so I was asked to help write an article
at the beginning that really is trained
as maybe start that conversation that
Dennis is talking about because I think
we all agree that you know the future of
food is so instrumental to the future of
our civilization to the future of our
planet and I’m an environmental
scientist so I’ll show you later why I
care so much about food as it impacts
the environment but if you really want
to start with the whole big
conversations around food we have to
confront many issues many many issues
and I’m only going to mention three
these are just three big ones but there
are others of course but one that others
will speak to later today much more than
I will it’s the need for feeding the
world today that as was mentioned
earlier we have just over seven billion
people but nearly a billion people today
are not adequately nourished and face
food insecurity that’s not a problem of
Agriculture and agronomics per se it’s
really an issue of our poverty around
the world and institutions land tenure
governance it’s largely a political and
institutional problem but as we think
about the future we will see increasing
demands on our food system part of that
is population growth that’s a you know
30 to 35 percent increase in just the
number of people between now and
mid-century assuming nothing else
changes but the big kind of elephant in
the room is essentially a cow right
we’re eating more meat as three to four
billion people on the planet already are
eating richer and richer higher and
higher up with a food chain kind of
diets so that’s why if nothing were to
change the demand for food will probably
increase from population growth but also
dietary affluence of course I’m gonna
argue later is that we can change those
things and we probably cannot double our
way to growing twice as much food we’re
gonna have to figure out how to curb
some of that demand as well and third we
have to think about agriculture as it
impacts the environment and the
sustainability of Agriculture and this
is important because agriculture is just
so vast this is a map showing the extent
of agriculture on the planet today it’s
about 38% right now of all the land
there is on earth if you were to double
the amount of food grown in the world if
you were to try to do that you would run
out of land very quickly that could ever
grow anything and right now we’re even
putting pressure
on tropical rainforest which is a huge
environmental problem also agriculture
is by far the biggest consumer of water
on the planet of even what we call water
withdrawals it’s 70% of all the water we
move on the planet is used for one thing
irrigating crops so we use much of the
world’s land most of our water and even
the contributions to climate change are
very large when it comes from
agriculture usually we think of climate
change is purely a problem of energy and
burning fossil fuels and it largely is
but it turns out once again agriculture
looms large about 30% of all the
contributions to climate change that we
produce as a civilization come from
agriculture mostly from deforestation
methane produced by cattle and rice
fields and nitrous oxide when we over
fertilize our fields so in this article
we kind of talked about those three big
problems and again there are many more
we’re just starting the conversation
this is just a beginning and we talked
about five kind of areas where you might
begin to explore some solutions again
there are more solutions here too but
here are some to maybe start the
conversation with one that we talked
about a lot was the need to really stop
deforestation the clearing of land
that’s rich in biodiversity rich in
carbon and rich with water and clearing
those to produce food mainly for the
world’s middle class not the world’s
poor is a bad trade-off it’s bad for the
environment and it’s not really
contributing to food security so this is
kind of a lose-lose proposition what can
we do if we avoid deforestation can we
grow more nutrition and deliver more
nutrition on the land we already have or
even better yet could we do it on even
less land and restore some into nature
well it turns out there are
opportunities to do this we talk a lot
about this in agriculture today the idea
of yield gaps that there are many places
in the world some due to poverty and
institutions some due to governance
issues where yields could be much higher
than they are today and those could be
achieved I think through very simple
practices often the kind of organic and
agroecology kinds of practices would
maybe be the best way to begin to close
those yield gaps using very appropriate
and local technologies keeping small
holders on the farm
and empowering them to do better that’s
something a lot of our panelists will
talk more about later I’m sure
we also have to get vastly more
efficient with our modes of production
though we use enormous amounts of
resources especially chemicals and as I
mentioned before water to produce food
and the so called Green Revolution
produced more food but using more
chemicals more energy more water and
more machines now we’re learning that
that was maybe temporarily good for
producing food but long term very bad
for the environment so how do we produce
more nutrition but with less water or
less chemicals and that’s something
where again a lot of work can be done
both on the kind of high tech and low
tech ends of the spectrum and I think we
have a lot to learn from organic and
conventional agriculture and others that
could be shared across the spectrum
finally though it gets back to this
issue can we double the amount of food
by mid-century I don’t believe that we
can you all member Sarah Palin right I
mean who could forget right you know she
would shout drill baby drill when asked
about her energy policy and I think our
policies in the world have been kind of
grow baby grow when it comes to food but
