Instant Genius - Sustainability Special – How can we make our food more secure?

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

Like it or not, food plays a central role in all of our lives. It’s so important that whole societies and economies have formed around it, wars are fought over it, and, now, the way we consume it is having profound impacts on the planet. So just how stable are the food systems on which most of us depend? In this episode, Prof Tim Benton, research director at Chatham House, joins the podcast to talk about food security. Tim has been working on issues in food, ecology, biodiversity, sustainability for 30 years. We humans depend on the Earth’s natural resources for our very existence, so it’s vital that we take as good care of them as we can. However, it’s abundantly clear that the environment isn’t in great shape at the moment. In this special six-part series we explore the different factors affecting the sustainability of our natural resources, investigate what their current state is, and discuss what we could be doing to take better care of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Noah Leach, news editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Like it or not, food plays a central role in all of our lives. It's so important that whole societies and economies have formed around it, wars are fought over it, and now the way we consume it is having profound impacts on the planet.

So just how stable are the food? systems on which most of us depend. To talk about food security, I'm joined today by Professor Tim Benton, research director at Chatham House, who has been working on issues in food, ecology, biodiversity and sustainability for over 30 years. We humans depend on the Earth's natural resources for our very existence, so it's vital that we take as good care of them as we can. However, it's abundantly clear that the environment isn't in great shape at the moment. In this, In this special six-part series, we explore the different factors affecting the sustainability of our natural resources, investigate what their current state is, and discuss what we could be doing to take better care of them.

Food is a fundamental part of everyone's lives, and there's so much we don't think about or know about when it comes to global food systems and how the food on our plate actually gets there. And many of us take that for granted, but many people across the world don't have that luxury at all. So Professor Tim Benton, what does it actually mean to be food secure? Yeah, that's a very good question. Security in this sense means about having a secure supply of food. So in reality, that means being able to eat when you're hungry to be able to buy you the food that you need. In the technical definition, it's about all people at all times having access to foods that can enhance their health.

and they can therefore not be hungry and be fit and healthy throughout their lives and be able to live a fulfilled life and access to the food that is culturally appropriate. So, you know, obviously different people in different parts of the world have different needs for food. So there isn't a kind of one-size-fits-all diet, but to be food secure means being able to eat when you're hungry effectively. Just in the last year, we've seen how fragile our food systems can be, when faced with various issues, such as human conflict, so sunflower production in Ukraine slowing down because of Russia's invasion, or vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers being taken

off the shelves earlier this year because of crop failure in the Mediterranean, or even the ongoing bird flu crisis taking eggs off the shelves. Are these issues actually on the rise, or are we just too used to having everything available all the time? Yes, to both. So over the last 50 or 60 years, that we have got increasingly a global food system so that a lot of what we eat has a set of common ingredients that relate to a relatively small handful of drops that are grown in different places in the world. So starch from wheat and maize, sugar from sugar cane, largely from Latin America, vegetable oil, which is very often related to palm oil from Indonesia, Malaysia, you know, all of those sorts of things, chocolate, in the case of a chocolate biscuit,

would come from the tropics. We've just got used to eating food that comes from very long and complex supply chains. And at the same time, because of wanting to eat food more cheaply, the whole food system has become more and more efficient. And by becoming efficient, it is also becoming more fragile for when shocks happen. And to the third point of this is that as the world becomes more globally connected and as we drive climate change so that its effects are becoming more feelable, more palpable, shocks to the supply chain through production or transport logistics or other things become much more frequent and over time looking ahead they'll become more frequent and more severe. So our expectation that we will always be able to have the same food

without any disruption to the whole system and the supply chains is, you know, in the future it's going to be much more tested than it has been in the last year. And, you know, in the last 2022, 23, as you point out, we've had Ukraine, we've had climate impacts, we've had supply chain disruptions coming on the back of COVID and new pests and diseases, other sorts of things that climate change is also going to make more likely because of their impacts on, ecological processes and so on. So you can see all of these things coming together now in a way that they haven't 10 years ago or 20 years ago where there was more redundancy, more buffering capacity within the food system as a whole because it was less efficient. So efficiency in globalization

and the globalization itself has led to a system that is quite fragile and when things go wrong, we suddenly notice. Yeah. And as you mentioned there, one of those things that might go wrong is climate change. And a huge part of that is the increased likelihood of ever hotter and more frequent heat waves. So how much are they likely to damage our food supply and to what extent? Yeah, well, it's interesting that you kind of pick up on heat waves. I mean, there are many ways that climate change can impact on our supply of food. On the production side, we've got increasing heat and drought. And those two things sometimes work together and sometimes work separately. So obviously as droughts happen, crops find it difficult to grow, but also livestock can't forage

