Food for thought: why is farming & food absent from COP26 discussions?
Food for thought: why is farming & food absent from COP26 discussions?
After being rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, COP26 is now right around the corner. This Sunday 31st October, the United Nations Climate Change Conference will begin in Glasgow in an attempt to discuss how we will work to keep global temperatures to below 2C.
Though the global food system currently accounts for a third of total greenhouse gas emissions, discussions about farming and food are largely absent from the COP26 schedule. Many leading academics and local governments have called upon COP26 to give food systems the attention they deserve at the event and push for the transformation of broken food systems that we so desperately need.
It seems strange that food is not one of the main items on the agenda, considering that discussion about the fragility of food systems is arguably more topical than ever - especially following the Covid-19 pandemic. The results of a recent survey confirm that more than 70% of UK consumers want the future of agriculture to be discussed at the upcoming COP26 summit in Glasgow. Despite the event being pushed back a year, food discussions have not been pushed up the agenda.
What neglecting the farming & food discussion could mean
According to a report from the World Benchmarking Alliance, only 7% of the world’s most influential food and agriculture companies have targets and reporting aligned with a 1.5˚C trajectory, while over half of businesses in the benchmark have no climate target at all.
It is incredibly unlikely that we will achieve our climate emission targets without a radical upheaval of our food networks. The way we grow, distribute, trade and consume food is neither sustainable, nor is it particularly effective - poverty levels are increasing even in the richest of countries.
The neglect of farming and food discussion at COP26 follows an underwhelming UN Food Summit, which took place in September 2021. 600 groups and individuals signed a declaration to “reject the ongoing corporate colonization of food systems and food governance […] The struggle for sustainable, just and healthy food systems cannot be unhooked from the realities of the peoples whose rights, knowledge and livelihoods have gone unrecognized and disrespected.”
Further criticisms identified the summit as being all talk, with no action, and that a lack of urgency from our world leaders means that the necessary systematic changes needed to our food networks are unlikely to be realised.
How our food systems contribute to climate change
Discussions at COP26 will be largely focused on energy, transport and fossil fuels. All of these, of course, also interact closely with our damaged food systems.
Roughly ⅓ of the food produced in the world for human consumption gets lost or is wasted every year. This wastes not only the energy used to grow the food, but also the energy used up in the supply chain. The waste in landfill then also produces the gas methane, adding to these unnecessary emissions.
The way in which we transport and trade food is also flawed. In the UK we import many foods that we would be capable of growing ourselves. The way we transport is also crucial to environmental impact - transporting food by air emits around 50 times as many greenhouse gases as transporting the same amount by sea. Sofie Quist at Nourish Scotland suggests that “food trade should be redesigned to protect local food systems rather than generating international profit. We shouldn’t be transporting food around in a way that’s carbon intensive.”
A lesser known issue with our agricultural systems is soil degradation. 95% of the food that we eat comes from soil. Healthy soils can help to combat climate change by capturing and storing carbon dioxide as organic carbon. 1/3 of the world’s arable soils are degraded, largely due to intensive farming practices such as ploughing or excessive use of fertilisers and pesticides.
Another large issue is livestock farming, which is responsible for around 14% of global manmade greenhouse gas emissions. This is largely due to the methane produced by cattle, as well as the ways in which they are kept and fed.
What needs to change?
There have been many calls for COP26 to encourage switching to a plant-based diet, which can drastically reduce your carbon footprint and water usage. According to a University of Oxford study, if everybody cut meat and dairy from their diet there could be a 49% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from food production.
However, in isolation this raises its own issues. Simply switching to a plant-based diet without addressing the environmental problems associated with growing plant-based foods is not enough. For example, fruit and veg make up 45% of global food waste, whilst cereal crops make up 30%. Estimates suggest that 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not consumed. An increase in a vegan diet presumably also increases these figures, unless you are also addressing systemic issues such as waste and fossil fuel use.
This is of course, not to deny the huge benefits of more people adopting a plant-based diet, but to suggest that changes must go beyond diet and what we eat. Setting instructions or recommendations about diet on a global scale avoids the nuances of culturally appropriate foods and agricultural practices. It also shifts responsibility from policymakers onto consumers, when there are many procedural and systematic issues within agriculture that must be addressed.
“Probably the most important thing to point out is that emissions are often viewed as the only metric of sustainability: they are not. Impacts of farming systems on carbon sequestration, soil acidification, water quality, and broader ecosystem services also need to be well considered,” said Matthew Harrison, systems modelling team leader at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture.
Growing methods, transportation, fertiliser use, distribution networks, packaging, waste, energy consumption and the treatment of people involved in the growing, picking, packing and delivery of our food are all crucial to consider in the improvements that need to be made if we are to achieve a more sustainable, fairer food system for all.
How does controlled environment agriculture fit in?
At LettUs Grow we believe that investment in technical innovations are crucial to building more resilient food networks that can deliver more sustainable food to more people. Farmers should be supported and encouraged to access new technologies and implement new practices.
Controlled environment agriculture can be one way of growing more food in a way that means we don’t have to industrially farm our natural environment or drain resources. It is also climate resilient, can boost local food security and can introduce new people and communities to agriculture. However, agricultural technology (agritech) innovations need to be introduced carefully, as part of a far more radical transformation of our food system.
This transformation needs to focus on issues such as the consumer’s relationship with and expectations of food, addressing the disconnect between where food comes from and where it ends up, and the unequal distribution of food across the globe. Much more attention also needs to be given to the financial and mental struggles that burden farmers all around the world.
Perhaps this is why food and farming policy is being neglected at summits such as COP26. Because the changes we need to make to our food systems go beyond setting numerical goals and reduction targets - they need to involve sensitive discussions about the way we think politically, culturally and socially about food, agriculture and land management. We urgently need to connect the knowledge and needs of farmers, environmentalists, policymakers and consumers in order to create a vision for a successful food system that best serves people and the planet.
