Instant Genius - Earth is heading for a food emergency. Can we stop it?

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Recent UN data tells us that currently 670 million people around the world are going hungry. There’s little doubt that food security is one of the most serious problems that the human race is facing. How have we reached this point of crisis and what solutions can we put in place to make sure everyone on the planet has enough nutritious food to eat without causing further harm to the environment? As part of our four-part miniseries, Future of Food, we’re joined by Dr Dave Chandler, a crop researcher and agricultural scientist based at the University of Warwick. He tells us how current global food production practices are one of the most significant drivers of environmental damage and biodiversity loss, how climate change is threatening our ability to grow fresh produce to put on our plates and details some of the current thinking on how we can ensure the future of food production worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized mass class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Recent UN data tells us that currently 670 million people around the world are going hungry. There's little doubt that food security is one of the most. serious problems that the human race is facing. How have we reached this point of crisis?

And what solutions can we put in place to make sure everyone on the planet has enough nutritious food to eat without causing further harm to the environment? In this episode, we're joined by Dr Dave Chandler, a crop researcher and agricultural scientist based at the University of Warwick. He tells us how current global food production practices are one of the most significant drivers of environmental damage and biodiversity loss, how climate change is threatening our ability to grow fresh produce to put on our plates and details some of the current thinking on how we can ensure the future of food production worldwide feeds us all. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you. Real pleasure to be here. So today we're talking about the future of farming and food production. So let's start with the basics. So what is the

current situation globally with food security. So a lot of people will think, oh, this is a problem for the undeveloped worlds, not the divert worlds, if that's the right way of saying it. But that isn't entirely true, is it? No, it's not. And food security is an important global issue. So, you know, today the figures from the UN say that there are over 670 million. people in the world who face hunger. Most of those are in sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia, but as you say, there are issues in the global north. So if you take our country, the UK, we've had food price inflation of nearly 40% in the last four years, and that is affecting people. Personally, I think that you can't separate calories from nutrition. So in this country,

we have a junk food system in which many people have poor quality diets. We have an obesity crisis that actually costs our NHS 11 billion pounds a year. It's a problem now, but it's going to get worse. I'm talking about food security here. You know, the human population is going up. It's projected to be 10 billion people by 2050. And there's a thing called a food gap, which is a difference between the number of calories that are produced now or that should use a baseline of 2010 so there's a gap

between the number of calories produced by farming in 2020 compared to the number of calories we need to produce in 2050 and that's a big gap and the estimate is that we'll have to increase food production by like 50% by 2050 and the scary thing is we have to do that on less land because a lot of ecologists tell us that We need to give between 30 and 50% of the planet over to nature to give us the ecosystem services that we need for our own survival. So you put it together, it's an existential threat. It's facing humanity.

So that's quite shocking, really, isn't it? Because a lot of us, especially like we say, we live in the UK, we just go to the supermarket, get plastic bags of food, go home, fine, cook it, fine. or, you know, what other ways people eat, maybe go to a restaurant. We don't think about it, really. But, you know, how do these crops come to us? How do they go around the world, you know? Because that's crazy.

You'll get a packet of, I don't know, broccoli, and it'll be said, it's grown in Sri Lanka or something. Yeah, there's this amazing global interconnected food system, which feeds us. it's highly successful, but it's also highly damaging. You know, the global industrialized extractive agricultural system is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss on the planet. So in feeding ourselves, we're also killing ourselves. And I'm not talking about British farming here, which is great.

I'm talking about things like destruction of the Amazon rainforest to clear the forest to produce land for cattle and soya for cattle feed or palm oil in Asia. Those kind of things that are highly, highly damaging. And there's also the issue of food miles. I think the food miles is actually a measure of the amount of

material moved combined with the distance. It's moved. But the latest studies indicate that food miles represent about a third of, or 20% I think of the emissions, greenhouse gas emissions for the food system, so it's quite significant. So I live in Bristol, and over here we have like a campaign, eat local.

How much of a difference does that make? It's complicated. It's complicated. I think local is good, but it's not always best. So, like, I do a lot of work, for example, on tomato crops. And some people argue that it might be better to buy tomato. grown in the Mediterranean where it's warm compared to tomatoes grown out of season in Britain where you have to heat them, for example. But then it gets more complicated because it depends

on where your energy source comes from heating. And many of our growers use green energy for production. And it depends on the production standards and the use of fertilizers and pesticides and those kind of things. I mean, it's also the type of. of food that is actually grown and produced. And so if you look at the environmental footprint or the carbon footprint of foods, they vary enormously. So like meat production is a lot more environmentally damaging than production of vegetables or fruit or pulses, for example.

