Rebalancing the Global Food System

A balance sheet always balances but the Earth’s food balance sheet is massively out of whack.

“The human cost of our faulty food systems is that almost 1 billion people are hungry, and almost 2 billion people are eating too much wrong food” (Food in the Anthropocene 2019).  More than 40 percent of adults (2.2 billion people) are now overweight or obese.

Also, due to increased Co2 in the atmosphere, what we produce is becoming significantly less nutritious. Agriculture, deforestation, and other factors have degraded and eroded topsoil at alarming rates. Globally, 52% of agricultural land is already degraded. On top of that, we are faced with the herculean task of doubling our food production by 2050 to feed the growing population while preventing agriculture from further expanding over more forest lands and lowering emissions. 

Furthermore, the Ukraine war demonstrated that when we depend excessively on one source of food production, the disruption could lead to inflation and hunger for many. Diversification of food sources has become a policy priority for many governments.

The current global food production and distribution system are unsustainable and imbalanced for a variety of complex and interconnected reasons but the underlying it lies in our present growth-driven socio-economic structure and the resulting culture.

Food nutrition, water, energy, and well-being are all part of how human beings adapt to their natural environment. Hunter-gatherers who lived off nature never wasted their food, they got their food by hunting, gathering, and fishing. Later, settled agriculture produced food surpluses and trade enabled the exchange of different types of foods, salt, sugar and other spices. The communities were self-sufficient in fulfilling all their nutritional requirements from their immediate surroundings and traditionally didn’t develop high blood pressure, diabetes, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease.

However, the arrival of industrial food production processes started to concentrate food production, trading and distribution by a few conglomerates. This coupled with a growth-based socio-economic structure and mindset had a twofold effect.

First, due to economic pressure to develop & urbanise, increasingly communities abandoned their farming lands to move to cities leading to fewer populations producing their own food. This made once self-sufficient masses dependent on lengthening global food supply chains which didn’t price in the cost of carbon footprint in transportation making distantly produced food cheaper to consume.  For example, salmon harvested in Chile is airfreighted to Thailand to be processed, then shipped around the world in frozen containers to the ultimate destination, increasing carbon emission but yet being cheaper than locally made food in many regions. This also led to people increasingly eating the same types of food no matter whether it was traditionally in their local diet or grown in immediate surroundings or not. For example, rice a water-intensive crop which was rare in the high altitude cold desert diet of Ladakh has become their staple food today.

Second, the socio-economic impetus to grow at all costs led to a global food industry that maximised growth and value over balance and nutrition.  Advertising led to the propagation of misinformation to the masses cutting them off from their traditional wisdom of eating the right food. It enabled industrial conglomerates to push non-nutritious junk food by promoting the culture of unhealthy food habits with easy targets being children. Due to lack of information today, the majority do not even know where their food is coming from or under what conditions is grown, its impact on human health, natural ecosystems and future sufficiency.

In short, due to growth driven economic structure the current global food system “commoditizes value-adding” food, maximizing profits for the few, and produces food that is neither healthy nor nutritious, but wasteful in terms of natural and mineral resource depletion and pollution, especially in plastic and metallic packaging that is non-recyclable.  

One root cause for this terrible state of affairs is also that economic accounting did not price in natural capital (in terms of soil degeneration, carbon emission, water and air pollution) as well as health costs to consumers.  There are no self-balancing mechanisms or feedback mechanisms to correct these damages to

nature and humanity.  

So what can we do to rebalance this wasteful and unsustainable food eco-system?

Leading soil scientist Dr. Ratan Lal has shown us that we can double the world's grain production while still returning one-third of the global agricultural land to nature.  But to regenerate soil health, we must tackle multiple barriers and compartmentalised silos that work together to form collective action traps that stop change.  Each silo maximises its own benefits but passes the costs in terms of pollution, and destruction of biodiversity to society and nature as a whole.  We cannot change the current system overnight but we need to begin somewhere. We can begin by realising the interconnectedness of our being & transboundary nature of the problems we face. We need solutions that holistically address the root causes. We cannot reverse the tide of time but we can learn from our mistakes and choose to evolve.  