like energy there is another side of the
equation you can yell insulate baby
insulate or maybe don’t throw that away
don’t throw that it mo doesn’t fit on a
bumper sticker but you know what I’m
saying we have a supply-side solution
but we also have demand-side solutions
so we could feed 10 billion people
probably today if we had no food waste
and everyone and we’re vegan well that’s
not gonna happen right away but clearly
changing diets biofuels and food waste
eating away at the demand making us
smarter with the food we already grow
might be a good solution
Emily Cassady who’s in the audience was
a former student mind who did this
wonderful studies showing how much of
what we grow actually feeds people a
version of this also appears in the
magazine the green world feeds people
this is China India Africa the
Mediterranean California through most of
Latin America this is where crops are
grown and fed directly to people rice
wheat fruits vegetables roots and tubers
so on and so forth the red world
primarily feeds animals and in some
cases cars we do eat those animals but
as Dennis mentioned before it is not a
hundred percent efficient
so ever you see red is a place you’re
getting meat but you also maybe have an
opportunity to get more food if we
changed our diets and biofuel strategies
a little bit where’s there some room
there furthermore on top of this whether
it’s meat or plant-based diets we have
about thirty to fifty percent of the
world’s food is never consumed and
that’s in rich countries and poor
countries what can we do to reduce food
waste which is actually I think the
biggest opportunity to address our food
and environment challenges going into
the future
so those were five kind of appetizers no
pun intended to get some conversations
started about where might we look for
solutions to this kind of nexus of
challenge between agricultural
developments food security and
environmental sustainability there are
more and this is the beginning of a
conversation certainly not the end but
what I want to leave you with is not the
usual doom and gloom
you know I’m an environmental guy right
usually you don’t invite people like me
to parties because we will scare the
hell out of you right so what I want to
stress here is we do actually have the
capacity right now to do a much better
job with food security and the
environment we can address the future of
food and I think we can do that best
when we have these conversations that
bring us together rather than the
terrorists apart when we kind of combine
our tools and strategies and look for
commonality but the good news is we can
actually feed the world and sustain the
planet it’s gonna require some new ways
of thinking and I think new ways of
collaborating which I would argue is key
and it’s really time for us to get to
work and continue that conversation and
take it out into the fields and into our
kitchens and see what we can do thanks
very much
you
at the beginning that really is trained
as maybe start that conversation that
Dennis is talking about because I think
we all agree that you know the future of
food is so instrumental to the future of
our civilization to the future of our
planet and I’m an environmental
scientist so I’ll show you later why I
care so much about food as it impacts
the environment but if you really want
to start with the whole big
conversations around food we have to
confront many issues many many issues
and I’m only going to mention three
these are just three big ones but there
are others of course but one that others
will speak to later today much more than
I will it’s the need for feeding the
world today that as was mentioned
earlier we have just over seven billion
people but nearly a billion people today
are not adequately nourished and face
food insecurity that’s not a problem of
Agriculture and agronomics per se it’s
really an issue of our poverty around
the world and institutions land tenure
governance it’s largely a political and
institutional problem but as we think
about the future we will see increasing
demands on our food system part of that
is population growth that’s a you know
30 to 35 percent increase in just the
number of people between now and
mid-century assuming nothing else
changes but the big kind of elephant in
the room is essentially a cow right
we’re eating more meat as three to four
billion people on the planet already are
eating richer and richer higher and
higher up with a food chain kind of
diets so that’s why if nothing were to
change the demand for food will probably
increase from population growth but also
dietary affluence of course I’m gonna
argue later is that we can change those
things and we probably cannot double our
way to growing twice as much food we’re
gonna have to figure out how to curb
some of that demand as well and third we
have to think about agriculture as it
impacts the environment and the
sustainability of Agriculture and this
is important because agriculture is just
so vast this is a map showing the extent
of agriculture on the planet today it’s
about 38% right now of all the land
there is on earth if you were to double
the amount of food grown in the world if
you were to try to do that you would run
out of land very quickly that could ever
grow anything and right now we’re even
putting pressure
on tropical rainforest which is a huge
environmental problem also agriculture
is by far the biggest consumer of water
on the planet of even what we call water
withdrawals it’s 70% of all the water we
move on the planet is used for one thing
irrigating crops so we use much of the
world’s land most of our water and even
the contributions to climate change are
very large when it comes from
agriculture usually we think of climate
change is purely a problem of energy and
burning fossil fuels and it largely is
but it turns out once again agriculture
looms large about 30% of all the