I mean, beef production is the big one. I'm just looking at some figures now, which I pulled up yesterday. So to produce beef, it's greenhouse gas emissions for about 60 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilogram of product. But that's an average. If you look at beef production in South America, it's about 72 kilograms of carbon. For the UK, it's about 18 kilograms of carbon. So if you're going to eat beef, make sure it's British beef rather than beef produced in South America.

But if you really want to make a difference, then you will become flexitarian and you'll eat more pulses for your protein. So production of beans, that's one kilogram of CO2 equivalents per kilogram of products. So going around the houses here a little bit, obviously, but it's how food is produced, how it's moved and also the kind of the food that you eat, which all has to be kind of considered in the mix when you're deciding what you should have. And, you know, I would generally say that locally is best. I think most people agree that, but it's not always the case. You know, you're not going to, you live in Bristol. You're not going to buy bananas that are grown in Bristol, are you? So some things we have to import. Let's stick with that beef thing that you said. So is that sort of emissions question

due to the fact of just the pure farming or, as you mentioned earlier, the deforestation and the food crops that they're feeding them as well? Yeah, 100%. Yes. So if you look at, say, beef production in South America, the problems there are, number one, disruption of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the world. Forest is cleared to provide land for cattle, but it's also cleared to grow things like Sawyer, which is used as cattle feed. That situation has a much, much higher carbon footprint than beef production in the UK, where you're producing a lot of your livestock in open fields on grassland. So in our country, people often don't realize this, but about 70% of the land in

our country is used for agriculture and most of that is grassland like 65% of that is grassland and it's used for sheep and cattle and it's used for that because it's often not suitable for growing other types of crops. We've got a great climate in this country for grassland because it's wet basically. So you can see that we're using our farmers are using their land in the most appropriate way and often in the most environmentally beneficial way in terms of a farming perspective. You're talking about things like pulses, beans, and there's this sort of idea of keystone foods. So what are they?

And, you know, should we be concentrating on that to feed the world's population more, you know, rather than a sort of not necessarily obsession, but like some people are getting wealthier, they want to eat the prime products, the meats, etc. should we sort of take a step back from that and go back to the more traditional sources of food? Yeah, 100%. You know, as I said before, our global food system and what we eat is killing us and it's killing the planet and we need a whole scale change in what we do. The recommendations, for example, their Eat Lancet Commission came up with their latest

healthy, sustainable diet recommendations. And it's not, let's all become vegetarian, it's let's be flexitarian. Let's eat less meat and make sure that the meat we have is sustainably produced. So British beef, for example. And certainly we need to consume much more fruit and vegetables because those are the things that provide us with the fibre, which is essential for our health. And also the micronutrients that we need for our health. you know, we all know that in Britain we don't, on average, have our five a day.

We don't consume enough fruit and vegetables. So that's really important for our health. It's also important for our food security. So Britain is like about 65% self-sufficient in its food production overall. But when you look at these keystone foods, fruit and vegetables, we're only 53% self-sufficient for veg, even though we've got a fantastic climate for grown veg, and we're only 15% self-sufficient for fruit. And in fact, like, horticultural production represents only 1% of our agricultural land area. So I would say, I am biased, but I would say that the most important thing we can do in this country is grow more fruit and veg and support British farmers and growers. to produce high quality fruit and veg

because it will have a major positive impact on human health. So they're pretty surprisingly low numbers to me. That's the first I've heard of that. So how do we go about that? Are there any innovations in place that we can help the growers produce these important food sources? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's complex.

And anything to do with the food system is complicated because it involves politics, regulation, culture, diet, science, technology, ecology, the environment. And it affects every person on the planet because, you know, unless you photo synthesize, everybody eats, you know, food. So it affects all of us. So, you know, it's a policy thing. I mean, we've got the UK food strategy being developed by the government at the moment and the meat on the bones for that. If you forgive, the pan will come out. The detail will come out next year.

