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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.
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Speaker 2: There's a good chance that you're listening to this podcast while eating. And sorry, I come to you today with bad news. Your food is likely to get more expensive. Extreme weather events this year are starting to hurt food production in serious ways. And in our tightly linked world, it means everyone's food bill is likely to go up. And wait, there's more bad news. What you're eating also has a carbon cost. Food production accounts for about 25% of planet warming emissions. The majority of those emissions come from raising the animals we slaughter and eat. I'm Akshat Rati. This is Zero, not a doom and gloom podcast. So this week, we'll talk about how to make our food system more secure and less harmful. Joining me on Xero is Paul Behrens, a British Academy Global Professor at the Oxford Martin School, specialising in how our food, energy and economic systems can change fast enough to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. Paul, welcome to Xero. Lovely to be here. There's plenty of extreme weather to talk about, from wildfires to heatwaves, droughts to hurricanes. There's a huge number of impacts to people and animals and nature. But I want to focus on the food system. How bad is it?
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Speaker 1: I would say it's very bad. We have systemically underestimated the impacts of climate change from crop models over time. The crop modeling community is actually really excellent at this, very much doing the validation and the verification of what the models are putting out. And paper after paper is showing that we're underestimating the impacts.
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Speaker 2: Well, you're a scientist. Scientists do good work. You're saying scientists have done good work. but people haven't followed up. The people in power haven't followed up. If the alarm is real and big, and given this summer, everyone's feeling it, why hasn't it quite sunk in for governments?
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Speaker 1: I think because there is a delay between the impacts of climate change on food systems, the increasing amount of that over time, and also the transmission through to prices. So what we see is we see that climate change is now contributing to increasing prices around the world. We know that increasing food prices is one surefire way to increase political instability through cost of living crises, even more extreme sort of state breakdown events like in Syria. And it's not saying that climate change is... you know, the thing or even the main thing. But what it is doing, it is layering on top of all these other stresses that we sort of deal with over time. We take the punches of all sorts of things in human societies and we can't do that any longer due to this climate change. Just to give you one example of the inflation over time, one study found that we should be expecting between one and three percentage points extra food price inflation by 2035. That's year on year. So that's very significant. Now, if you layer on top of that straight of Hormuz, if you layer on top of that Ukraine, Grain interruptions, if you layer on that. El Nino. You're looking at a situation where you've got a big slug of inflation coming through, but it hasn't happened yet. As food system scientists and as climate scientists, we're looking at this and we know it's coming, but it hasn't appeared yet on the receipts, so the politicians aren't noticing and they're not reacting in the way they need to.
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Speaker 2: We had Javier Blas, who is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist on the show, and he looks at soft commodities. He talked about how in the Iran war crisis, you're not quite feeling the food inflation impact because there were bumper years between the Ukraine crisis and the Iran war starting. And there was just a bunch of stored food that is now coming into market and thus the prices are low. But the Ukraine crisis did give us a flavor of what a really extreme supply crisis can do to food prices. Now, maybe the super El Nino is not a Ukraine crisis equivalent, but it's going to do plenty of harm. We had Columbia professor Mingfang Ting, who talked about the large impacts that El Nino will have on the world. But specifically, what do you think the super El Nino is likely to do to food production?
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Speaker 1: I think that it is going to throw a system that's already struggling to adapt, already struggling with climate and geopolitical problems into even further challenges. Previous El Ninos are interesting because you see varied impacts around the world. And on average, previous El Ninos are not necessarily always bad for total global food production. The problem is it's off a baseline that's already very high now. And so now you've got a really big El Nino coming off a baseline that's already high with geopolitical instability. And you've also got a running down of the resilience over time. I mean, there's a really good specific example in the UK. We've got this situation now where farmers are feeding the stored forage for the animals that they would have stored for winter now, which means they're going to have to buy in. Some farms are going to have to buy in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of feed during the winter because they don't have it because of this drought. Now, this is the second year we had that because the grass stops growing over that certain temperature. We've had two hot years. And what this means is you're running down that resilience at the very point at which you need it when El Nino comes and makes things more chaotic. Now, There are specific regions in the world which will see huge problems and damage. And actually, various human agencies are already sounding the alarm for sub-Saharan Africa. 45 million people potentially becoming food insecure extra on top of what it is already. And this is largely because of the way that precipitation patterns change due to El Nino. You've also got situations in Brazil, in the Amazon. The Amazon is set under this El Nino probably to dry quite a bit. This is during a period where it's already on a knife edge, really, in terms of deforestation, in terms of the stability of the rainforest itself. So I have heard other scientists who are Amazon-specific scientists say they're very worried about this next, I would say, six to 12 months.
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Speaker 2: We also had a note from our neighboring country. French growers said that because of these successive heat waves, five of them, there's been a 25% shortfall in courgettes, 35% in lettuce, 40% in peas, 60% in broccolis, and in some places, 100% for artichokes. So these are things that people will likely maybe with the lag start to feel. Are there any countries... taking this food security seriously and putting in place policies to start to address it.
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Speaker 1: There are countries that are doing parts of the picture. That's a very good point about France. I mean, we import in the UK, for example, very, very dependent on imports and about a quarter of our imports come from the Mediterranean and it's really our nutrient supply. We don't just need to think about security in the terms of calories. We need to think about it in terms of the vitamins we need, you know, and and the micronutrients that we need. And I don't know of any country that's looking from the very beginning of the picture right to the very end, except perhaps Denmark. Now, Denmark has seen I guess, in a sense, the writing on the wall in the sense that they are much more existentially exposed due to climate change, due to sea level rise. And so there's a real feeling there. They've had a number of very big TV shows, for example, Families Like Ours by Thomas Vinterberg, the famous director. And I think there's an understanding in that country that, you know, look, we're on the line here. And what they did is they built a tripartite agreement across industry, government, NGOs and farmers. And what they did was develop a plant rich action plan. So, this was all the way across from the supply chain, from the very beginning in terms of starting to put a price on the emissions from agriculture, all the way to the end, like training chefs, investing in alternatives. I would point towards the Danish for a sort of a fuller picture policy. If you're looking at just food security in general, then you can also look at the other Scandinavian countries. Partly, this is not driven by climate change. This is driven by the nearness to Russia. And so we can see Finland, for example, having about nine months storage capacity. In some types of foodstuffs, Sweden as well, Germany is starting to bring back some level of local storage. In the UK and other countries, we're still not taking this very seriously. So in the UK, we have broadly three days to three weeks of food in the country. And that's basically just what's really in the supply chain. We've got to move from this just-in-time supply chain to this just-in-case supply chain, as the National Preparedness Commission pointed out.