contributions to climate change that we
produce as a civilization come from
agriculture mostly from deforestation
methane produced by cattle and rice
fields and nitrous oxide when we over
fertilize our fields so in this article
we kind of talked about those three big
problems and again there are many more
we’re just starting the conversation
this is just a beginning and we talked
about five kind of areas where you might
begin to explore some solutions again
there are more solutions here too but
here are some to maybe start the
conversation with one that we talked
about a lot was the need to really stop
deforestation the clearing of land
that’s rich in biodiversity rich in
carbon and rich with water and clearing
those to produce food mainly for the
world’s middle class not the world’s
poor is a bad trade-off it’s bad for the
environment and it’s not really
contributing to food security so this is
kind of a lose-lose proposition what can
we do if we avoid deforestation can we
grow more nutrition and deliver more
nutrition on the land we already have or
even better yet could we do it on even
less land and restore some into nature
well it turns out there are
opportunities to do this we talk a lot
about this in agriculture today the idea
of yield gaps that there are many places
in the world some due to poverty and
institutions some due to governance
issues where yields could be much higher
than they are today and those could be
achieved I think through very simple
practices often the kind of organic and
agroecology kinds of practices would
maybe be the best way to begin to close
those yield gaps using very appropriate
and local technologies keeping small
holders on the farm
and empowering them to do better that’s
something a lot of our panelists will
talk more about later I’m sure
we also have to get vastly more
efficient with our modes of production
though we use enormous amounts of
resources especially chemicals and as I
mentioned before water to produce food
and the so called Green Revolution
produced more food but using more
chemicals more energy more water and
more machines now we’re learning that
that was maybe temporarily good for
producing food but long term very bad
for the environment so how do we produce
more nutrition but with less water or
less chemicals and that’s something
where again a lot of work can be done
both on the kind of high tech and low
tech ends of the spectrum and I think we
have a lot to learn from organic and
conventional agriculture and others that
could be shared across the spectrum
finally though it gets back to this
issue can we double the amount of food
by mid-century I don’t believe that we
can you all member Sarah Palin right I
mean who could forget right you know she
would shout drill baby drill when asked
about her energy policy and I think our
policies in the world have been kind of
grow baby grow when it comes to food but
like energy there is another side of the
equation you can yell insulate baby
insulate or maybe don’t throw that away
don’t throw that it mo doesn’t fit on a
bumper sticker but you know what I’m
saying we have a supply-side solution
but we also have demand-side solutions
so we could feed 10 billion people
probably today if we had no food waste
and everyone and we’re vegan well that’s
not gonna happen right away but clearly
changing diets biofuels and food waste
eating away at the demand making us
smarter with the food we already grow
might be a good solution
Emily Cassady who’s in the audience was
a former student mind who did this
wonderful studies showing how much of
what we grow actually feeds people a
version of this also appears in the
magazine the green world feeds people
this is China India Africa the
Mediterranean California through most of
Latin America this is where crops are
grown and fed directly to people rice
wheat fruits vegetables roots and tubers
so on and so forth the red world
primarily feeds animals and in some
cases cars we do eat those animals but
as Dennis mentioned before it is not a
hundred percent efficient
so ever you see red is a place you’re
getting meat but you also maybe have an
opportunity to get more food if we
changed our diets and biofuel strategies
a little bit where’s there some room
there furthermore on top of this whether
it’s meat or plant-based diets we have
about thirty to fifty percent of the
world’s food is never consumed and
that’s in rich countries and poor
countries what can we do to reduce food
waste which is actually I think the
biggest opportunity to address our food
and environment challenges going into
the future
so those were five kind of appetizers no
pun intended to get some conversations
started about where might we look for
solutions to this kind of nexus of
challenge between agricultural
developments food security and
environmental sustainability there are
more and this is the beginning of a
conversation certainly not the end but
what I want to leave you with is not the
usual doom and gloom
you know I’m an environmental guy right
usually you don’t invite people like me
to parties because we will scare the
hell out of you right so what I want to
stress here is we do actually have the
capacity right now to do a much better
job with food security and the
environment we can address the future of
food and I think we can do that best
when we have these conversations that
bring us together rather than the
terrorists apart when we kind of combine
our tools and strategies and look for
commonality but the good news is we can
actually feed the world and sustain the
planet it’s gonna require some new ways
of thinking and I think new ways of
collaborating which I would argue is key
and it’s really time for us to get to
work and continue that conversation and
take it out into the fields and into our
kitchens and see what we can do thanks
very much
you
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