is probably also a case for producing some things in more industrialized, high tech glasshouse systems, but such systems are unlikely ever to prove the most effective way to meet most of our food needs and even this kind of system can benefit from things such as mixed cropping and encouraging natural predators, as a way of controlling pests.

The Food Chain Campaign

Although the potential is there to feed 9 billion people, in a sustainable way, we cannot do so if more and more land that could grow crops to feed people continues to be diverted to growing crops to feed livestock.  What is more, the increased demand for land that intensive meat and dairy production creates is also driving accelerated clearance of forests.  This leads to accelerated loss of bio-diversity and vital "eco-system services"; and leads to yet more CO2 being released into the atmosphere. This further accelerates climate change, which further threatens our ability to produce enough food. This is compounded by the fact that cattle, in particular, are also a major source of methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

Particularly severe environmental impacts are caused by the production of soya for cattle feed, which now provides the bulk of the protein fed to intensively farmed livestock in the UK.  This summary report, produced by Friends of the Earth Cymru, goes into much more detail about these impacts. 

Intensive livestock production also has major implications for marine bio-diversity, in that a large proportion of the catch from already overexploited fish stocks is diverted towards producing fishmeal, for animal feed, an even more wasteful use of resources than feeding animals on grain and soya.

Friends of the Earth's new Food Chain Campaign focuses on the twin issues of the need to reduce our consumption of meat and dairy products and, more specifically, on the need to address the environmental impacts of intensive production systems.  

The targets of the campaign are two fold.  In part the campaign is aimed at getting people to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products, which would also have health benefits; however, the campaign is also aimed at getting changes to legislation and subsidy regimes, to promote a shift away from unsustainable, intensive livestock production and towards more sustainable systems.  Such a shift would have additional public health benefits, as well as environmental ones, due to the way that current intensive systems provide a breeding ground for diseases (e.g. variant CJD, salmonella, etc) and because of the reliance that much intensive production places on the routine inclusion of antibiotics in animals' feed, something that promotes the development of resistant strains of disease organisms.

Friends of the Earth are not calling on everyone to become a vegan, since some land is more suitable for grazing than for growing crops; and livestock has an important role to play in many of the more productive, mixed farming systems that we would favour.  Whether people give up meat and dairy entirely is more an individual moral decision, but we certainly do need to reduce the proportion of meat and dairy in our diet and a move away from intensive systems would also, in itself, have positive implications for animal welfare.

What about GM?

GM technology, which exploits new technologies to transfer genetic material from one species to another, has been promoted as having a big role to play in feeding an expanding world population, by allowing the creation of novel new crops able, for instance, to tolerate higher levels of salt in the soil, or with higher resistance to drought, or able to make more use of increased fertilizer input.

The claims made for GM are seductive and some of us would not discount GM technology having some role to play in improving crop yields in the future (others would); however, the kind of best farming practices already described could meet our food needs without resort to GM technology and this technology undoubtedly needs to be treated with a great deal of caution. Of particular concern are the dangers posed by the potential for totally unexpected effects, if novel organisms are introduced into ecosystems, or created by genetic transfer to wild relatives of genetically engineered crops.  Enough damage is already caused by naturally occurring species being accidentally, or deliberately introduced into areas where they have not previously been present and the potential for unexpected consequences is even higher if we introduce organisms that are entirely new to nature.

The other big issue with GM technology is who controls it and to what end?  The technology is currently being promoted by the big agro-chemical and seed companies and is being used to produce new crops that only reinforce the kind of farming systems that we don't need.  Crops that are resistant to proprietary herbicides, for instance, to allow greater use of herbicide, rather than developing more sustainable systems for controlling weeds.  

The technology has also been used to strengthen the hold of the seed companies, by introducing genes to make second generation seeds sterile, preventing farmers from keeping a small proportion of this years crop for next years planting and instead forcing them to buy expensive new seed every year. What is more, by encouraging and stimulating the spread and intensification of the kind of farming that relies on a very limited range of crops and crop varieties, the way that the technology is currently being used is contributing to a loss of bio-diversity, which might otherwise provide valuable genetic resources for developing truly useful new plant varieties, whether via traditional breeding techniques, or by using GM technology.

At the very least, we need a moratorium on the introduction of GM crops, with a thorough, independent, case by case risk assessment, based on the precautionary principle, before any relaxation of that moratorium.  We also need to address the issues of who controls the technology and what it is to be used for.

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