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Speaker 2: Well, there's so much on the supply chain side that the UK needs to improve. I mean, gas storage. The UK still needs gas and there is so little gas storage in this country. I'll come back to the plant-based diet because that's one of the solutions here. But let's stick to the things that can mitigate the crisis. So if you just take a few decades, we know that there have been numerous studies that have come out saying that there will come a point where we will run out of land to grow food, where we will chop out on our yields on agriculture, we will run into a hunger crisis, and then some sort of technology leap has come through and saved us. Now, just to put some numbers here, if you look at figures on cereal production, so that's wheat, rice, barley, oats, it's up by 250% since 1960. The growth in population is about 150%. The land used for cereals has grown by 15%. So these huge productivity gains, that come from technology have been real and have really saved us. Why will it not happen again?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, just a very good point. And put that in perspective, two out of every five of us is alive today due to artificial fertilisers. which have been applied to soils around the world.
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Speaker 2: I like to think about it as two-fifths of us is made out of artificial food.
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Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, we can be more equitable. Yeah, we can all have a bit of synthetic fertilizer. Yeah, nitrogen inside us. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I like that. Probably my arms. So the key thing here is that yields have gone up over time. And sometimes when I'm talking about the chances of multi-breadbasket failure, I'm talking about impacts of climate change. all the way from the increasing range of pests, for example, which actually just increase due to climate change, it turns out they don't decrease, to lower nutrient content due to the higher CO2 in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we thought originally that plants might grow more due to the fear of CO2, because people would say, ah, plant food. Turns out that's not true. There's all sorts of limiting factors. And so we actually won't get that benefit. But not only will we not get that benefit, but plants will reduce the amount of nutrients they're producing as well. So it's all very very worrying, not just from the big extreme events, but just these broader trends. Of course, yields are still ticking up. It's not the overall increase that you need to be looking at. You need to look at the rate of the increase. Climate change has knocked off about 21% of the yield growth we thought would happen. That was up until, I believe, 2015, so even more now. You're running faster and faster to stand still. What you were referring to in terms of the overall yields is this green revolution, this quote-unquote green revolution, because some people don't think of it as all that green. This is a mixture of breeding in terms of the crops that you have and the application of fertilisers and agricultural inputs like pesticides and herbicides. Of course, these have all driven their own environmental issues. Actually, the key one there is that they've largely driven the reduction in biodiversity. Both the land use and also those inputs have driven the huge reduction in biodiversity around the world. And this is turning into a sort of a biodiversity crisis, if you like. The way I like to think about it is that biodiversity sits up there with climate. So, you know, in terms of what we need to be worried about. And a lot of biodiversity, things like insects and pollinators, this is really the mortar between the bricks of our society because they make and regulate all the things that allow us to continue on as the foundations of our society. So we can't really do that again now. There are technologies out there that can help. I mean, there are things that we can do with genetically modified crops. There's precision agriculture, controlled environment agriculture. All of this would require, largely require changes in the way in which we see food, the way in which we grow food, the way in which we finance food. But ultimately, it's limited what can be done, especially in the short term, which I'm very worried about now. We can't continue to produce food in the way that we have, sort of seeing land as a little bit of a factory, just squeezing out as much calories as we possibly can.
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Speaker 2: We talk a lot about the energy system when it comes to climate change, because 75 to 80% of the emissions come from the energy system. And so it's something you can focus on. But there are parallels between the energy system and the food system that we don't talk about enough, because we know that fossil fuels are bad for us, but we need the energy, so we burn fossil fuels anyway. That's true of the food system too. We had George Monbiot, the author of the book, Regenesis on the show a few years ago. And he said, agriculture is one of the greatest causes of water pollution, of air pollution, of climate breakdown and of biodiversity loss. So our agricultural practices give us the food we want, but there is really poor understanding in the public about the fact that the methods of our agriculture are also destroying the planet and thus making the food system itself unsustainable.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, so first thing I'd say, the food we want. That's a really interesting way of putting it because I would say that we do not have freedom of choice of the food that we eat. We live in a food environment that's heavily shaped by policies, by the things that we're not paying for in terms of those environmental damage. And I would agree with George on those impacts. I'd go even further. I'd say agriculture is the largest driver of antimicrobial resistance. One of the largest drivers is zoonotics disease. I would say that, yeah, water and air pollution. So ultimately, it is eroding the very foundations on which it relies. It's an interesting point about energy systems because agriculture has, depending on what you include, our assessments say something like 20% of global energy, the FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization. If you draw the system boundary much wider, it says about 40% of energy goes into agriculture. But the core boundaries point is that even if we were to decarbonize all of that and it decarbonize all of the rest of the energy system food system emissions on their own would be enough to blow us past 1.5 i mean anything would at this stage but even beyond two degrees of warming and this is largely because of the non-co2 gases that are emitted by agriculture um things like methane nitrous oxide but also the deforestation that's associated with agricultural expansion. So really, the system is untenable. Right now, this system is probably, if you're looking at the broad scope of the environmental impacts, it is the biggest single driver of most of those environmental impacts, except for climate change, which is the second biggest driver. So you couldn't think of a more damaging system right now for the environment.
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Speaker 2: So again, taking that parallel with the energy system, One thing that we have done with the energy system is for the energy we want, we have ended up subsidizing it to make sure we have it. And we've done the same thing with the food we want. We subsidize food heavily. Now we have started to target subsidies on energy and the G7 and the G20 have put that language about reducing subsidies on fossil fuels for a long time. They haven't really acted, but at least they're talking about it. More recently in 2022, At the Biodiversity Conference COP15, all countries pledged that they will remove harmful subsidies of the order of $ 500 billion a year that affect biodiversity. Is there any progress on actually cutting down bad subsidies?
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, to put these costs into perspective, global agricultural systems cause damage of the order of $ 12 trillion a year globally. This is an estimate from the FAO. It's, I believe, a little bit larger than the total economic output of agriculture. So actually, it's running us into ground, even if you were to make those estimates.
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Speaker 2: How do you do that?
00:16:57
Speaker 1: So it includes all the environmental damages. It includes health Because, of course, although we've got this system that appears that it's providing such luxury, it's actually driving huge levels of obesity. I mean, over 50% in some countries. It's driving malnutrition and micronutrient insufficiency in some regions because of the way that it's built up. And so you get to this really large number. And, you know, you look at a country like the UK, for example. estimates suggest that if we ate a healthy diet with the productivity gains, with the health improvements, you could be yielding tens to hundreds of billions of pounds a year in benefits. I mean, in terms of the subsidies, I actually see things going in the wrong direction in some countries. So one of the things that I'm sort of deeply concerned about is the fact that, well, we see that the animal agriculture, and maybe we can get onto this, but the animal agriculture that's We know needs to shift and we know we need to do things in a different way. Over time, that's exposed to more climate impacts generally than the crops. So we know that cattle, for example, during the recent heat waves have been producing between 10 and 20% less milk due to the heat waves in the UK. We know that... We then need cooling. We need to put lots of money into that. We need investments. We need more and more assets. And that's going to raise prices. But then we've also got the upstream feed that's required for chicken, for pigs and poultry, for example. And we know that that's exposed. So you're actually exposed through multiple pathways to climate change, not even taking into account infrastructure and all the rest of it. And what you see is governments going, oh, yeah, we've got to keep this system going. Let's provide more and more subsidies for exactly these sectors that need to keep going. And instead, I would argue, yeah, sure, you could subsidise, but subsidise through a transformation, through a transition. Subsidise to help people move out, to produce different crops, to rewild, to do all sorts of things on the land. But that's not what's happening in countries like the US, for example, where they're actually just doubling down on the subsidies as more and more of the livestock get diseased, get injured, die due to sort of climate impacts and the related climate impacts like pest spread.