In order to rebalance the global food system, we need to think about mass movements in the following directions.

First, to recognize the interdependency and the fact that everyone needs to work together for our planet and human survival we require a One Earth Balance Sheet approach; that not only measures flows but also the natural capital (stocks), needs and interdependency of the societies to objectively, sustainably, and fairly organise and structure our world's food & economic system while

ensuring that human demands are within the planetary boundaries at any given point of time. We need improved data metrics and economic accounting standards to make this happen. Much of the available data today, for example, the FAO food balance sheet is incomplete with highly estimated country aggregated data instead of bottom-up farm level data which creates a dark room paralysis for planning grassroots level actions. Furthermore, what is available is clumsy & outdated. Food database and information systems, and modelling capabilities aided by remote sensing technologies are to be more systematically supported and strengthened. 

Second, data that is not available to the elites for top-down decisions actually rests with the mass communities, especially those living closest with nature.  Thus, until we mobilize, reward & systematically co-ordinate the efforts of those at the “coal face” of climate action to deal with water, soil, food and livelihood deterioration, we will not succeed. Instead of large multinational corporations controlling our food supply with predatory monoculture & unhealthy practices, we need more small & diverse regional farms which are synergistically co-ordinated/interlinked with each other through One Earth Balance Sheet approach to ensure that the local dietary needs of the population are taken care of in a sustainable & fair manner. This is a bottom-up Darwinian solution whereby by promoting individuals and communities to produce their own food, the supply chain from production to consumption is shortened, saving energy costs, whilst improving well-being because producer/consumers fully understand the cyclical nature of food production can minimize waste, pollution and promote healthy and nutritious food for all.

Third, like Wikipedia, we should be able to collaborate to create a knowledge library for fixing soil health by adopting an omnichannel approach - collating long-form articles, podcasts & DIY videos from around the world & involving influencers & NGOs to disseminate them in a farmer-friendly manner. The success of voluntary efforts to share knowledge like Wikipedia suggests that there may be a technological solution to matching the supply of knowledge, funding and trust mechanisms through what we call Wiki-Ori, Ori being the Japanese word for weaving. If we are able to weave together the knowledge, funding and trust mechanisms that farmers and social enterprises need to help work on climate action (or indeed any SDG) projects, then we avoid the situation whereby many local experiments are conducted, without the global and local sharing of knowledge on how to tackle common problems. 

Fourth, climate change is a mindset and behavioural change that has to have mass support.  The media has a major role, not in terms of advertising that turbocharges unhealthy food behaviours and excess consumption but rather in re-educating and redirecting masses towards healthy lifestyles and responsible diets leading them to a harmonious way of living. Mega platforms like YouTube, Facebook & Google can play important roles in disseminating the right information to the masses in a relatively shorter amount of time.

To conclude, we are no longer living in times when the mainstream growth economic theory was written. We have moved away from a demand-constrained world with an abundant supply of natural resources to a world of increasing supply shortages.  Such a situation calls for a progression of economic thought from that of growth to balance to efficiently manage our resources better for the well-being of all. One Earth Balance Sheet is a harmonious middle path that avoids the extremes of globalisation and localisation. Putting together a systematic one-earth food data dashboard would not only prevent us from shooting arrows blind but give us an objective and globally coordinated local trajectory to the urgent high-level goals we all are endeavouring to realise. We need more individuals, including the state, corporations and communities to accept personal responsibility for making things better. And to equip them to manage earth’s resources better we need better management information & knowledge systems. There’s no shortage of technology & know-how to make the above happen but only the global collective will. 

After fuel, food is the next frontier of climate action. In this context and only eight years to 2030, our calling is urgent.

Authors: Tan Sri Andrew Sheng and Sneha Poddar; Chairman & Associate Research Fellow respectively at George Town Institute of Open & Advanced Studies