Environment and Food

Colin Sage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781134229000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This timely book provides a thorough introduction to the inter-relationship of food and the environment. Its primary purpose is to bring to our attention the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections between what we eat and how this impacts on the earth's resources. Having a better idea of the consequences of our food choices might encourage us to develop more sustainable practices of production and consumption in the decades ahead.

Although human societies have, over time, brought under control a large proportion of the earth's resources for the purpose of food production, we remain subject to the effective functioning of global ecosystem services. The author highlights the vital importance of these services and explains why we should be concerned about the depletion of freshwater resources, soil fertility decline and loss of biological diversity. The book also tackles some of the enormous challenges of our era: climate change – to which the agri-food system is both a major contributor and a vulnerable sector – and the prospect of significantly higher energy prices, arising from the peaking of oil and gas supplies which will reveal how dependent the food system has become upon cheap fossil fuels. Such challenges are likely to have significant implications for the long-term functioning of global supply chains and raise profound questions regarding the nutritional security of the world's population. Taken together the book argues that a re-examination of the assumptions and practices underpinning the contemporary food system is urgently required.

Environment and Food is a highly original, inter-disciplinary and accessible text that will be of interest to students and the wider public genuinely interested in and concerned by the state of the world's food provisioning system. It is richly illustrated with figures and makes extensive use of boxes to highlight relevant examples.

Introduction

Why Environment and Food?

Eating, more than any other single experience, brings us into a full relationship with the natural world. The act itself calls forth the full embodiment of our senses – taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. We know nature largely by the various ways we consume it. Eating establishes the most primordial of all human bonds with the environment … (it) is the bridge that connects culture with nature …

(Rifkin 1992: 234)

No area of concern demonstrates the difficulty of managing the contradictions of the food system as clearly as the environment.

(Goodman and Redclift 1991: 202)

If, according to Wendell Berry, “eating is an agricultural act”, then by extension it is also an ecological act. What we eat and how we eat has more impact on the Earth than almost anything else. Yet we have shown little interest in this connection until recently, when terms such as food miles, carbon footprint and Fairtrade have come into wider public discourse.

The basic biological necessity for all human life – the essential physiological requirement that we all share – is the need to eat. Historically, the kinds of food that we ate and the style in which it was consumed reflected a host of social, cultural and geographical factors. The past 100 years, however, have probably witnessed a greater transformation in the foods we eat than at any time since the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, when hunting and gathering gradually gave way to farming. During the twentieth century, significant changes gathered pace, initially in North America and Europe but spreading quickly to other societies around the world, involving a greater convergence in dietary practices with marked consequences for food production methods and for human health.

With respect to the former, the application of scientific methods and industrial technologies dramatically altered the scale and productivity of farming and food processing. Established practices in rearing animals and cultivating crops; the sourcing, processing and distribution of agricultural produce; and the purchase, preparation and consumption of food were all fundamentally transformed. This was to have a significant impact on the environment: on landscapes, soil and water resources, biological diversity and the global climate system. As regards human health, food is now cheaper in real terms and more readily available (for those with the means to purchase it) than ever before. But the ubiquity of highly processed, cheap and convenient foods is driving rising levels of diet-related diseases and associated risk factors (cardio-vascular, diabetes, obesity) on a global scale (Hawkes 2008).

We have arrived at a point where food has become a highly contested arena of competing paradigms (Lang and Heasman 2004). In the realm of production, some commentators insist that the “application of agricultural and food system science has been one of the great success stories of mankind”. Fresco goes on to remind us that, since the 1960s,

(W)orld population has doubled while the available calories per head increased by 25 percent. Worldwide, households now spend less income on their daily food that ever before, in the order of 10–15 percent in the OECD countries, as compared to over 40 percent in the middle of the last century. Even if many developing countries still spend much higher but declining percentages, the diversity, quality and safety of food have improved nearly universally and stand at a historic high.

(Fresco 2009: 379)

These have been remarkable achievements to date, of that there is no doubt, particularly for those of us in the high-income countries of the world, as well as for increasing numbers of urban residents in middle-income countries who, on the whole, enjoy a privileged position within the global agri-food system. Clearly, science has played a major role in helping to feed the world, as the green revolution demonstrated (Godfray et al. 2010). However, if agricultural and food system science is such a success story, as Fresco argues, “because of the collective capacity of humankind to adjust to the lessons learnt”, then this would appear to be a vital moment to take stock of the shortcomings and weaknesses of the current global agri-food system and remind ourselves of the following.

