Farming and Climate Change Measuring Success

my name is henry dimbleby

and i am leading the government

commissioned

national food strategy i don’t want to

spend my time today

talking about the what question what

would constitute a good food system

what might a fair healthy sustainable

food system look like

instead i want to think about the how

question

how do we end up here of all places how

do we end up with a food system

that can feed the world but also makes

us ill that pollutes our rivers and our

air that has devastated nature

and that produces almost a third of our

greenhouse gases

how on earth did we end up with a food

system that looks like this

understanding any complex system is not

an easy task

the food system is in fact a web of

interconnected systems everything from

the way

crops grow to the mechanisms of human

appetite

to the man-made systems by which

supermarkets for example

restock their shelves or companies

decide where to invest their money

each of these smaller systems is driven

and connected

by feedback loops either balancing or

reinforcing balancing feedback loops

working against change

reinforcing feedback loops accelerating

change

our food system has developed a new and

destructive reinforcing feedback loop

and lacks a vital balancing one the

latter is why we’re here today

to understand why it helps to go back to

the early summer of 1944

the allies are beating back the axis

forces in europe and the russians have

broken the siege of leningrad

across the atlantic an ideological young

american biologist called norman borlog

arrives at a ramshackle research station

just east of mexico city to study the

productivity of local farms

bullock grew up in a small farm in iowa

during the great depression

as a child he witnessed starving people

begging on the streets

and rioting over food he knows what

poverty

and hunger look like but nothing

prepares him for what he finds in mexico

the living conditions of the

half-starving locals horrify him

these places i’ve seen have clubbed my

mind

he writes to his wife margaret the earth

is so lacking in life force the plants

just

cling to existence they don’t really

grow

they just fight to stay alive the levels

of nourishment in the soil are so low

that wheat plants produce only a few

grains

i don’t know what we can do to help but

we’ve got to do something

he thinks the solution might lie in

breeding a new form of wheat

higher yielding and resistant to disease

he spends his days in the heat blasted

fields

painstakingly cross breeding plants

tweezering off stamen mingling pollens

by hand and placing

hundreds and thousands of tiny hoods

over individual

heads he often sleeps on the dirt floor

of his hut

the mexican farm workers think he’s

crazy but eventually

his efforts pay off borlaug creates a

whole new

farming system it’s built on four

pillars his new strains of wheat

nourished by industrial fertilizers

watered by sophisticated irrigation

systems

and protected by chemical pesticides

it’s a muscular turbo charged approach

overriding the complex web of feedback

loops that comprise our ecosystem

it is concerned only with the cost of

inputs per hectare

and the output per hectare measured in

tons of wheat

and on these terms it is staggeringly

effective

when borlaug arrived in mexico the

country imported 60

of its wheat by 1956 thanks to the

strain he developed mexico was

self-sufficient

the miracle was repeated in india and

pakistan

and then across the world new breeds of

wheat

rice and corn were combined with modern

irrigation techniques and industrial

fertilizers and pesticides

to create a new era of high-yield

high-input intensive farming

for the first time in agricultural

history thanks to borlog

and what became known as the green

revolution the increase in food

production

massively outstripped the additional

land being farmed

and since then the population has

exploded from 2.5 billion to almost

8 billion today if you remove just one

of borlaug’s pillars synthetic

fertilizer it is estimated that our food

system

as it is configured today would feed

just

half of those people this is one of

the great stories of human ingenuity

but it turns out that the very

simplicity of bull log system

is also its achilles heel with its

atomization of nature into its

constituent parts

it focuses only on productivity without

sufficient care for the system as a

whole

the green revolution unwittingly set in

train

the failures we see today the first of

these

is the failure of one of the most

remarkable and complex

of our evolutionary systems our appetite

through a series of delicately

interwoven feedback loops

involving numerous hormones our appetite

ensures that we eat what we need

to nourish ourselves without our even

thinking about it this isn’t just a case

of being hungry or not

our appetite gives us urges to to seek

out specific nutrients if we’re short of

them

it’s an extraordinarily powerful system

hard to resist

some people for example will if they’re

short of iron

will instinctively eat soil it’s a

completely miraculous thing

but the human appetite is out of sync

with the modern world

because it evolved when calories were

scarce

our appetite prompts us to seek out

calorie dense food high in

sugars and fat it makes them delicious

to us

and when we eat these foods it delays

our sensation of fullness

so we eat more of them unsurprisingly

food companies have noticed this and as

a result

they put more money into the development

and marketing of these foods

often ultra processed and low in

nutrients

and made from the refined fats and

carbohydrates that the green revolution

has made so cheap

and as companies have invested more so

we’ve eaten more

and as we’ve eaten more so we’ve become

sick this is a classic

reinforcing feedback loop a vicious

cycle

a junk food cycle if you like a toxic

interaction of appetite

and commercial incentives the second

failure

and the reason we’re here today is what

parthadasgupta recently described with

such

brutal clarity in his review for the uk

treasury

the economics of diversity this is a

failure brought about

by the invisibility of nature in almost

all of the systems that we use to value

human activity

nature is invisible we do not value it

in financial terms a farmer for example

who

farms on rich peat land does not have to

pay for the peat that is lost and the

carbon that is emitted in the process

nor pass the costs on to the consumer

no one pays and yet everyone does

the financial costs of environmental

destruction and climate change

are not factored into measurements of

gdp or shown on the financial statements

of our companies

and we’re even further from finding a

way to recognize nature’s

intrinsic sacred value

as a result our economic systems treat

nature’s resources

as if they were both costless and

infinite there is no

balancing feedback loop to prevent us

from squandering them

in fact it’s worse than that das gupta

points out that governments

actively subsidize the destruction of

nature

globally he estimates they pay between

four and six

trillion dollars every year towards

activities that destroy nature to

agriculture fossil fuels fisheries

energy fertilizer manufacturer in

economist terms

we have given nature a negative cost

we’re not only failing to protect it

we are actively encouraging its

destruction

but if we are to make nature visible in

our farming systems let alone

place a value on it we need to work out

how to measure it

in all its glorious complexity we cannot

risk our focus

being so narrow that we repeat the

mistakes of the past

i worry for example that the current

maniacal focus on carbon

though understandable might unleash a

whole new set of unintended consequences

if we do not value nature equally

alongside it

this is why the work to create a global

language to measure nature

will be seen in time i think to be as

critical as the work the international

bureau

of weights and measures does in paris to

define the

the metrics used in chemistry and

physics

there is an urgent need to recognize the

central role nature plays not just in

our spiritual lives

but in our economic ones but until we

can talk about nature in the same

language

will not be able to value it certainly

we won’t be able to systematically

restore it

creating this common language will not

be sufficient on its own to halt the

decline

we need to create the right incentives

too but it is necessary

in fact it’s vital and it’s urgent

thank you very much