Can We Feed Ourselves without Devouring the Planet? | George Monbiot | TED

What's the worst thing we've ever done to the planet?

The answer is tough to hear

and many people recoil from it

because it conflicts with some of our most cherished beliefs.

Farming.

Farming is the greatest cause of habitat destruction,

the greatest cause of wildlife loss,

the world's greatest cause of extinction.

It's caused roughly 80 percent of the deforestation this century.

Only 29 percent of the weight of birds on Earth

consists of wild species.

And the rest are poultry.

Just four percent of mammals, by weight, are wild.

36 percent is accounted for by humans,

and farmed animals make up the remaining 60 percent.

Yes, look, we all need food and we all need farming.

But that shouldn't blind us to the fact

that it's also among the world's foremost causes of climate breakdown,

of water pollution, of air pollution.

But, perhaps most importantly,

it's the foremost cause of land use.

Now I've come to see land

as perhaps the most important of all environmental questions.

Every acre of land that we use for our own purposes

is an acre that can't support wild ecosystems,

such as forests and wetlands and savannahs,

on which the great majority of the world's species depend.

It's our use of land which, above all,

is driving the sixth great extinction of species.

Now, there are some thrilling and world-changing solutions

to these great crises,

and I'll be coming to those in just a minute.

I mean, some of them are mind-blowing

and have the potential to solve several problems at the same time.

But in order to understand them and the need for them,

first, we need to understand the scope and direction

of the global food system.

We rail against urban sprawl, and rightly so.

But all our homes and businesses and infrastructure

occupy just one percent of the planet's land.

Agricultural sprawl is a far greater ecological threat.

Farming occupies 38 percent of the planet's land.

Most of the rest, incidentally, is protected areas,

forests, deserts, ice and mountains.

So we have this vast amount of land being occupied.

A lot of people complain about intensive farming

and the harm that it does to us and our world,

and this harm is real.

But so is the harm caused by extensive farming,

which means using more land to produce a given amount of food.

Now, I know some of you will find this a shocking statement,

but the most damaging of all farm products is pasture-fed meat,

and that's because of the agricultural sprawl it causes.

You remember that 38 percent of land used by farming?

Well, only 12 percent of the land is covered by crops.

The remaining 26 percent is used for pasture,

mostly for cattle, sheep and goats.

Our environmental crisis is not driven by intensive farming

or by extensive farming,

but by a disastrous combination of the two.

The problem is not the adjective --

it's the noun.

Farming itself is threatened

by the environmental harm that it's contributed to,

such as climate breakdown and soil depletion

and the exhaustion of water supplies.

But there could be an even greater threat to our food supplies.

It's possible to see the biggest threat that the global food system faces

as the global food system.

It's beginning to look a bit like the global financial system

in the approach to 2008.

Now for a long time, we thought we were beating hunger.

Between the 1960s and 2014, hunger was declining fairly steadily.

But then, in 2015, the trend began to turn,

and the number of chronically malnourished people began rising

and has continued to rise ever since.

Astoundingly, that rise began just as world food prices were falling.

So what's going on?

Well, the world food system, like global finance,

is a complex system,

and complex systems behave in counterintuitive ways.

They're resilient under certain conditions,

because there’s weird self-organizing dynamics [to] stabilize them.

But if they're pushed by an extreme amount of stress,

then those same self-organizing dynamics

can start transmitting shocks across the network.

And beyond a certain point,

they can tip the whole network past its critical threshold,

whereupon the system collapses, suddenly and unstoppably.

Now over the past few years,

the crucial elements of systemic resilience

that we call redundancy, modularity, circuit breakers and backup systems

have been stripped out by corporate strategies.

On one estimate, just four companies now control

90 percent of the global grain trade.

Only four crops, which are wheat, rice, corn and soy,

account for almost 60 percent of the calories that farmers produce.

And the production for export of those crops

has become highly concentrated in a handful of nations,

including Russia and Ukraine.

Nations have polarized into superexporters and superimporters,

and much of this trade passes through vulnerable choke points,

such as the Turkish Straits

and the Suez and Panama Canals.

Had the blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 --

by that giant container ship, you remember that --

had that coincided with the closure of the Turkish Straits in 2022

by the war in Ukraine,

then the food chain for hundreds of millions of people

might have snapped.

The reason why hunger is rising seems to be that,

as the food system has lost its resilience,

more and more contagious shocks are being transmitted across it.

Now, we in the rich nations,

we scarcely noticed the shocks being caused by speculative surges

and export bans and bottlenecking and other issues like that,

until 2020, when COVID began to make us more aware

of some of the issues we were facing.

But those shocks, for years, have been hitting the poorer nations

with weak currencies,

which stand at the end of the queue.

And what they saw is that local food prices can surge

even as global prices remain low.