because the forage is reduced, so it impacts on animals too. Heat will affect the ability of flowers to set seed or flower, and therefore, whether or not they're productive, heat can also stress animals outside or in barns, you know, intensive lifestyle. systems are often inside these days and in the middle of a 40 degree heat wave. They're not often air-conditioned, as you can imagine. But of course, floods can affect food production systems. All sorts of things can affect the logistics of the food system. So one of the major commodity crops in the world is maize, and the centre of production is really the Midwest. And the majority of the grain that comes out of the Midwest in the United States comes down

the Mississippi River. And of course, on barges coming down the Mississippi River, and if that dries out and barges can't flow, there isn't any other means of getting the grain to ports. Very big storms can impact port infrastructure, disrupting the global supply chains. And of course, pests and diseases can impact on people or they can impact on the production side. And as we saw during COVID, outbreaks of COVID led to the shutting of meat processing plants and themselves led to shortfalls in meat production in some parts of the world. So however you look at it, whether it's heat or drought or unusual cold snaps, even as the climate change impacts, you know, many areas are getting hotter, but sometimes cold air is pulled down from the north

from the Arctic and can create conditions that disrupt. There are literally thousands of ways that climate change can impact on our food system and lead to the sorts of issues that we've been seeing over the last few years. What current and future research, technology and innovations in chemistry and in other scientific fields could help to make our food system more secure? That's a really difficult question to answer, not because there aren't answers to it, but because if you think about growing food in Malawi or if you think about growing soya in very large scale in Brazil or wheat in Europe or livestock systems in China or whatever. There are many, many, many different local contexts where innovation can help.

There's also, and I'll come back to the question of chemistry in a minute, there are also, of course, issues to do with innovation necessary to track food across borders and ensure its authenticity to avoid the situation where high-value foods as adulterated substituted with low-value foods leading to food safety issues. There are all sorts of issues about how you can monitor the spread of contaminants or fungal pathogens or something like that in grain as it crosses borders and comes into countries for processing. There are all sorts of issues around the science of,

whether or not different people react differently to different supplies of calories and nutrients and the issue of what makes a healthy diet for a young person or an old person or a person that's infirm and the whole kind of personalised medicine nature of food and tracking food relative to your genetics and what would make an optimal diet. So the science behind how to do this well is really, really, really broad. And it's not just chemical science. It's also biological science, you know, the way that the soil fertility is affected by the microbes and fungi in the soil and what supplies of nutrients that they might need. It's not just a chemical question. It's a biological question. How do you preserve biodiversity in agricultural landscapes? You know,

what is the precise formulation of food? How do you do sustainability in different farming systems? You know, lots and lots of science questions. And so lots of space for innovation. In the particular question of chemistry, I think we are at a point where given that the food system is responsible for driving climate change, about a third of greenhouse gases come from the food system. And given that the food system is also responsible for about 70 to 80 percent of biodiversity loss on a global basis and given that the food system collectively is also the number one polluter on a global basis, there is a huge need to get away from a highly intensive, chemically based agriculture in the sense of synthetic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and to think about the chemistry and the

biology of low-input systems that are more biodiversity-friendly, less polluting. And there's a whole lot of need for things like biopesticides that can mimic the behaviour of natural pathogens and target specific plant pests rather than generic pesticides that might contribute to the decline of biodiversity and loss of bees and other pollinators and things like that. There's the need for thinking about how do you integrate plant production systems with the precise use of nutrients and where do those nutrients come from as an alternative to the fossil fuel intensive nitrogen-based fertilizers that we typically use in excess at the moment? What does a low-input system look like? And where would the chemistry of the nutrients? What would be the feedstock for that? Would it be human waste?

