A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10 trillion of benefits a year, improve human health, and ease the climate crisis
A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10 trillion of benefits a year, improve human health, and ease the climate crisis: article about new research from the...
A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10 trillion of benefits a year, improve human health, and ease the climate crisis: article about new research from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (I guess this title was too wordy for Tildes!)
With less food insecurity, the report says, undernutrition could be eradicated by 2050, with 174 million fewer premature deaths, and 400 million farm workers able to earn a sufficient income. The proposed transition would help to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and halve nitrogen run-offs from agriculture.
Overall, they estimate the costs of the transformation at between 0.2% and 0.4% of global GDP per year.
...
[This report] estimated the hidden costs of food, including climate change, human health, nutrition and natural resources, at $15tn, and created a new model to project how these hidden costs could develop over time, depending on humanity’s ability to change. Their calculations were in line with a report last year by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which estimated off-books agrifood costs at more than $10trillion globally in 2020.
Dr Steven Lord, of the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, said in a statement: “This analysis puts a first figure on the regional and global economic opportunity in transforming food systems. While not easy, the transformation is affordable on a global scale and the accumulating costs into the future of doing nothing pose a considerable economic risk.”
Sharing because it seems like important news about the current state of the world's agriculture system and good news about the viability of sustainable food systems, though thus far I've only read the brief Guardian article about it. Thanks for the heads up about it over on /r/Permaculture.
I sometimes wonder if our governments or communities should be a lot more paternalistic when it comes to food. Lately I've been thinking about the history of our food production systems and how it...
I sometimes wonder if our governments or communities should be a lot more paternalistic when it comes to food. Lately I've been thinking about the history of our food production systems and how it has grown as a result of greed, both on the part of the consumers and producers.
Let's take sugar for an example. People like sweet things. At first we ate fruits. Then we learned how to domesticate bees so we could safely use them to produce honey. But that wasn't scalable enough, so when we figured out sugarcane and sugar beets we tried to do everything to grow them. But they're too dependant on specific weather, so we started making sugar from corn instead. Oil has a simelar progression; we went from cream and butter to olive oil and then have found ways to turn just about anything into oil. But it's still not enough, so we are deforresting to create oil palm plantations which produce much more oil. Now when you look at the amount of oil being produced the numbers are insane.
I don't know what to say. Just please eat your vegetables. It makes a big difference. It helps your own health as well as the health of the planet.
A couple notes after reading the brief report: Most of the report explains the concept of true cost accounting rather than discussing the agriculture system in general--though information about...
A couple notes after reading the brief report:
Most of the report explains the concept of true cost accounting rather than discussing the agriculture system in general--though information about the system and some of the current "true costs" are shown in various charts throughout.
I had expected the true costs to be environmental, but I am surprised to see that so many of them are related to unhealthy diets. Hopefully the full report details what exactly this means.
An example: The USA subsidizes the bejezus out of corn. There's a bit of an upper bound to how much cheap unprocessed corn people want to eat and is reasonable to feed to animals. But processing...
An example:
The USA subsidizes the bejezus out of corn. There's a bit of an upper bound to how much cheap unprocessed corn people want to eat and is reasonable to feed to animals.
But processing that cheap corn into high-fructose corn syrup? Now you have a cheap, incredibly unhealthy, alternative to sugar that you can find in damn near every packaged good on the planet.
If corn wasn't so subsidized, high fructose corn syrup would not be as viable as a product, and the price of both it and sugar would go up, making things like soda less viable in return.
And extrapolate that trading excesses on the global market, and those unhealthy patterns propagate.
A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10 trillion of benefits a year, improve human health, and ease the climate crisis: article about new research from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (I guess this title was too wordy for Tildes!)
...
Some related links:
The State of Food and Agriculture 2023 main page
The full report PDF
The brief/summarized report
Trillions in hidden costs of agrifood systems revealed by Oxford research contained in UN report
Sharing because it seems like important news about the current state of the world's agriculture system and good news about the viability of sustainable food systems, though thus far I've only read the brief Guardian article about it. Thanks for the heads up about it over on /r/Permaculture.
I sometimes wonder if our governments or communities should be a lot more paternalistic when it comes to food. Lately I've been thinking about the history of our food production systems and how it has grown as a result of greed, both on the part of the consumers and producers.
Let's take sugar for an example. People like sweet things. At first we ate fruits. Then we learned how to domesticate bees so we could safely use them to produce honey. But that wasn't scalable enough, so when we figured out sugarcane and sugar beets we tried to do everything to grow them. But they're too dependant on specific weather, so we started making sugar from corn instead. Oil has a simelar progression; we went from cream and butter to olive oil and then have found ways to turn just about anything into oil. But it's still not enough, so we are deforresting to create oil palm plantations which produce much more oil. Now when you look at the amount of oil being produced the numbers are insane.
I don't know what to say. Just please eat your vegetables. It makes a big difference. It helps your own health as well as the health of the planet.
A couple notes after reading the brief report:
Most of the report explains the concept of true cost accounting rather than discussing the agriculture system in general--though information about the system and some of the current "true costs" are shown in various charts throughout.
I had expected the true costs to be environmental, but I am surprised to see that so many of them are related to unhealthy diets. Hopefully the full report details what exactly this means.
An example:
The USA subsidizes the bejezus out of corn. There's a bit of an upper bound to how much cheap unprocessed corn people want to eat and is reasonable to feed to animals.
But processing that cheap corn into high-fructose corn syrup? Now you have a cheap, incredibly unhealthy, alternative to sugar that you can find in damn near every packaged good on the planet.
If corn wasn't so subsidized, high fructose corn syrup would not be as viable as a product, and the price of both it and sugar would go up, making things like soda less viable in return.
And extrapolate that trading excesses on the global market, and those unhealthy patterns propagate.