Oliver Milman, The Guardian - Our system of producing food... is in a relative stone age when it comes to the climate crisis. We continue to raze vast tracts of carbon-rich forests for crop and grazing land thereby creating, by some estimates, as much as a third of all global planet-heating emissions.
As parts of the developing world get wealthier, people eat more meat, meaning more forest and grassland is obliterated and greater emissions are belched out by livestock and its attendant machinery, feed and chemicals. Even if we do manage to kick the habit of coal, oil and gas, modern agriculture now has enough heft on its own to shove us headlong into environmental catastrophe.
Why our food system remains a climate disaster, and how we can extricate ourselves from this mess, are central questions pondered in a new book called We Are Eating the Earth by the journalist Michael Grunwald.
Grunwald is unsparing in his diagnosis of the challenge, estimating that agricultural production will need to expand by about 50% in the next 25 years to feed a growing human population of 10 billion people while somehow also not wiping out the world’s biodiversity and carbon-storing trees while doing so.
Given the world has already, according to Grunwald, devoted an amount of land equivalent to all of Asia and all of Europe for farming, however, the maths in doing this is “terrible” and “remorseless”. As so little funding and thought has gone into making our food climate-friendly, there is no obvious template for ramping up food production in a way that doesn’t eat more of the Earth. MORE
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