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Speaker 2: After the break, more of my conversation with Paul Behrens. If you're enjoying this episode of Xero, please take a moment to rate and review the show on whichever platform you're listening on. This is something that I've thought about for a long time because I grew up vegetarian in India. The first time I ate beef was when I came to this country, studying in university. And within that first year of university, there was a report from the UN, Livestock's Long Shadow, that talked about the sheer impact livestock has on the planet. And this was 2006, 20 years ago. Within a year, I stopped eating beef and I ran a campaign to try and get a meat-free day in the university. Those numbers are stunning. You know, 50% of the food sector's emissions are from raising livestock. But then the other side is also stunning. Since 1960, meat consumption has grown fivefold from 70 million tons to 373 million tons. In that period, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions has only gone up two and a half times. So meat consumption is something that people seem to really, really want. You talked about a plant based diet, you're a big proponent of it, there are just numbers that make sense. But how do you get policy changes that make people want to eat less meat?
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Speaker 1: It's a great question. And to be clear, I ate meat a long time as well. And actually, it was my research that started to show me what it was all about. And I realized that I had to shift. And I went on a journey. And I think one of the things we've got to understand is that We're all on a journey. You know, it's like nothing's easy when you start and you go on first step and you this next step and the next step. And, you know, you walk on the way and the way appears. And so for me, it's any policies when you're looking at these policies is how do you help people make the choices that are healthier for us? I mean, and that's the really key point is that this stuff is healthier for us, especially in high income countries. So in high-income countries, moving to a plant-rich diet, that's not a completely vegan diet. That's on the order of a beef burger once every two weeks, a chicken fillet once a week, some dairy a day. That would reduce our emissions from our diets about 61%. If we were to then save the land associated with that shift, so actually we'd be able to produce a healthier diet on the remaining land, only a tiny fraction would need to be used to make up the plant proteins that we'd need because Basically, there's an inefficiency in the livestock there. You would save an area almost the size of the EU across high-income countries, and you'd be able to draw down about 14 years of agricultural emissions. The way that I think policymakers then need to think about it, that's the science, okay, whatever. Then you can think about, well, what does that mean for people on the ground? And what does that mean for communities up and down different countries? And for me, that is networks of rewilding, networks of parks up and down the country, access to nature for people, which you know is good for people's mental health. You can see better floodwater absorption, better storm surge absorption. So you can roll with the punches of climate change better, have healthier water, water that you can swim in and not full of effluent from animals. cleaner air because actually agriculture drives a lot of these secondary particulates that you get in the atmosphere. So you can reduce the load there. And you can have, as I say, this network of nature up and down countries which is going to allow us to deal with these impacts. On top of that, you would save yourself enough land to actually get your multi-cropping going, your more resilient agriculture going. So it's a health issue. It's a resilient agriculture issue. It's an economic issue because agriculture With our research, we find that about 82% of subsidies currently go to animal agriculture in the EU, for example. That's through both feed and directly to the livestock. Now, that can be transitioned to help farmers out. And what we find is that the assets on the farm would go down, so farmers wouldn't face so much debt. And our recent work is suggesting, this is a preprint, so it needs to go through peer review, but we're finding that in some countries like the UK, the agricultural system and farmers on the whole could make more money with this transition. So these are all messages for policymakers.
00:23:39
Speaker 2: But this should then land with policymakers. Right now, especially in rich countries, but certainly true in developing countries, the amount that governments can spend is tight. Their borrowing is at a high level, interest rates that are at a high level. They have all these security threats. non-food ones that they have to deal with, trade wars, real wars. But they are looking for policy successes where they can redirect money that they are already spending to things that can have benefits. Why, then, has this not landed? Because it's not like the theoretical work has not been done for years or decades.
00:24:15
Speaker 1: Well, I think the theoretical work on what this means for the agricultural sector is fairly new, actually. I think this is work that we've just been doing in terms of looking at... the income for farmers. And really, that's only been over the last five, six years. Nobody's been focused on... People, of course, have looked into the economics of farming, but they haven't looked into what does the economics of farming look like with such a transition that the environmental scientists are telling us. You're quite right on the environmental science side. That's been well established for some time now as a consensus. The ultimate reason why this isn't done yet is a mixture of the joined up thinking across different governments. Often it's siloed, so you get your health ministry, you might get your environment ministry, you might get your rural ministry, and they're not talking to one another. You might get your treasury, for example, that doesn't really grasp the benefits. That's a key one. The second one, which is really key, is the role of vested interests in this. You talked about meat consumption. It's a very similar story to fossil fuels, really. So we have all of this great academic work in journals like Science and Nature showing how the fossil industry knew about climate change. They actually did very good models and assessments back in the 70s and 80s. And actually, it's starting to emerge that the same thing happened with meat and dairy. And actually, there's the first few papers coming out in the academic literature showing this documentation now. And, of course, these industries are extremely good at defending the status quo because that's essentially what they're based on doing. I mean, they're good at public relations. That is what a company is supposed to do, is do public relations, get people to buy things. And I think, finally, I think governments could be far more creative about financing how this might look. I know in some countries, for example, they're looking at health bonds. So, this is where the health sector would issue bonds on the basis of improving the health of the population and saving those health costs later down the road. Obviously, there's an issue of financialization there. In Sweden, where they tried this, it was a fairly government-related bank that bought them. So, it's all a little bit circular. But there are sort of interesting ways of sort of financing some of these things which would keep the benefits in the community.
00:26:29
Speaker 2: So one place we have seen government policy come to change behaviour is the sugar tax. So the UK, for example, has introduced a sugar tax on high sugar drinks and there has been a positive impact. We can see that average daily consumption of sugar has fallen by about five grams per day for children and 11 grams for adults. Could you introduce a meat tax?
00:26:54
Speaker 1: The sugar tax is an interesting example of what I was mentioning. I mean, the vicious fighting tooth and nail, the vested interest in that was..
00:27:01
Speaker 2: Incredible.
