This is a guest post by Robin Saluoks, co-founder and CEO, eAgronom, an agriculture-focused climate tech company from Estonia that helps farmers adopt sustainable practices.
No matter which population prediction you think is most accurate, one thing is seemingly for certain: Earth’s population will get bigger before it gets smaller, even if population growth is currently slowing down. And one thing is for certain: all those people need to be fed.
Feeding more people means scaling food production, and scaling food production necessarily means more land, water, greenhouse gases, and waste. It’s essential that this scaling happens in a sustainable way, one that won’t undermine the green progress agriculture has already made. In other words, how we scale food production is not only paramount to the survival of billions of people, but to our planet.
The United Nations predicts that global population could reach 9 billion by 2037 and eventually peak at 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s. Even with fertility rates set to fall below the replacement rate by the end of the century and the median age continually rising in the meantime according to the Pew Research Center, there’s no getting around feeding this growing population in the short or long term. Food production will need to scale accordingly.
Significant progress has been made in recent years in the field of green agriculture and farming methods, particularly on the technological side. But even that progress hasn’t reversed the significant problems we face within food production and supply right now. Earth has roughly 50 million square kilometres of farmland, billions of acres of which have been destroyed or abandoned in the last 50 years alone due to soil degradation, desertification, pollution, and erosion. Across the planet we’re seeing longer and more severe droughts, to say nothing of increased water source contamination. Soil degradation, native plant extinction, and the failure to preserve seeds are all pressing issues.
The issue of scaling is necessarily connected to land use. We need more farmland to grow more food to feed more people. Simply clearing more forests to create farmland is neither a sustainable nor intelligent solution. Doing so would effectively undermine the soil restoration and reforestation efforts of the last decade and beyond.
Much of these efforts, it bears mentioning, have been led by farmers. Farmers are working on the ground floor of not only food production but sustainability itself, and are crucial in implementing and maintaining green methods and tools. These include carbon sinks, low-use drip irrigation, soil restoration, agroforestry, and carbon credits. But we can’t rely on farmers alone, nor can we rely on any one group in the food industry. Green changes on the consumer level are not enough, nor is a top-down bureaucratic approach sufficient.
Just as population growth is a group effort, scaling food production to meet those needs should be too. We cannot allow farmer-led efforts to be negated by increased land clearing, nor by the waste and emissions that accompanies food production scaling. The measures that must be taken to feed our growing planet are the very measures that could effectively cancel out what sustainable progress farmers and farms have already made.
Part of the reason for this is that scaling issues extend far beyond the soil, the land, and the farm. Waste is an enormous problem; more food means more waste at the consumer level, particularly plastic and packaging waste. Emissions created by supermarkets and uneaten food waste already account for nearly ten percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The methane this wasted food creates in a landfill, combined with the excess nitrogen emitted from croplands is a harmful combination for our planet.
Add to this the aspects of food production outside traditional crop agriculture, like dairy and livestock. Animal agriculture fuels deforestation, pollution, and habitat destruction. Beyond that, livestock has to be fed, and more demand for meat means more demand for grazing land. And moving all this food, whether animal or plant, through the supply chain is no small strain on resources. 19 percent of the calories consumed worldwide are already internationally traded, and global food miles already make up 20 percent of food-related carbon emissions.
Expand this proportionally – in other words, scale it to the future – and there’s no denying that we’re bound to wholly negate what green progress has been made several times over. Preventing that will be a multi-tiered and international effort. Simply put, it is not enough to feed the planet, we also have to keep the planet alive and able to feed us.
This begins with national initiatives and global cooperation as it relates to land use. This isn’t just about cropland, but includes forest, environment, and wetland protection measures that act as natural carbon sinks. Beyond this, farmers need private- and government-funded scientific cooperation at the highest level to improve and further develop soil health, irrigation tactics, and native crop use. Prioritising land restoration across entire continents is also essential.
Outside of hard science and on-the-ground work, we need to overhaul the carbon offsetting credit system. Credits should be tied to wetland and forest protection measures by addressing high-risk land and forest areas. A new approach to carbon offsetting would go along with insetting, which is to say that when food producers feel external pressure to reduce their carbon footprint, they’ll turn to low carbon inputs from farmers. This has the potential to change the entire industry.
Farmers need to be involved in every step of this process – all the bureaucratic and international collaboration in the world means nothing without them. Discussions involving scientists, economists, and farm machinery manufacturers, for instance, shouldn’t happen without farmers too. Farmers are the ones who have made the green progress so far, and it’s their progress that is being threatened to be totally undermined by food scaling needs. In other words, we do this with the farmers and we do it together, or we all go under.