• Reliance upon the market as the sole effective mechanism for the supply and demand of food requires every individual to possess the capacity to buy. Such a mechanism cannot ensure equitable access to food, nor can it guarantee the provision of even basic nutrition for all. An estimated one billion people in the world are experiencing hunger and malnutrition because of their lack of entitlements through which to express a demand for food.
• In a context where international food policy appears no longer fit for purpose, the profit-seeking behaviour of food companies encourages them to promote those snack, convenience and confectionary products that are high in salt, sugar and fat. It has been suggested that over one billion people in the world are overweight or obese and susceptible to a range of diet-related diseases (Lang et al. 2009).
• The declining share of food in the household budgets of consumers does not reflect the true economic, social or environmental cost of its production, distribution and consumption. What we pay for food at the supermarket checkout does not take into account the loss of ecological services, the depletion of resources, the impairment of Earth system processes, and the rising medical costs of poorer human health.
• Calls for a doubling of food production to meet rising demand from a growing, more urbanised and possibly more affluent global population must not result in more of the same kinds of productivity-driven science and technology “solutions”. Rather, questions of delivering global food security with sustainability will require new approaches that can ensure appropriate developmental, environmental and social justice outcomes (Pretty et al. 2010).

So, in a context where the world produces enough food for all at historically low prices, the global food system has created unprecedented numbers of underfed and overfed people. And at a time when it has recently been shaken by growing volatility of food prices, with severe impacts for the world’s poor, it is confronted by a number of serious challenges, including the prospect of growing freshwater scarcity, a tightening of energy markets and greater climatic perturbance.

Food and the Environment

There is now sufficient evidence and scientific consensus around the phenomenon of human-induced climate change, with warming of the climate system now regarded as unequivocal (IPCC 2007). According to a report produced for the European Commission, what we eat has more impact on climate change than any other aspect of daily life, accounting for 31 per cent of the global warming potential of products consumed (Tukker et al. 2006). One category of foods that records the greatest environmental impacts across a range of categories is meat and meat products, with livestock production accounting for 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet projections that talk of doubling demand for food by 2050 assume that consumption of meat will continue to rise sharply in rapidly developing economies as an inevitable aspect of the nutrition transition (Popkin 2006). With around 40 per cent of global meat production supplied by factory farms, increasing volumes of cereals and oil seed crops are being grown for livestock feeds, and account for at least one-third of total global grain output.

Agriculture accounts for around 86 per cent of global freshwater consumption and it has been estimated that one person alone might eat up to 5000 litres of “virtual water” per day, depending upon their diet, represented by the evaporation and transpiration associated with growing crops (Hoekstra and Chapagain 2007). Yet freshwater resources in some regions are seriously depleted, and raise questions about the appropriateness of water-intensive farming systems in dry countries producing export crops for distant markets.

Recent events have also revealed the degree to which the agri-food system has become entangled with global energy markets. In every aspect – from farming, through processing and manufacturing operations, to retail and to the point of consumption – the modern food system rests upon an abundant, low-cost supply of energy that is overwhelmingly provided by fossil fuels. Natural gas provides the feedstock for fertilisers, while oil is used to drive farm and other plant and machinery; is transformed by the petrochemicals industry into a wide range of packaging materials; and, critically, underpins the everlengthening supply chain that brings foods from all over the world to our local supermarkets. Concerns about rising energy prices and a belated realisation of the extent of our dependence on petroleum have resulted in a significant expansion of biofuel crops that compete with food crops for arable land.

Sustainability and Food

These brief observations should indicate that the perspective taken in this book is a good deal less celebratory of agricultural and food system science than conveyed by the above quote from Louise Fresco (2009). This is not to deny the evident achievements of scientists and farmers to increase food output, but to make clear that we need a more holistic framework through which to evaluate the performance of the agri-food system than the adoption of singular “productivist” criteria such as output volume or yield. It is in this regard that the notion of sustainability has emerged as a framework capable of conveying important underlying principles across the biological, economic and social realms. One of the essential requirements of sustainability is to maximise goal achievement across these three realms through an adaptive process of trade-offs, a process that must necessarily be place-and time-specific. Consequently, it is not possible to reconcile sustainability with the kinds of scientific and technological “blueprint” created in the private or publicly funded research facilities of the North with the intention of rolling them out across the developing world. Striving to improve productivity is important, but so is achieving other system properties, such as stability (of output or prices); resilience and durability (abilities to withstand and recover quickly from such events as drought or crop pests); social justice and equity; and adaptation, among other things. At this stage, a detailed understanding of the notion of sustainability is not required – we will return to it at the beginning of chapter seven – but we can at least draw up some simple rules.

First, a sustainable food system must be able to demonstrate that it can optimise agricultural output without compromising the stock of natural resources and ecosystem services. However, it needs to move beyond that, extending through all subsequent stages of processing, manufacturing, distribution and retailing, to the point of consumption. Second, each stage of a sustainable food system must endeavour to minimise the use of non-renewable resources (such as fossil fuels), ensuring that the utilisation of renewable resources (such as wild capture fisheries) is within their capacity to regenerate stocks. Third, a sustainable system must reduce waste streams to a minimum and aim to bring pollution levels to within the capacity of ecosystems (the atmosphere, streams, rivers and estuaries) to deal with and neutralise these wastes (a process known as remediation). Finally, a sustainable food system is also committed to the principle of social justice, which means working to ensure the achievement of food – and, indeed, nutritional – security for all.