Would it be bio-compost? Would it be other forms of biomass? You know, so there's a lot around the traditional uses of chemistry, particularly around pest control and fertilizer input, how do we get away from that into a new world where we've got organic in the sense that it's biodiversity friendly, it comes from natural sources, it's not fossil fuel based, and all the rest of that. And then the other kind of big issue, other than how do you kind of monitor and evaluate the composition of, foods to ensure their authenticity and safety. The other big issue, of course, is around waste. And certainly chemistry plays a very big role in thinking about, well, how do you prolong shelf

life, or how do you come up with biodegradable packaging systems that are not plastic-based coming from fossil fuels? How do you minimize waste in the food chain as a whole? 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 back. 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.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. How can we nurture and protect crops more sustainably than we have been doing? I would start off by asking a more generic question about what crops should we be growing. So at the moment, the global food system is based on too few crops. So something like two-thirds of the calories come from eight major crops, wheat, rice, maize, palm oil, soya, sugar, barley and potato. And if you think about most food that you would buy in some sort of packet in a supermarket that is ready for eating or microwavable for eating, it will be made up of some mixture of

those major commodities. So the first question is, what should we be growing? And if everybody in the world were to eat five fruit and vegetables a day, we currently only grow about a third of the amount that would be required. So looking ahead, you want to get to the point where we're diversifying our food system and growing more crops and a greater diversity of crops and perhaps growing those crops at a smaller scale. So that's the first point. And then, If you're growing crops in a more diverse way in a small scale, you've got scope for thinking about the science of what used to be traditional in agriculture,

which is rotations, that you grow different crops at different seasons, and you would have one year where you're growing nitrogen fixing crops, so beans or things like that, the actual clover that put nitrogen in the ground. So part of the answer to your question is that by having rotations, we can use the biological and chemical processes that have evolved into plants and perhaps put them into different plants. And if we're also doing more mixed, smaller scale, more diverse farming systems, then incorporating some livestock within that rotational system so that they graze and then their manure can be used as an input to the system to avoid, further fertilizer. And then you've got also the potential for using green waste within the system as a compost, which might be a cover crop that is there during the winter to protect the soil. And then you plow into the ground or harvest it and compost it and put it back on the ground

for the next rotation that comes in. So there are many ways of thinking about the nutrient system and the nutrient recycling in different farming systems. And what about the pesticide side of things? Because obviously we've got crops that are being sprayed with things that kind of damage the very insects that are integral to kind of making them possible in the first place. So how do you see the sustainability of pesticides going forward? There are many ways, again, that this can be tackled. One is thinking about how you engineer the pesticides.

plants to be pest resistant. So can you enhance the genetics of the way that they get attacked or damaged by insects? Another way is thinking about the relationship between plants that are protective and plants that are attractive to pests. So again, thinking about the diversity of farming systems, you know, certainly with small-scale agriculture in Africa, the Rothenstead research in the United Kingdom, develop something called push-pull agriculture, which is where you have dummy crops, in a sense, interspersed with the food crops, that the pests could attack at will and the pest preferred to those to the plant crops. So you attract pests in, but decoy them with plants that are less important from a food production perspective. Then there is the potential for managing

the natural enemies of pests within the farmland system. So in the UK, we have a lot of have a problem with aphids on wheat, but those aphids in turn are parasitized by a number of very small wasps. Now those wasps live in grassy margins and bits of paddock land and so on. And over time as we become more specialised in having monocultural landscapes, you know, wheat specialist landscapes, those areas where the pests live over winter have declined. So the natural enemies of the pests live over winter have declined. So we've got to the point. where we've removed the natural control of the pests from the landscape. So finding ways to do that kind of ecological engineering of the landscape so that there's

space for pests to work alongside any form of chemical control in integrated pest management. It's cool. And then lastly, there is the issue of developing new biopesticides, which are based on the natural pathogens or other ways of circumventing the immune system of the pests so that they are really, really specifically targeted on the pests and then they don't get any kind of secondary insects that might be beneficial. So there are plenty of ways where you can think of which are not about producing traditional chemical pesticides, but nonetheless rely on understanding the biochemistry and chemistry of the systems. You talked before about the diversity of crops being really

important for the future and not just having these monocultures. But are there any particularly good kind of species or particularly good food crops that we should be growing into the future? I know you mentioned beans as an important nitrogen fixer. Or is that just totally the wrong way of thinking about things? Should we just be going for full diversity? The way I articulate things from a food system's perspective is that we need to tackle the challenge of food security. We need to tackle the challenge that too many people in the world don't have access to a healthy diet. That's in every country of the world. In the poorest countries of the world, people just don't have enough to eat and have micronutrient deficiencies in countries like ours. People typically