00:27:03
Speaker 1: It took years to come through. Yes, it has been broadly successful in as far as it goes. It's not necessarily reshaped the whole food environment that we need. A meat tax is interesting because I think this relates to the idea that we really underestimate what we are willing to do. We underestimate our neighbours. For example, we typically underestimate 10, 20, 30% where the actual support is. There's been a number of studies that have gone around the world now, and this is shown across country by country. showing that if you ask people what percentage of people in this country support environmental action X, it will be much higher than they think it is. For example, in the US, people thought that around 32-34% of people supported a carbon tax, which is like, you know, yeah, I would think that and probably even lower. The actual support was above 60%. Now, coming back to the meat tax, meat tax is one of the harder ones. Now, In a study that looked at MPs, you see the same picture that the MPs underestimate the public in a country like the UK. And I would presume this is broadly similar in other countries too. For a meat tax is interesting. I believe it was around 20, somewhere between 20 and 25% was what MPs thought that the public would support it. And the actual support, and I might get the second digit wrong, but it's something like 42%. So it's not at that above 50% yet, but it's certainly much higher than you might think. I mean, if you were to say meat tax and you were to guess what percentage of people supported it, you would think probably lower than that.
00:28:43
Speaker 2: Now, if we keep meat tax apart or even park the idea of trying to change the behaviour on meat, are there technologies that you think in the next 10 years could try and support some of the action? So Lab-grown meat, precision fermentation, genetically modified crops, drought-resistant crops, anything that you think is on the edge and really could come to commercial use and make a real impact?
00:29:12
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I would... class quite a few of those technologies as shifts in our food environment and diets as well. So precision fermentation, for example. And I think precision fermentation is the most exciting development actually so far. It is becoming extremely efficient. It's becoming economically competitive. You're seeing products on the market right now across the world.
00:29:37
Speaker 2: Examples?
00:29:38
Speaker 1: So you've got products in a single You've got products in Israel. You've got products that are now sort of making and hitting shelves. For example, there's this huge trend now to consuming more protein. Partly, I think this is driven by various advertising and interests. But, you know, there's companies that are producing precision fermented whey at a very, very high quality. And that's one of the really exciting things about precision fermentation generally is that it's really high quality. And the nutrition outputs that I've seen so far in its early days, I want to sort of caveat that, but both for precision fermentation and sort of cellular agriculture for meat, it shows that the nutrient profiles are really good. They're much better than the sort of open field products. So that's really quite exciting. And what we're seeing is a similar learning curve in terms of the reductions as in other technologies. I wouldn't say it's quite up there with wind and solar. I mean, that was pretty extreme. I mean, there we're talking 20, 30%. So for every doubling of the capacity, you see a 20% to 30% reduction in cost. We're hoping to do the first sort of assessment for precision fermentation, but it's certainly non-negligible. And anything non-negligible on a learning curve is impressive.
00:30:58
Speaker 2: What about vertical farming? You didn't bring that up because we've had a conversation with CEOs of vertical farming companies and, you know, there was a boom recently. And then there was a bust and we haven't really heard back from the bust whether the boom is coming back.
00:31:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, vertical farming is an interesting one. I think for some products, for some nutrients, it may be good sort of niche products that can compete. So, you know, you're talking about microgreens, your tomatoes, sometimes even pharmaceutical inputs that come from plants. I can definitely see that there are opportunities there. I think when you're talking about sort of large macronutrients, you know, your fats, your sugars, your proteins, I don't see it contributing that much myself, largely because of the huge energy inputs that are required for that. One thing I will say about photogarpharma, which is really interesting, is there are a number of unanticipated benefits that you get. Things like you don't have to wash the salad leaves. And what that means is if you don't have to wash the salad leaves because it's grown in a clean environment, then you don't get the wastage. So you can have salad that's sitting there in your fridge that's going to last three weeks, not a few days. So that's quite interesting because then if you look at the whole food system impact there, you're not actually just talking about, you know, potentially having a more resilient production system that's resilient to the elements, potentially, although you're swapping it for energy inputs that could be impacted. You're actually looking at the reduction of waste down the line as well. So you have to add that in. So there's some interesting things. The other one is that, you know, vertical farms, in vertical farms, you're limited by the sink capacity. of the plant, not the source. So normally in open field agriculture, you're limited by water or you're limited by sunlight, you're limited by nutrients. In vertical farming, it's actually the reverse because you can control all of that. And it's actually the genetics of the plants that's the problem because the plants themselves, they are often in an open field, they're just trying to stay alive and they put a lot of energy into staying alive. Now, we use those same plants in vertical farming, but you don't need it anymore. And so actually, there's a huge breeding program that could happen to improve the overall production and economics of vertical farming for vertical farming specific plants that you could actually then produce more from. And because you're able to control all of the sources, they taste magical because they can just basically put all their energy into producing wonderful flavors. So, All up, I think there is a little bit of a role, but I still see it more as a niche role compared to something like precision fermentation, which I think can be wildly successful.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: One of the earlier stories I wrote was about this guy named John Leary, who'd worked with local communities in places like Senegal, where he was helping restore degraded farmland into what are called forest gardens. where some trees, some crops were grown together to provide fruit and vegetable and maybe some cereal, which did a mixture of like giving food security to the community that is growing because it's a different types of fruits and different types of foods covering all types of nutrients that you want, but also essentially converting wasteland into a useful asset. But again, Only a few countries have done that, and it feels like a win-win-win that more places could do, but it really is difficult to see how it scales.
00:34:28
Speaker 1: That's the issue with a lot of these sort of approaches is the scaling. Because what they're doing is actually fighting against a broader external system that is pushing a certain model of agriculture. So we see sort of large agribusinesses, we see the sort of multinational interests trying to find new markets as all, you know, capitalistic companies will do. But unfortunately, instead of having the power to push back on that and say, no, we're going to go a different way and we're going to actually do something that actually leapfrogs where you guys are at, you're often in a situation where the pressure is to go down the same intensification road as other countries and also pressure for deforestation that actually erodes those benefits. So at the very time when in the high-income countries we're talking about bringing back those sorts of production systems, so multi-cropping, agroforestry, agroecological approaches. You'll have companies that are really trying to push hard into the developing countries to produce in the same way that we always have. It's not too dissimilar to other trends. Tobacco, we saw a reduction in tobacco in high-income countries. Now that's being pushed to middle and lower income countries. So you can see the sort of same sort of pattern continuing on. In terms of scaling, I think this is coming back to your point about policymakers again. It's like there is a real, I think, fear of touching this because of the impression that they get from the public. I think misinformed impression, but the impression nonetheless. And I think what people don't realize is unlike say, in other areas like the energy transition. A lot of these food system transformations are going to happen anyway because of the physics of the situation, because of climate change. Energy is exposed to climate change, but not quite as much as agriculture. There's no AC on a field. And so, policymakers, both in lower income and upper and higher income countries, are going to have to deal with this. And I think high income countries especially have a responsibility towards lower income countries to not export production systems that are going to erode the foundations going forwards.
00:36:35
Speaker 2: So now we can start to imagine a system without fossil fuels. Maybe they play a tiny part in some form because we need it for fractional demand at the end of the century. I can't imagine a world where there is no agriculture. So we need a net zero agriculture system. What does that look like?