Now, these problems are likely only to become worse

as the system becomes less stable

and is possibly approaching a critical threshold.

Governments prevented the banks from collapsing

by bailing them out with future money.

But you can't bail out the food system with future food.

So we face two enormous issues here.

One, the environmental harm caused by the food system,

and secondly, the possibility that the system itself could collapse.

Might there be a solution,

a solution to both these problems?

Can we find a way of feeding the world without devouring the planet?

Well, there are some fascinating new techniques for growing crops

being developed by farmers and scientists.

I'm especially interested in the potential of perennial grain crops,

which are being developed in particular by The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

If we can grow grain on plants that stay in the soil from year to year,

we can greatly reduce the damage to the soil caused by plowing

and the amount of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers,

irrigation required to establish new crops.

Other farmers are finding really amazing ways

of boosting their yields without using either fertilizers or manure.

Crucial as all these developments are,

they can only be partial solutions to the issues we face.

Because perhaps our most urgent task

is replacing the protein-rich and fat-rich foods

that we currently obtain from animals

and from crops like soy and oil palm.

If the biggest problem that farming is causing

is the amount of land it uses,

then perhaps the biggest environmental solution

is shifting food production off the land and into the factory.

Now, I realize that's another shocking statement.

Many people hate the idea of food being produced in factories,

forgetting, somewhat, that almost all the food we eat

passes through a factory at some point in its production.

In fact, the great majority of the animals we eat are factory farmed.

Well, in Helsinki, Finland, I visited a company called Solar Foods,

which is using a technique called precision fermentation

to create a protein-rich flour

from a soil bacterium that eats hydrogen.

It requires no farm products at all.

I was the first person outside the lab to eat a pancake made from this flour.

A small flip for man.

(Laughter)

Amazingly, this pancake tasted just like a pancake.

Rich and mellow and filling.

But this isn't just about making pancakes.

These flours, which have a protein content of about 65 percent,

could form the basis of much better alternatives --

cheaper alternatives, healthier alternatives -- to the animal products

and some of the plants, like soy and coconut and oil palm,

that we currently eat.

In fact, they could trigger a whole new cuisine,

a shift as profound as the neolithic revolution.

Most importantly,

they require just a tiny fraction of the land

and a tiny amount of the water and fertilizer

needed to raise either crops or animals.

And this is why I see precision fermentation

as perhaps the most important environmental technology ever developed.

It could be all that stands between us and environmental collapse.

Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing,

which was first developed by NASA in the 1960s.

But it's not rocket science.

It actually requires no major technological breakthrough.

The bacteria being multiplied by Solar Foods

use hydrogen in similar ways to how plants use sunlight.

But this process, powered ultimately by solar energy --

using the electricity to make the hydrogen --

is far more efficient than photosynthesis.

Are you horrified by the idea of eating bacteria?

(Laughs)

I'm sure some of you are.

Well, if so, I've got bad news for you.

You eat them with every meal.

In fact, some of our food, like cheese and yogurt,

is deliberately inoculated with live bacteria.

If you're still disgusted by the idea of eating microbes,

could I invite you to visit a factory pig or factory chicken farm?

And the slaughterhouse,

which kills and processes the animals that it raises?

That's what disgusting looks like.

(Laughter)

So we have this extraordinary potential.

If we can replace the protein

which we currently obtain from the flesh and secretions of animals

with protein from single-celled organisms,

we could release vast tracts of the planet from our impacts,

restoring forests and salt marshes

and freshwater marshes and mangroves, and steppes and savannahs

and kelp forests and seafloors.

This great rewilding could stop the sixth great extinction in its tracks.

It could save Earth's systems,

it could draw down vast amounts of carbon dioxide

from the atmosphere.

Moreover, it could be the only chance some countries have

of breaking their dangerous dependency on exports from distant places.

A lot of the countries which are most at risk of mass starvation,

they don't have enough fertile land and water

to produce the food they need from farming,

but they have plenty of something else --

sunlight,

which is what you need to sustain food production based on hydrogen.

Now, these technologies are yet to be fully commercialized,

but companies like Solar Foods have applied for permission

to release their products onto the market.

I hope that when they do,

innovative chefs will step up to design the new diet,

the new cuisine that the technology promises.

And I would love to see a microbial brewery in every town,

run by small local companies,

producing protein-rich foods tailored to local markets.

For that to happen,

we have to stop the disastrous corporate concentration

we've seen in the rest of the food chain.

Intellectual property rights should be weak,

and antitrust laws should be strong.

We have the possibility here

of solving two of our great existential crises

with the same strategy.

By shifting the production of protein-rich food

off the farm, and into the factory,

we could help solve these great predicaments

of hunger and extinction.

Thank you.

(Cheers and applause)