don't have a lack of calories, but have a lack of nutrition. So dietary-related ill health is associated with diets that are rich in fat and carbohydrates and other things and fast foods, etc. So that's one of the challenges. Then we got the challenge of biodiversity and how do we restore and protect biodiversity because it's an important part of the resilience of our food system and the sustainability in the long term, natural pests control, pollinations and so on. Then we got the challenge of climate change, both adapting to the rigours of climate change, the impacts the droughts and the heatwaves and so on, but also reducing the emissions that come from the food system

that are driving climate change. And then we've got pollution as a whole. And when you look at all of those challenges together, that requires us to have a food system that's better at protecting people, preserving the environment, and providing food in a different sort of way. So looking ahead, there is a lot of conversation

about the need to have protein-rich crops, particularly ones that can fix nitrogen. So that's the legume family peas and beans and lentils and chickpeas and things like that. So that's really important. As I said earlier, food and vegetables are really important. But of course, when it comes to coping with climate change, some crops are more resilient than other crops to heat or to flooding or to a drought. or too cold at different times a year. And there is no kind of, I think, more legumes to allow people to have a more plant-based diet with lots of protein in and to fix nitrogen is a really good thing to be kind of aiming for

into the future. And we will certainly need more of them. More fruit and vegetables comes with the challenge that fruit and vegetables are often more dependent on water. And so if you're in a droughty area, perhaps they're more difficult to grow than if you're in a area where there's rich in rainfall.

So it does come down to what is appropriate for the place that we're thinking of. But in general, from a resilience perspective, given that the climate change is going to have multiple impacts everywhere, the greater the diversity, the more resilient the system will be. So I think there is a kind of

a generic need to increase the range of what we grow and how we grow it. And as I said earlier, the more we integrate diverse farming systems, the more we build sustainability and resilience into the system because it's, don't put all your eggs in one basket kind of thinking that you can build a more sustainable system, you can fix your nitrogen, you can preserve biodiversity, you can encourage the right sort of biodiversity in a diverse system in a way that you can't in a very large landscape monoculture. So would a shift away from large supermarkets towards smaller scale food systems like community food systems help to diversify our food sources? And would that even help?

Yeah, I mean, that will certainly play a role. I mean, more local systems are not necessarily more sustainable because actually the environmental impact largely comes from where it's produced and what is produced rather than how close it is produced. to you. I think the scale issue is important because in a sense we have designed this food system which is very specialised on a very few crops grown at very large scale in very different parts of the world and these globalised fragile interconnected fly chains that we're in the situation that because we've done that really, really, really efficiently over the last 20, 30 years, it has become, you know, the production of grain at such scale and volume has reduced its price.

So it's become economically rational, both to, in many parts of the world, for people to buy food and waste it. It's become economically rational for people who are surrounded by snacky foods all the time to overeat. And it's become economically rational to feed human-type food to animals to increase the volume of production of livestock. and a statistic across Europe, now over 60% of the grains that are grown in Europe are fed to livestock. So actually, if we wasted less food, if we changed the composition of our diets a bit and ate less meat, and if we ate the right amount of food for our health rather than overate, that would allow us to produce less food.

And if we can produce less food, we can do it in a more sustainable way without so many chemical inputs. So from a food system's approach, part of the answer is about how we change our diets to deliver on the objective to make people healthier. That allows us to use our land in different ways and that allows us to farm in different ways, which requires different kinds of technical innovation to deliver a different farming system. But they all kind of, all of the pieces fit together and point in a certain direction. So with our own diets then, how can we, make changes to our personal lifestyle and what we cook and eat and make for our friends and family to help with this and to make our food systems more resilient? There's an assumption in your question

that by changing our habits from consumption, we change the market, which is something that I think is questionable. The biggest agency I think we have in changing the food system is to encourage debate in politics about the food system. So instead of seeing people as consumers and using consumer power to change the system, seeing consumers as citizens and saying to government, no, we want to regulate better. We want the market to work better to be more sustainable. So as a person, as a citizen, encourage family and friends to vote for politics. So they start competing to drive climate action and sustainability. As a consumer, from a health perspective and from a sustainability perspective,