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that really looks like the picture I mentioned before. So in high income countries and actually upper middle income countries, we have the shifts to eating more plants, better for us, better for the land. And then you're able to use that land as a land sink. I mean, you know, so many of these climate models, they have quite a lot of carbon dioxide removal involved in them. And the least regret carbon dioxide removal that we should be looking at is then reducing having the return to potential natural vegetation or so-called rewilding, active or passive, or however you want to do it. Even sort of bringing more carbon back on the land as well in farming, for example. So you've got to sort of straddle this situation where you're wanting to bring down carbon from the atmosphere onto the land to reverse a lot of the carbon that we've lost from soils through the centuries. while making sure that the food system is resilient and you're producing enough. So that's going to be a tightrope that we're going to have to walk while addressing both the production and the consumption side. Because if your production side changes, as it is in the UK right now, we've got these investments for the Sustainable Farming Initiative, we've got investments for nature, for example. But if we don't address the consumption side, we just buy it from elsewhere. So that's why there's lots of good campaigns to buy British beans, to buy British legumes, our plant proteins, because that then syncs up the production side changes with the consumption side changes. And ultimately, the picture is that the way I see it in high income nations, at least in upper middle income nations, is you would have this shift, you would save a huge amount of land, and that land then allows you to do some of the production operations that you just mentioned, which are more resilient. they generally do take more land because you're not treating land like that factory anymore. So you are going to need some of that spared land to do that. You're also going to have land that can be set aside in reserve through different years if you get hit by a yield. I mean, yield losses in this country, we've seen normally wheat yields at around 8 tonnes per hectare in the UK. Last year it came in at 6.9 and we had the earliest harvest in 20 years because of the dryness. That equates to more land area. you know, if we're going to continue having those sorts of damages. And how are we going to get that land? And it's just got to have to be through these plant-rich transitions. I think on top of that, you know, you do have a role for technology on open field agriculture. So precision farming, for example, where we apply water and fertilizers and pesticides, herbicides very, very accurately through the field. You have all sorts of automation that's going to be important this is why i work in the areas because i'm simultaneously utterly terrified about all of the impacts and multi-bread basket failures which uh you know the odds that the chances are going up but on the same side i'm so so excited by the opportunities This is what.
00:39:46
Speaker 2: Keeps me going on the climate beat. So thank you for joining the show, Paul.
00:39:50
Speaker 1: Great. Thank you, Akshay.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: And thank you for listening to Zero. We'll link to Paul's book, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, in the show notes. Now for the sound of the week. That is the sound of two tarantulas drumming, tapping their feet rapidly to say they're ready to mate. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Somersadi and Alyssa MacDonald. I'm Akshat Rati, back soon.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.
00:00:08
Speaker 2: There's a good chance that you're listening to this podcast while eating. And sorry, I come to you today with bad news. Your food is likely to get more expensive. Extreme weather events this year are starting to hurt food production in serious ways. And in our tightly linked world, it means everyone's food bill is likely to go up. And wait, there's more bad news. What you're eating also has a carbon cost. Food production accounts for about 25% of planet warming emissions. The majority of those emissions come from raising the animals we slaughter and eat. I'm Akshat Rati. This is Zero, not a doom and gloom podcast. So this week, we'll talk about how to make our food system more secure and less harmful. Joining me on Xero is Paul Behrens, a British Academy Global Professor at the Oxford Martin School, specialising in how our food, energy and economic systems can change fast enough to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. Paul, welcome to Xero. Lovely to be here. There's plenty of extreme weather to talk about, from wildfires to heatwaves, droughts to hurricanes. There's a huge number of impacts to people and animals and nature. But I want to focus on the food system. How bad is it?
00:01:31
Speaker 1: I would say it's very bad. We have systemically underestimated the impacts of climate change from crop models over time. The crop modeling community is actually really excellent at this, very much doing the validation and the verification of what the models are putting out. And paper after paper is showing that we're underestimating the impacts.
00:01:53
Speaker 2: Well, you're a scientist. Scientists do good work. You're saying scientists have done good work. but people haven't followed up. The people in power haven't followed up. If the alarm is real and big, and given this summer, everyone's feeling it, why hasn't it quite sunk in for governments?
00:02:14
Speaker 1: I think because there is a delay between the impacts of climate change on food systems, the increasing amount of that over time, and also the transmission through to prices. So what we see is we see that climate change is now contributing to increasing prices around the world. We know that increasing food prices is one surefire way to increase political instability through cost of living crises, even more extreme sort of state breakdown events like in Syria. And it's not saying that climate change is... you know, the thing or even the main thing. But what it is doing, it is layering on top of all these other stresses that we sort of deal with over time. We take the punches of all sorts of things in human societies and we can't do that any longer due to this climate change. Just to give you one example of the inflation over time, one study found that we should be expecting between one and three percentage points extra food price inflation by 2035. That's year on year. So that's very significant. Now, if you layer on top of that straight of Hormuz, if you layer on top of that Ukraine, Grain interruptions, if you layer on that. El Nino. You're looking at a situation where you've got a big slug of inflation coming through, but it hasn't happened yet. As food system scientists and as climate scientists, we're looking at this and we know it's coming, but it hasn't appeared yet on the receipts, so the politicians aren't noticing and they're not reacting in the way they need to.
00:03:33
Speaker 2: We had Javier Blas, who is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist on the show, and he looks at soft commodities. He talked about how in the Iran war crisis, you're not quite feeling the food inflation impact because there were bumper years between the Ukraine crisis and the Iran war starting. And there was just a bunch of stored food that is now coming into market and thus the prices are low. But the Ukraine crisis did give us a flavor of what a really extreme supply crisis can do to food prices. Now, maybe the super El Nino is not a Ukraine crisis equivalent, but it's going to do plenty of harm. We had Columbia professor Mingfang Ting, who talked about the large impacts that El Nino will have on the world. But specifically, what do you think the super El Nino is likely to do to food production?
00:04:24
Speaker 1: I think that it is going to throw a system that's already struggling to adapt, already struggling with climate and geopolitical problems into even further challenges. Previous El Ninos are interesting because you see varied impacts around the world. And on average, previous El Ninos are not necessarily always bad for total global food production. The problem is it's off a baseline that's already very high now. And so now you've got a really big El Nino coming off a baseline that's already high with geopolitical instability. And you've also got a running down of the resilience over time. I mean, there's a really good specific example in the UK. We've got this situation now where farmers are feeding the stored forage for the animals that they would have stored for winter now, which means they're going to have to buy in. Some farms are going to have to buy in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of feed during the winter because they don't have it because of this drought. Now, this is the second year we had that because the grass stops growing over that certain temperature. We've had two hot years. And what this means is you're running down that resilience at the very point at which you need it when El Nino comes and makes things more chaotic. Now, There are specific regions in the world which will see huge problems and damage. And actually, various human agencies are already sounding the alarm for sub-Saharan Africa. 45 million people potentially becoming food insecure extra on top of what it is already. And this is largely because of the way that precipitation patterns change due to El Nino. You've also got situations in Brazil, in the Amazon. The Amazon is set under this El Nino probably to dry quite a bit. This is during a period where it's already on a knife edge, really, in terms of deforestation, in terms of the stability of the rainforest itself. So I have heard other scientists who are Amazon-specific scientists say they're very worried about this next, I would say, six to 12 months.
