How can we feed the world in 2014?

As the world’s population grows, more sustainable diets are needed. But what government got elected by rationing meat?

Pressure is mounting on the global food system. There are more mouths to feed: by 2050, according to the UN, the world’s population is expected to have grown from 7 billion to 9.3 billion. Recent Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates of greenhouse gas data show that emissions from agriculture, forestry and fisheries have already nearly doubled over the past 50 years, but demand for resource-intensive products such as meat and dairy is set to keep increasing. Meanwhile, obesity – and associated non-communicable diseases such as diabetes – continue to rise.

Food, farming, environment and health are all linked – so how do we tackle this? How do we ensure that a growing population can eat in a healthy, affordable way without adding to the pressures on our land, water and energy resources?

A ‘sustainable diets’ paradigm is increasingly seen as a way of moving towards a healthy future for both people and planet, but defining and achieving it is a challenge. A recent debate hosted by the Guardian invited three experts to discuss that challenge.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London, described how awareness of the connections between environmental and public health problems has grown in recent years.

“For about 30 to 40 years, the evidence has been mounting about food having a huge impact on the environment and public health. Those two bodies of evidence have built up in tandem, and in the past 20 years, a simple idea has taken hold that maybe consumers have got to eat a diet within environmental limits and working for public health. That phrase is sustainable diets, and it’s basically eating for health and for the environment. And that debate has now become extremely tense and important.”

What does such a diet look like? In the UK, the NHS promotes an ‘eat well’ plate, designed to guide the public on healthy eating. World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has taken that further with its ‘live well’ guide, which takes those healthy eating goals but marries them with sustainability objectives. Its five rules for a sustainable diet are: eat less processed food; waste less food; eat less meat; buy food that meets a credible certified standard; and eat more plants.

“It takes the government approach to what a healthy diet would look like, and says what would this need to look like if it were also good for the planet and didn’t consume too much land and water,” said David Nussbaum, CEO of WWF UK.

Translating that into action is another matter, and that’s where retailers have a role to play. The grocery market accounts for 54.9p of every £1 of UK retail spending, according to the food and consumer goods research organisation IGD, so retailers hold huge sway in influencing the sustainability of our diets.

This is something Tesco takes seriously, according to Tim Smith, the company’s group quality director. “For some time now, Tesco has made its responsibility in this area very clear,” he said.

“We’re selling food and other products in more than 12 countries and we’re sourcing from 70. The challenges of non-communicable diseases, climate change, transitions within countries from one type of diet to another – these are all impacting on what we do for our customers, and we take those responsibilities seriously.”

Smith cited Tesco’s recent work on reducing food waste.

“We have mapped clearly the top 25 contributors to food waste that we sell in the UK and we are going down each of those supply chains, working with our partners and suppliers to fix problems that we can now identify on an evidence base. That gives us a powerful way of reducing the food waste that occurs in our retail outlets, in the field, and – perhaps more difficult still – those incurred by consumers.”

A position of influence

Smith also pointed out how Tesco and its suppliers have changed product formulations in recent years to reduce salt, along with planned changes to cut sugar in its soft drinks by 25%. “There are things that we as a retailer are in a unique position in the supply chain to do,” he said.

Such moves by producers and retailers can make a difference: adult daily salt intake in the UK has fallen from 9.5g to 8.1g since 2005, following salt-reduction targets for the food industry set by the Food Standards Agency for 85 categories of food. On 22 May, Tesco also announced it would stop selling sweets at the checkouts in its smaller stores, having already removed them from larger stores.

Is this enough? The problem, argued Lang, is that even the world’s largest retailers, with their immense reach and power, can’t create a sustainable food system on their own. The elephant in the room, he said, is the lack of government policymaking.

“Governments don’t want to govern. Unless governments set a framework, Tesco, huge and powerful though it is, can’t solve this.”

There’s potential for global policymaking to lead the way. Addressing the
High- level roundtable on Food and Nutrition Security through Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems in the Post-2015 Agenda in March, David Nabarro, the UN’s special representative on food security and nutrition for the United Nations, called for “a transformation of agriculture and
sustainably”.

And yet, as Lang pointed out, the UN is still failing to join the dots in practice. “This year the UN system meets for the first international conference on nutrition since 1992, and they’ve decided not to talk about sustainable diets. That’s catastrophic.”

A global perspective is increasingly urgent as health, food security and
environmental challenges become visibly intertwined in emerging economies. In Mexico, 32.8% of people are obese. In India, the rate of diabetes in urban areas is thought to be around 9%, while rural smallholders continue to grapple with poverty, under nutrition and climate change adaptation.

But in the absence of adequate global or national frameworks on sustainable diets, it remains up to corporate powers to do what they can, said Smith.

Appealing to voters

“The ideal situation is one where governments are able to frame what a food policy ought to be for a nation, for European states, and for the world. In the absence of that it’s our responsibility to take action rather than wait for others to come to conclusions that may or may not lead in the same direction.”

Part of the problem, according Nussbaum, is that some of the messages aren’t going to be vote-winners.

“Meat is an issue because of the amount of resources it consumes,” he said.

“We have to grow a lot of grain to feed to the animals we eat. We’re not arguing that people shouldn’t eat meat, but we’re saying the amount of meat we all choose to eat needs to reflect what’s good for us and what’s good for the environment, and for many of us that means reducing meat consumption.”

But the trouble, he added, is that “governments worry about whether people will vote for them if they’re saying things that people don’t want to hear.”

For people in developed countries – and increasingly for emerging middle classes around the world – it’s about making a cultural shift and “confronting a notion of progress which is to eat feast food every day,” said Lang.

That said, Smith pointed out that Tesco’s experience in South Korea was that a modern retail infrastructure could be developed without harming the
country’s traditionally healthy diet, by virtue of consumer education, some regulation and strong cultural links to food.

WWF’s research has shown – perhaps unsurprisingly, since it includes less meat and more vegetables – that a sustainable diet wouldn’t cost any more than a typical diet today.

Achieving the cultural shift, and getting policy frameworks in place, is the hard part.

“The good news,” said Nussbaum, “is that broadly what’s good news for humans is good for the planet. But we have to think about how we can influence the system to change it so that it produces the food we all need but at a price that isn’t damaging to the environment, and that means working with both companies and governments. It’s tough, but we have to find a way of confronting this.”

At the table

Jo Confino (Chair), executive editor, the Guardian
Tim Lang, Professor of food policy, City of London
David Nussbaum, chief executive, WWF
Tim Smith, group quality director, Tesco

Key discussion points

• The world’s population is expected to grow by over a third, or 2.3 billion people, between 2009 and 2050. Most growth is expected to occur in developing countries. Urban areas will account for 70% of world population in 2050, up from 49% at present.
Source: FAO

• One in three adults in the world (1.46 billion) were overweight or obese in 2008, up 23% from 1980. In the developing world, the number of overweight or obese adults more than tripled from 250 million in 1980 to 904 million in 2008.
Source: ODI

• Globally, 366 million people have diabetes. If nothing is done, this number will reach 552 million by 2030. Three quarters of people with diabetes live in low- and middle-income countries.
Source: International Diabetes Federation

• Industrialised and developing countries waste around the same amount of food each year – 670m and 630m tonnes respectively. In rich countries, waste primarily occurs at the level of the consumer, while in developing countries it’s mostly early in the supply chain due to poor storage, processing and packaging.
Source: FAO

• Mature forests are projected to shrink in area by 13% by 2050. This will mainly be due to land-use change (becoming agricultural land) as well as more commercial forestry and human encroachment.
Source: OECD

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The Guardian