I think the advice points in a similar sort of way that eating more fruit and vegetables, a more plant-based diet where meat is not something that you eat every day, eating more whole grains, eating less highly processed, highly packaged foods with all the plastic that comes with it and all the calories. and salt and preservatives that are inside the food, all of those things act in a way as small agents have changed to the system as a whole, but they're not as powerful, probably in the long run, as people voting for politicians to get the food system right. Could you also talk about what we can do in terms of changing our lifestyle when it comes

to wasting what we've bought and what we don't eat? Absolutely. Any form of waste means that resources are going into producing it, resources are going into processing, packaging it, transporting it, and then resources are going into wasting it. And something like, and it depends on the place and it depends on the commodity, something like a third of food that is produced is wasted or lost throughout the food system. So anything that can be done to reduce that is a good thing. So that's using leftovers from meals at home. That's meal planning so that you don't just buy or your parents don't buy a whole lot of food, put it in the fridge, go out for a couple of nights, come back on a Friday evening before the next delivery from the supermarket and empty out the fridge and find all sorts of slimy things in the back. You know, it's all of that proper portion control so you're eating the right amount of food.

You're not buying twice as much food as you need and so on. So there's lots of scope for thinking about how you do that. And then if you've got a garden, particularly vegetable waste, uncooked, composting that and using that to fertilise your garden rather than buying peat from a garden centre to put on your roses or whatever it might be is another important thing. If about a third of the food in the world is wasted and at the moment there are 900 million people who aren't getting enough food to eat, several billion who can't afford a healthy diet, the more we consume it, economically consume it, and buy it and waste it, and the more people at the other end of the food chain go hungry, then that is unethical, immoral, however you want to phrase it, that shows that the food system

is not working. And if the emissions from food waste, you know, this is an old stat now, and probably needs updating, but if the emissions from food waste were a country, there would be second or third in the list of all countries, polluting countries from a global greenhouse gas perspective. And so the scale of the issue, whether it's in the UK or globally, is absolutely huge. And, you know, the natural environment is so precious. And so many people are not having access to the rights amounts of food. There is something seriously wrong with the food system where it is so easy to waste food. and all of those resources and all of those impacts are then gone to waste, literally.

And so we have seen in recent years the rise of growing technologies that can help to reduce the need for land conversion. So things like hydroponics and vertical farming and also innovations in plant-based meats, if you can call them that. So what current research coming up in the future are you excited about that you think could make a difference? Well, there's a lot. It's difficult looking head, and this has been true through the history of innovation, to say what will be the most exciting innovation if it's adopted at scale. But certainly alternative proteins, as the kind of generic name is, whether it's lab grown meat or whether it's industrial biotechnologically grown meat, such as things like corn or other artificial meats that are effectively made through industrial processes or whether it is plant-based

proteins which are repurposed as meat-like analogs. All of those I think are important, perhaps, especially in the short term, in helping people eat less meat and go towards more plant-based diets. I really like vertical farming and local food production systems because in a way, not that they will solve the food security needs of the world in the way if people see food being grown locally, it helps them to think about the resources that go into it and respect the food for the resources that are gone into it because the price that we pay for food is often less

than the total cost when you build in the environmental costs and the healthcare costs and all the rest of that. So food waste, I think, is related to, many urban dwellers getting divorced from production of food. So anything that stimulates food growing in the local environment, I think, you know, if you have an urban vertical farm and people go in and pick their own lettuce or something, they're much less likely to put it in a fridge and throw it away later, just like having an allotment or vegetable garden of your own. If you've slaved over your carrots, even if you have a glutter carrots, you tend to find ways of eating

your carrots rather than throwing them away. So there's lots in that. And then, of course, course, huge amounts of thinking about some of the things we talked about earlier, the science rotations, what crop should we grow, how can we make them climate and pest resilient, how can we reduce the emissions from agriculture in the narrow sense and also the broad sense, in the narrow sense, you know, per crop, but also from the system as a whole. What can we do about issues around food authenticity and using new ways of tracking food across supply chains. How can we build a system that is resilient to the shocks? How can we conserve water within farming systems, including within soils? How can we build up soil fertility? You know,

there's just so many things, the use of robotics, robotics to pick fruit and vegetables, robotics to ensure that, you know, small autonomous vehicles that have a laser instead of a pesticide and with a camera go around recognizing weeds and zapping them with a laser, to kill them rather zapping them with a pesticide. You know, there's just so much that's exciting in the space, let alone thinking about food formulation and 3D printing of food and, you know, different ways of delivering food to people and the personalisation of diets according to your genetics

and what makes a healthy diet for somebody who's old and overweight versus somebody who's young and growing. You know, all of those sorts of things around the jazz of food production. You know, there's just so much. You've been listening to Professor Tim Benton telling us about the future of food security. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine. By the latest issue of Science Focus in store or visit us at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal.

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