The notion of sustainability possesses markedly different meanings for different actors depending upon their position within the agri-food system. It is unlikely that a dairy farmer in Western Europe shares the same understanding as the CEO of a large food-manufacturing company, or that of a city-based office worker who buys their food from a supermarket, let alone an agricultural migrant worker toiling in the fields for below legal minimum wages: all will have quite different perspectives on what a sustainable food system looks like. Yet, if sustainability is to have any real meaning at all, that is, beyond the rhetoric of corporate “greenwash”, then finding ways for farmers, farm workers and other food producers, as well as consumers and civil society actors, to have a voice in shaping the rules and principles of the food system will be vital.

It is apparent that, since the rise of the modern agri-food system after 1945 (discussed in chapter two), there has been a relentless squeezing of the public into the category of “consumers”. Under the cover of a continuous and heavy barrage of advertising, consumers have had their attention refocused onto individualised concerns for convenience and low price. This has not only led to the exclusion from the mainstream of other food quality criteria (its sensual attributes, nutritional value, production methods, sourcing and traceability), but has allowed corporate interests to dominate the food system. This has left little room – at least until recently – for the majority of people to make more profound judgements about their food beyond narrowly circumscribed choices between competing brands. It has also created the legacy of a “knowledge deficit” in which scientists and policy makers assert a monopoly of wisdom over such things as genetically modified organisms on which the “average citizen” is regarded as uninformed.

With retailers especially anxious to resolve the contradictions of the food system on behalf of their customers (“How can meat be sold so cheaply if not produced under excessive stocking densities?” “Trust us: it’s farm fresh quality assured”), we have come to take for granted so much of what our food system does. As beneficiaries of the in-store cornucopia, we have learnt not to ask questions, not to know too much, about the way in which our fillets of meat or green beans end up in polystyrene trays covered in a thin film of polymer. We are actively discouraged from peeking behind the curtain that conceals the production methods of the modern food system, and our sensibilities are easily disturbed by unwelcome news of practices associated with intensive animal farming, children in distant countries picking coffee or cocoa beans, or gangs of migrant labourers closer to home collecting field vegetables, salad crops or shellfish. While the contemporary food system frees most of us from toiling for our food beyond the task of pushing a trolley around the supermarket, it has also removed a significant degree of personal responsibility. We have learnt to accept the retailers’ refrain that what we really want is cheap and convenient food.

Or have we?

There is increasing evidence that many people are choosing to take back some of their power from the corporate food system, to recover a degree of food citizenship. Developments, particularly throughout North America and Europe during the past two decades, have seen a variety of initiatives aiming to achieve a more sustainable food system characterised by a greater degree of relocalisation. There are many different aspects of this phenomenon, some of which are described in chapter seven, but among the most successful has been the growth of farmers’ markets as sites for the retailing of ostensibly local products. Although there may be a number of different, locally contingent factors that underlie specific initiatives, there appears to be some common denominator around a desire for food that embodies different quality attributes (fresher, healthier, tastier); that is associated with a producer or someone who can speak on behalf of its authenticity; and that promises to carry less environmental impact. Above all, there has been a desire to recover food that is not only traceable and trustworthy, but also good to eat; food that is culturally, as well as physiologically, nourishing.

Focus and Structure of the Book

Before describing the organisation and structure of the book, I should explain something of its geographical focus. The intention in writing this book was to be as global as possible in its approach, reflecting the fact that the world today is criss-crossed in supply chains carrying agri-commodities from distant sites of production in poor rural regions to the supermarket shelves of affluent cities. In telling this story, there is potential for a great deal of “thick description”, a narrative that would illustrate much of the detail of labour practices, production methods and consumption choices, but this is better done elsewhere (e.g. Cook 2004). Rather, the intention here is to outline some of the wider implications of this global system, and so specific examples here are, on the whole, briefer and more concerned with environmental and, potentially, systemic consequences.

Given that fish provide less than 1 per cent of the overall caloric intake of the world’s human population, and less than 5 per cent of total food protein (Pimentel et al. 2008), it was decided to focus in this book on terrestrial – that is land-based – primary food production. Although aquacultural (fish farming) systems are growing rapidly in number and capacity, until recently fish consumption was largely met by harvesting wild populations (capture fisheries). The serious decline in wild fish stocks is now generally well known and represents a classic example of the unsustainable exploitation of a commons resource, where technological capacity (high-endurance factory ships) has outstripped biological capability (the reproduction of stocks). Although there is a brief illustration of aquacultural systems in chapter three, the scale and systemic importance of agriculture and its food derivatives remains the primary focus of this text.

Throughout the book, I generally use the terms North and South as shorthand to refer to the rich, powerful and generally liberal democratic states of what was once called the first world; and to those parts of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Introduction: why environment and food?
• Chapter 2. The global agri-food system
• Chapter 3. The agro-ecology of primary food production
• Chapter 4. Global challenges for food production
• Chapter 5. Final foods and their consequences
• Chapter 6. Rethinking food security
• Chapter 7. Towards a sustainable agri-food system
• Chapter 8. Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index