But one of the aspirations for the government is to increase British food security and increase the production of kind of fruit and vegetable crops. So growers need incentives. Most growers operate on really low, margins, it's really hard for them to make a profit. It's really hard for them to compete with production overseas, which is often delivered and produced at lower production standards. So it's things like the relationships of the supermarkets to the growers. It's also scientific R&D is really important. So if you look at the Netherlands, right? So the Netherlands is a really small

country. It's the size of Maryland in the United States. It's a tiny country, but it's a global agricultural powerhouse. It's one of the biggest food producers in the world, particularly for horticultural crops. And it does that because of policy decisions, which have their roots in actually in the post-war period and experience the Dutch population in the Second World War when they were literally starving. And so it's to do with food security, but it's also the fact that they have always invested in developing very good relationships between their farmers and growers and their research scientists to deliver them the science and technologies that they need to produce high quality, high yields of food. I personally, I think we need to be doing that in the UK,

because if you look ahead the next decades, you know, we live in a very uncertain world. We live in a dangerous century. People often say this is the most dangerous period in the whole of human history ever to be alive. And you look at geopolitical events that are occurring and combined with climate change and a biodiversity crisis, we need to address our food security really, really seriously. So, like, this is one of the things that keeps me as a food and agricultural scientists awake at night. Most of Northern Europe is heavily dependent on very small areas of the Mediterranean for a lot of its fresh produce, like it's tomatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers, all this healthy stuff, right?

Talking about the areas like Almorilla in Spain, where you get these big areas of polytunnels, they're growing in a desert, essentially, they're running out of water and it's getting too hot and it's getting increasingly untenable to produce. Personally, I think production is going to cease entirely in those areas within 15 years and then we're stuffed. you know, where are we going to get a lot of our fresh produce from? So we need to start planning now. You know, it scares me.

And I think we need to be planning in our food system for British food security, sustainable food security and sustainable production systems and doing it now because of the long leading times to get the infrastructure, the regulations, the science and technology all in place to meet the challenges of, say, 2050. day. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive

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Not necessarily. Okay. No, I mean, there's, it can be a lot of science and engineering. So we're talking about protected crops. So the advantage, you know, it says a name suggests you're growing plants, crops under protection. So that can be glass house, can be a polytunnel. You can get new types of polytunnel based on ETFE. And so glass absorbs ultraviolet light.

So it doesn't transmit all the daylight. whereas these new ETFE tunnels transmit all the daylight, and that can be beneficial in terms of improving, yeah, improving the nutrition of crops. So if you'll say, I don't know, growing a tomato crop under sunlight, the UV will kind of induce changes in the chemistry of the tomato. It's producing a sunscreen, in essence, and the metabolites that it produces are actually beneficial for human health. So you can get more sophisticated polytunnels.

And this thing about growing under protection, it's really important for the future. So we grow glasshouse crops, things like tomatoes, peppers in this country. These are Mediterranean-type crops that wouldn't normally grow outdoors in the UK. So we grow them in glasshouses. They're heated in the summer by the sun and enable us to grow them at the right temperatures. but Britain is predicted to have one of the biggest increases in heat wave events of any country in the world because of climate change. And now it's actually getting too hot in summer on occasions. And that is having an adverse effect on pollen production in things like tomatoes, which is leading to loss of yield.

So in future, our glass houses will not just have to heat crops. They will have to cool them. A lot of our fruit is already grown under protection, and in mainland Europe, they're growing things like apples under protection, like under canopies now, in order to protect them from extreme weather events like a hailstorm. So if a hailstorm happens and you're an apple farmer, a single hailstorm can wipe out your entire crop within 30 minutes, and then that's the end of your business. So I kind of predict that in the future, a lot more of our crops will be grown under some form of protection.

That's really interesting because sort of naively, you think we've, you know, human beings have lived for tens of thousands, so many years. And we've always eaten the food that's just grown naturally. It's a lot of work. Yeah. And now we're having to do so much.

Isn't that crazy? Yeah. I mean, it's societal changes. The thing that concerns me, along with everything else, is that the disconnect between people and where their food comes from. It's natural.

You know, I work in agricultural science, but I don't come from a farming background. You know, my family comes from the East End of London and, you know, we're not farmers. But I know about it because for various reasons, I've ended up doing this as a career, and I love it. But the connection between people where the food comes from is really, really, really important.