00:06:15
Speaker 2: We also had a note from our neighboring country. French growers said that because of these successive heat waves, five of them, there's been a 25% shortfall in courgettes, 35% in lettuce, 40% in peas, 60% in broccolis, and in some places, 100% for artichokes. So these are things that people will likely maybe with the lag start to feel. Are there any countries... taking this food security seriously and putting in place policies to start to address it.
00:06:52
Speaker 1: There are countries that are doing parts of the picture. That's a very good point about France. I mean, we import in the UK, for example, very, very dependent on imports and about a quarter of our imports come from the Mediterranean and it's really our nutrient supply. We don't just need to think about security in the terms of calories. We need to think about it in terms of the vitamins we need, you know, and and the micronutrients that we need. And I don't know of any country that's looking from the very beginning of the picture right to the very end, except perhaps Denmark. Now, Denmark has seen I guess, in a sense, the writing on the wall in the sense that they are much more existentially exposed due to climate change, due to sea level rise. And so there's a real feeling there. They've had a number of very big TV shows, for example, Families Like Ours by Thomas Vinterberg, the famous director. And I think there's an understanding in that country that, you know, look, we're on the line here. And what they did is they built a tripartite agreement across industry, government, NGOs and farmers. And what they did was develop a plant rich action plan. So, this was all the way across from the supply chain, from the very beginning in terms of starting to put a price on the emissions from agriculture, all the way to the end, like training chefs, investing in alternatives. I would point towards the Danish for a sort of a fuller picture policy. If you're looking at just food security in general, then you can also look at the other Scandinavian countries. Partly, this is not driven by climate change. This is driven by the nearness to Russia. And so we can see Finland, for example, having about nine months storage capacity. In some types of foodstuffs, Sweden as well, Germany is starting to bring back some level of local storage. In the UK and other countries, we're still not taking this very seriously. So in the UK, we have broadly three days to three weeks of food in the country. And that's basically just what's really in the supply chain. We've got to move from this just-in-time supply chain to this just-in-case supply chain, as the National Preparedness Commission pointed out.
00:08:55
Speaker 2: Well, there's so much on the supply chain side that the UK needs to improve. I mean, gas storage. The UK still needs gas and there is so little gas storage in this country. I'll come back to the plant-based diet because that's one of the solutions here. But let's stick to the things that can mitigate the crisis. So if you just take a few decades, we know that there have been numerous studies that have come out saying that there will come a point where we will run out of land to grow food, where we will chop out on our yields on agriculture, we will run into a hunger crisis, and then some sort of technology leap has come through and saved us. Now, just to put some numbers here, if you look at figures on cereal production, so that's wheat, rice, barley, oats, it's up by 250% since 1960. The growth in population is about 150%. The land used for cereals has grown by 15%. So these huge productivity gains, that come from technology have been real and have really saved us. Why will it not happen again?
00:10:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, just a very good point. And put that in perspective, two out of every five of us is alive today due to artificial fertilisers. which have been applied to soils around the world.
00:10:18
Speaker 2: I like to think about it as two-fifths of us is made out of artificial food.
00:10:22
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, we can be more equitable. Yeah, we can all have a bit of synthetic fertilizer. Yeah, nitrogen inside us. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I like that. Probably my arms. So the key thing here is that yields have gone up over time. And sometimes when I'm talking about the chances of multi-breadbasket failure, I'm talking about impacts of climate change. all the way from the increasing range of pests, for example, which actually just increase due to climate change, it turns out they don't decrease, to lower nutrient content due to the higher CO2 in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we thought originally that plants might grow more due to the fear of CO2, because people would say, ah, plant food. Turns out that's not true. There's all sorts of limiting factors. And so we actually won't get that benefit. But not only will we not get that benefit, but plants will reduce the amount of nutrients they're producing as well. So it's all very very worrying, not just from the big extreme events, but just these broader trends. Of course, yields are still ticking up. It's not the overall increase that you need to be looking at. You need to look at the rate of the increase. Climate change has knocked off about 21% of the yield growth we thought would happen. That was up until, I believe, 2015, so even more now. You're running faster and faster to stand still. What you were referring to in terms of the overall yields is this green revolution, this quote-unquote green revolution, because some people don't think of it as all that green. This is a mixture of breeding in terms of the crops that you have and the application of fertilisers and agricultural inputs like pesticides and herbicides. Of course, these have all driven their own environmental issues. Actually, the key one there is that they've largely driven the reduction in biodiversity. Both the land use and also those inputs have driven the huge reduction in biodiversity around the world. And this is turning into a sort of a biodiversity crisis, if you like. The way I like to think about it is that biodiversity sits up there with climate. So, you know, in terms of what we need to be worried about. And a lot of biodiversity, things like insects and pollinators, this is really the mortar between the bricks of our society because they make and regulate all the things that allow us to continue on as the foundations of our society. So we can't really do that again now. There are technologies out there that can help. I mean, there are things that we can do with genetically modified crops. There's precision agriculture, controlled environment agriculture. All of this would require, largely require changes in the way in which we see food, the way in which we grow food, the way in which we finance food. But ultimately, it's limited what can be done, especially in the short term, which I'm very worried about now. We can't continue to produce food in the way that we have, sort of seeing land as a little bit of a factory, just squeezing out as much calories as we possibly can.
00:13:09
Speaker 2: We talk a lot about the energy system when it comes to climate change, because 75 to 80% of the emissions come from the energy system. And so it's something you can focus on. But there are parallels between the energy system and the food system that we don't talk about enough, because we know that fossil fuels are bad for us, but we need the energy, so we burn fossil fuels anyway. That's true of the food system too. We had George Monbiot, the author of the book, Regenesis on the show a few years ago. And he said, agriculture is one of the greatest causes of water pollution, of air pollution, of climate breakdown and of biodiversity loss. So our agricultural practices give us the food we want, but there is really poor understanding in the public about the fact that the methods of our agriculture are also destroying the planet and thus making the food system itself unsustainable.
