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