And we don't realize how hard it is to grow food. You know, the growers I work with, they have to be scientists, ecologists, environmentalists, business people, HR managers, technologists, engineers, you know, all wrapped up in one business. It's really, really hard. I think this is a really important point because a lot of times, especially in the sort of science area of the media, people talk about nutrition and things like that. but they don't talk about where the food actually comes from. I think we're really missing a significant point here. Yeah, no, I agree with you. And again, I mean, it's these things I was talking about earlier are involvement with the food system and food culture and all the rest of it.

We need to connect people where their food comes. We need to back British farmers. That's not to knock people because I think people want to do that. I mean, people do want to know where the food comes from. People do want to eat healthily. They do want to eat food with a high quality of nutrition. They are just constrained by outside forces, you know, their circumstances, the money they earn, all those kind of things. But yeah, the connection with where our food comes, but not just where a food comes from it's how the food is grown and what it does to the planet. Because I said before and the global system is killing us. You know, it's destroying our planet. It's destroying our natural systems. destroying our biodiversity. Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking farmers because farmers have to

operate within our economy in order to survive and their businesses. And in the current economic systems we have, farmers in order to grow profitably have to do so in an unsustainable way. So I think the challenges is how we get the right regulations. It's a horrible phrase, but we have to kind of internalize the external costs of farming so that we can enable everybody to survive and thrive. So farmers can grow high-quality food in a sustainable way. People can get access to good quality food. And science has a big part.

It's not the whole part, but science increasingly in the future will have an important part for that. So let's have a look a little bit deeper into that. then we're all experiencing globally more extreme weather events. Obviously, this is absolutely laying waste to crops everywhere. You know, if you've read the news over the last years, anyone will know this. So, you know, what can we do to protect, like, our vital food sources against these events? So there's a lot we can do.

I'm a believer in basing everything on sound principles, foundational principles. So the gold standard for farming is called integrated crop management or integrated farm management. So integrated crop management is where you do things, you put things into effect to produce good yields, high quality food that protect the environment, maintain your soils. So it's things like rotations, choice of variety, water, water, conservation. Soil, for example, no till, which means no ploughing systems, minimizing your use of fertilizers, minimizing your use of synthetic chemical pesticides, using biological controls as part of an integrated pest management program.

There are all those things. So you get the basic foundational principles and then you can build in specifics a part of that. And because it's then kind of holistic and interactive it provides you of a framework, if you like. But, you know, I think we're going to have to face the fact that technology can get us only so far unless we tackle climate change and its roots and a biodiversity crisis unless we halt the direction we're travelling along at the moment, it's inevitable that some parts of the planet will just not be amenable to food production and we'll see mass migration.

You know, it's scary. I don't want to be alarmist because, you know, personally, I think all of these problems are made by humans and they can all be solved by humans, but we need to start doing stuff now. We need to work together and we need to have a vision of what a good future for everybody will look like and then say, okay, this is a life we want to lead in the future for humanity. How do we get that? How do we do it?

And if we have that kind of approach, then I think it's eminently solvable. But, you know, even if we stop carbon emissions tomorrow, the temperatures, going to go up and it's still, you know, we need to be aware for that. You know, we need to make plans for that because in some areas agriculture is going to get very difficult. So you mentioned pesticides there. So I think this is a huge issue. Like, even if you think in the 1970s, like Joni Mitchell's songs, give me spots on the apples, leave me the birds and the bees, we've known this for years, but we're still using these chemicals, which we know, are toxic, to the ecosystem?

Yeah, we are. It's complicated. Again, don't blame the farmers. It's just an inherent feature of the system. So growing crops is hard. Pests, diseases and weeds destroy about 30, 40% at the potential global harvest. So if we can manage,

and that's with the existing mechanisms of pest control that we have. So if we can improve our control, pesticides and weeds, we can produce more food on less land. And there was this thing called the Green Revolution of the 1960s in which farming was completely upended and it was a number of things. It was the development of high yielding varieties of staple crops like wheat amaze that required high chemical inputs to give us those high yields. So high inputs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. And it produced foods for me.

millions of people and saved millions of people's lives, but it has an environmental cost. So it's not the pesticides necessarily. It's an injudicious use of pesticides, which is causing the damage and cause environmental pollution. And it causes crop protection failure because of the evolution of resistance in target pest populations. You know, there's loads of things with unsustainable farming use. So, for example, you won't be aware of this, but there's a lot of concern now. about excessive use of fungicides in farming because it's driving the evolution of resistance to medical fungicides in fungal infections of people who are immunocompromised. And the medical fungicides are the same mode of action as agricultural fungicides. So in order to combat

fungal infections, we need to use alternatives. So there's a real drive to develop alternatives, including things called biological pesticides. So these are safe, environmentally friendly alternatives based on things like living microorganisms, plant extracts, cellular products like peptides. And already in Britain about 20% about a fifth of the pesticides registered, approved for use in this country, are biopesticides.