00:14:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, so first thing I'd say, the food we want. That's a really interesting way of putting it because I would say that we do not have freedom of choice of the food that we eat. We live in a food environment that's heavily shaped by policies, by the things that we're not paying for in terms of those environmental damage. And I would agree with George on those impacts. I'd go even further. I'd say agriculture is the largest driver of antimicrobial resistance. One of the largest drivers is zoonotics disease. I would say that, yeah, water and air pollution. So ultimately, it is eroding the very foundations on which it relies. It's an interesting point about energy systems because agriculture has, depending on what you include, our assessments say something like 20% of global energy, the FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization. If you draw the system boundary much wider, it says about 40% of energy goes into agriculture. But the core boundaries point is that even if we were to decarbonize all of that and it decarbonize all of the rest of the energy system food system emissions on their own would be enough to blow us past 1.5 i mean anything would at this stage but even beyond two degrees of warming and this is largely because of the non-co2 gases that are emitted by agriculture um things like methane nitrous oxide but also the deforestation that's associated with agricultural expansion. So really, the system is untenable. Right now, this system is probably, if you're looking at the broad scope of the environmental impacts, it is the biggest single driver of most of those environmental impacts, except for climate change, which is the second biggest driver. So you couldn't think of a more damaging system right now for the environment.
00:15:46
Speaker 2: So again, taking that parallel with the energy system, One thing that we have done with the energy system is for the energy we want, we have ended up subsidizing it to make sure we have it. And we've done the same thing with the food we want. We subsidize food heavily. Now we have started to target subsidies on energy and the G7 and the G20 have put that language about reducing subsidies on fossil fuels for a long time. They haven't really acted, but at least they're talking about it. More recently in 2022, At the Biodiversity Conference COP15, all countries pledged that they will remove harmful subsidies of the order of $ 500 billion a year that affect biodiversity. Is there any progress on actually cutting down bad subsidies?
00:16:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, to put these costs into perspective, global agricultural systems cause damage of the order of $ 12 trillion a year globally. This is an estimate from the FAO. It's, I believe, a little bit larger than the total economic output of agriculture. So actually, it's running us into ground, even if you were to make those estimates.
00:16:56
Speaker 2: How do you do that?
00:16:57
Speaker 1: So it includes all the environmental damages. It includes health Because, of course, although we've got this system that appears that it's providing such luxury, it's actually driving huge levels of obesity. I mean, over 50% in some countries. It's driving malnutrition and micronutrient insufficiency in some regions because of the way that it's built up. And so you get to this really large number. And, you know, you look at a country like the UK, for example. estimates suggest that if we ate a healthy diet with the productivity gains, with the health improvements, you could be yielding tens to hundreds of billions of pounds a year in benefits. I mean, in terms of the subsidies, I actually see things going in the wrong direction in some countries. So one of the things that I'm sort of deeply concerned about is the fact that, well, we see that the animal agriculture, and maybe we can get onto this, but the animal agriculture that's We know needs to shift and we know we need to do things in a different way. Over time, that's exposed to more climate impacts generally than the crops. So we know that cattle, for example, during the recent heat waves have been producing between 10 and 20% less milk due to the heat waves in the UK. We know that... We then need cooling. We need to put lots of money into that. We need investments. We need more and more assets. And that's going to raise prices. But then we've also got the upstream feed that's required for chicken, for pigs and poultry, for example. And we know that that's exposed. So you're actually exposed through multiple pathways to climate change, not even taking into account infrastructure and all the rest of it. And what you see is governments going, oh, yeah, we've got to keep this system going. Let's provide more and more subsidies for exactly these sectors that need to keep going. And instead, I would argue, yeah, sure, you could subsidise, but subsidise through a transformation, through a transition. Subsidise to help people move out, to produce different crops, to rewild, to do all sorts of things on the land. But that's not what's happening in countries like the US, for example, where they're actually just doubling down on the subsidies as more and more of the livestock get diseased, get injured, die due to sort of climate impacts and the related climate impacts like pest spread.
00:19:14
Speaker 2: After the break, more of my conversation with Paul Behrens. If you're enjoying this episode of Xero, please take a moment to rate and review the show on whichever platform you're listening on. This is something that I've thought about for a long time because I grew up vegetarian in India. The first time I ate beef was when I came to this country, studying in university. And within that first year of university, there was a report from the UN, Livestock's Long Shadow, that talked about the sheer impact livestock has on the planet. And this was 2006, 20 years ago. Within a year, I stopped eating beef and I ran a campaign to try and get a meat-free day in the university. Those numbers are stunning. You know, 50% of the food sector's emissions are from raising livestock. But then the other side is also stunning. Since 1960, meat consumption has grown fivefold from 70 million tons to 373 million tons. In that period, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions has only gone up two and a half times. So meat consumption is something that people seem to really, really want. You talked about a plant based diet, you're a big proponent of it, there are just numbers that make sense. But how do you get policy changes that make people want to eat less meat?
00:20:49
Speaker 1: It's a great question. And to be clear, I ate meat a long time as well. And actually, it was my research that started to show me what it was all about. And I realized that I had to shift. And I went on a journey. And I think one of the things we've got to understand is that We're all on a journey. You know, it's like nothing's easy when you start and you go on first step and you this next step and the next step. And, you know, you walk on the way and the way appears. And so for me, it's any policies when you're looking at these policies is how do you help people make the choices that are healthier for us? I mean, and that's the really key point is that this stuff is healthier for us, especially in high income countries. So in high-income countries, moving to a plant-rich diet, that's not a completely vegan diet. That's on the order of a beef burger once every two weeks, a chicken fillet once a week, some dairy a day. That would reduce our emissions from our diets about 61%. If we were to then save the land associated with that shift, so actually we'd be able to produce a healthier diet on the remaining land, only a tiny fraction would need to be used to make up the plant proteins that we'd need because Basically, there's an inefficiency in the livestock there. You would save an area almost the size of the EU across high-income countries, and you'd be able to draw down about 14 years of agricultural emissions. The way that I think policymakers then need to think about it, that's the science, okay, whatever. Then you can think about, well, what does that mean for people on the ground? And what does that mean for communities up and down different countries? And for me, that is networks of rewilding, networks of parks up and down the country, access to nature for people, which you know is good for people's mental health. You can see better floodwater absorption, better storm surge absorption. So you can roll with the punches of climate change better, have healthier water, water that you can swim in and not full of effluent from animals. cleaner air because actually agriculture drives a lot of these secondary particulates that you get in the atmosphere. So you can reduce the load there. And you can have, as I say, this network of nature up and down countries which is going to allow us to deal with these impacts. On top of that, you would save yourself enough land to actually get your multi-cropping going, your more resilient agriculture going. So it's a health issue. It's a resilient agriculture issue. It's an economic issue because agriculture With our research, we find that about 82% of subsidies currently go to animal agriculture in the EU, for example. That's through both feed and directly to the livestock. Now, that can be transitioned to help farmers out. And what we find is that the assets on the farm would go down, so farmers wouldn't face so much debt. And our recent work is suggesting, this is a preprint, so it needs to go through peer review, but we're finding that in some countries like the UK, the agricultural system and farmers on the whole could make more money with this transition. So these are all messages for policymakers.
00:23:39
Speaker 2: But this should then land with policymakers. Right now, especially in rich countries, but certainly true in developing countries, the amount that governments can spend is tight. Their borrowing is at a high level, interest rates that are at a high level. They have all these security threats. non-food ones that they have to deal with, trade wars, real wars. But they are looking for policy successes where they can redirect money that they are already spending to things that can have benefits. Why, then, has this not landed? Because it's not like the theoretical work has not been done for years or decades.