And so we're seeing a shift. Yeah, it's really good. I mean, still niche market, but there's a lot more we can do. And the pressure on pesticide use will increase. So one of the things that is another thing that's concerning is that some of our synthetic pesticides are based on forever chemical backbones, PFAS chemical backbones. And we know we have to stop using those.

So in the forthcoming years, we will see a transition in pesticide use towards kind of biopesticides use as part of integrated pest management. And we can go even further. one of the things I research is I'm kind of an, I work on biopesticides. That's one of the things I do. And I also work with colleagues on plant breeding and really interested in interactions between plants and things like biological pesticides and natural enemies. So I think in the future, we'll be able to breed new varieties of crops that talk to beneficial organisms. And it's already known that they do this. We just need to enhance the effects. So we need to need.

crops that attract in things like predatory ladybirds and parasitic wasps to control aphids. We need plants that produce metabolites in the root system that attract in beneficial microorganisms that allow the plant to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere via the microorganisms. All of those things are possible and they're all based on biological understandings. When you start to look at the biology and ecology of farming and you apply scientific thinking to it in the way that I've described, there are lots of exciting opportunities to tackle these globally important issues. That sounds really interesting and really great. So let's move on to another important topic, which is fertilisation. So we use a lot of chemical fertilisers at the

moment. And we've got river runoff, water runoff, all things like that. They're not really doing much good in a lot of places. you know, how can we solve that? So you were right. And, you know, I was told by my one of our colleagues that if climate change was not a thing, then the biggest environmental challenge on the planet will be nitrogen, pollution.

It's a really issue. And I'm not an expert in this, but, you know, the use of nitrogen, use of fertilizers generally is very inefficient. So only about 35% of the nitrogen applied to crops is taken up by plants and the rest of it enters a natural environment. It enters our waterways. I mean, it's the same for phosphates of phosphorus. Most of the phosphorus applied as fertilizer to crops ends up in waterways.

That causes a problem. it causes a thing called uterification where, so most rivers, for example, are very, very low levels of nitrate and phosphate. And if you increase the nitrate and phosphate, you get things like algal blooms and then that leads to elimination of the oxygen in the water and then everything dies. And all the water, every river in this country has levels of nitrate and phosphates that are way above the levels that the European Environment Agency would classify as being pristine. So we need to, to answer your question, we need to have precision use of fertilizers, which means a number of things.

It means developing new formulations of fertilizers. It means greater use, I would say, of organic fertilizers with slower release. It means targeted applications. It means decision support systems. All of those kinds of things. I mean, you can't get away from fertilizer use because our crop system needs fertilizers, but, you know, it's sort of a piece with everything else. I think there's a lot more that we could do.

We've talked about an awful lot there. So what do you think, like the future steps that we should be taking, you know, even if, even if they're small, what do you hope for? So the vision, it's all about, I mean, it's like how do you eat an elephant one chunk at a time. need a vision of what a sustainable food system would look like, you know, and those visions are there. The Eat Lancet diet, flexitarian diet, is there. And then it's up to, I'm not a politician, it's up to politicians and regulators to say, how do we actually get there? It's complicated, but it's doable. I can only talk about, you know, I'm a scientist, I can only

talk about the stuff I do and the R&D. We're going through, it's a rapid transition in agriculture, driven by opportunities from new technologies like AI, robotics, biotechnologies, things like precision breeding, things like the biopesticides I've talked about. So there are huge opportunities there. What we have to do is actually invest in R&D in its country. I mean, this will be shocking, but over the last 30 years, the amount of money invested in research and development for horticultural crops is declined by 90%.

I would say, 90%. It's going back decades, but we've eroded a lot of our science base. So we need to back it to make the most of the opportunities that are available for British food security. And if we have the vibrant science system, allied with this vision, of what a good food system would look like with good regulation and food culture and everything like that, I think we can get there. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Dave Chandler.

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