00:24:15
Speaker 1: Well, I think the theoretical work on what this means for the agricultural sector is fairly new, actually. I think this is work that we've just been doing in terms of looking at... the income for farmers. And really, that's only been over the last five, six years. Nobody's been focused on... People, of course, have looked into the economics of farming, but they haven't looked into what does the economics of farming look like with such a transition that the environmental scientists are telling us. You're quite right on the environmental science side. That's been well established for some time now as a consensus. The ultimate reason why this isn't done yet is a mixture of the joined up thinking across different governments. Often it's siloed, so you get your health ministry, you might get your environment ministry, you might get your rural ministry, and they're not talking to one another. You might get your treasury, for example, that doesn't really grasp the benefits. That's a key one. The second one, which is really key, is the role of vested interests in this. You talked about meat consumption. It's a very similar story to fossil fuels, really. So we have all of this great academic work in journals like Science and Nature showing how the fossil industry knew about climate change. They actually did very good models and assessments back in the 70s and 80s. And actually, it's starting to emerge that the same thing happened with meat and dairy. And actually, there's the first few papers coming out in the academic literature showing this documentation now. And, of course, these industries are extremely good at defending the status quo because that's essentially what they're based on doing. I mean, they're good at public relations. That is what a company is supposed to do, is do public relations, get people to buy things. And I think, finally, I think governments could be far more creative about financing how this might look. I know in some countries, for example, they're looking at health bonds. So, this is where the health sector would issue bonds on the basis of improving the health of the population and saving those health costs later down the road. Obviously, there's an issue of financialization there. In Sweden, where they tried this, it was a fairly government-related bank that bought them. So, it's all a little bit circular. But there are sort of interesting ways of sort of financing some of these things which would keep the benefits in the community.
00:26:29
Speaker 2: So one place we have seen government policy come to change behaviour is the sugar tax. So the UK, for example, has introduced a sugar tax on high sugar drinks and there has been a positive impact. We can see that average daily consumption of sugar has fallen by about five grams per day for children and 11 grams for adults. Could you introduce a meat tax?
00:26:54
Speaker 1: The sugar tax is an interesting example of what I was mentioning. I mean, the vicious fighting tooth and nail, the vested interest in that was..
00:27:01
Speaker 2: Incredible.
00:27:03
Speaker 1: It took years to come through. Yes, it has been broadly successful in as far as it goes. It's not necessarily reshaped the whole food environment that we need. A meat tax is interesting because I think this relates to the idea that we really underestimate what we are willing to do. We underestimate our neighbours. For example, we typically underestimate 10, 20, 30% where the actual support is. There's been a number of studies that have gone around the world now, and this is shown across country by country. showing that if you ask people what percentage of people in this country support environmental action X, it will be much higher than they think it is. For example, in the US, people thought that around 32-34% of people supported a carbon tax, which is like, you know, yeah, I would think that and probably even lower. The actual support was above 60%. Now, coming back to the meat tax, meat tax is one of the harder ones. Now, In a study that looked at MPs, you see the same picture that the MPs underestimate the public in a country like the UK. And I would presume this is broadly similar in other countries too. For a meat tax is interesting. I believe it was around 20, somewhere between 20 and 25% was what MPs thought that the public would support it. And the actual support, and I might get the second digit wrong, but it's something like 42%. So it's not at that above 50% yet, but it's certainly much higher than you might think. I mean, if you were to say meat tax and you were to guess what percentage of people supported it, you would think probably lower than that.
00:28:43
Speaker 2: Now, if we keep meat tax apart or even park the idea of trying to change the behaviour on meat, are there technologies that you think in the next 10 years could try and support some of the action? So Lab-grown meat, precision fermentation, genetically modified crops, drought-resistant crops, anything that you think is on the edge and really could come to commercial use and make a real impact?
00:29:12
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I would... class quite a few of those technologies as shifts in our food environment and diets as well. So precision fermentation, for example. And I think precision fermentation is the most exciting development actually so far. It is becoming extremely efficient. It's becoming economically competitive. You're seeing products on the market right now across the world.
00:29:37
Speaker 2: Examples?
00:29:38
Speaker 1: So you've got products in a single You've got products in Israel. You've got products that are now sort of making and hitting shelves. For example, there's this huge trend now to consuming more protein. Partly, I think this is driven by various advertising and interests. But, you know, there's companies that are producing precision fermented whey at a very, very high quality. And that's one of the really exciting things about precision fermentation generally is that it's really high quality. And the nutrition outputs that I've seen so far in its early days, I want to sort of caveat that, but both for precision fermentation and sort of cellular agriculture for meat, it shows that the nutrient profiles are really good. They're much better than the sort of open field products. So that's really quite exciting. And what we're seeing is a similar learning curve in terms of the reductions as in other technologies. I wouldn't say it's quite up there with wind and solar. I mean, that was pretty extreme. I mean, there we're talking 20, 30%. So for every doubling of the capacity, you see a 20% to 30% reduction in cost. We're hoping to do the first sort of assessment for precision fermentation, but it's certainly non-negligible. And anything non-negligible on a learning curve is impressive.
00:30:58
Speaker 2: What about vertical farming? You didn't bring that up because we've had a conversation with CEOs of vertical farming companies and, you know, there was a boom recently. And then there was a bust and we haven't really heard back from the bust whether the boom is coming back.
00:31:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, vertical farming is an interesting one. I think for some products, for some nutrients, it may be good sort of niche products that can compete. So, you know, you're talking about microgreens, your tomatoes, sometimes even pharmaceutical inputs that come from plants. I can definitely see that there are opportunities there. I think when you're talking about sort of large macronutrients, you know, your fats, your sugars, your proteins, I don't see it contributing that much myself, largely because of the huge energy inputs that are required for that. One thing I will say about photogarpharma, which is really interesting, is there are a number of unanticipated benefits that you get. Things like you don't have to wash the salad leaves. And what that means is if you don't have to wash the salad leaves because it's grown in a clean environment, then you don't get the wastage. So you can have salad that's sitting there in your fridge that's going to last three weeks, not a few days. So that's quite interesting because then if you look at the whole food system impact there, you're not actually just talking about, you know, potentially having a more resilient production system that's resilient to the elements, potentially, although you're swapping it for energy inputs that could be impacted. You're actually looking at the reduction of waste down the line as well. So you have to add that in. So there's some interesting things. The other one is that, you know, vertical farms, in vertical farms, you're limited by the sink capacity. of the plant, not the source. So normally in open field agriculture, you're limited by water or you're limited by sunlight, you're limited by nutrients. In vertical farming, it's actually the reverse because you can control all of that. And it's actually the genetics of the plants that's the problem because the plants themselves, they are often in an open field, they're just trying to stay alive and they put a lot of energy into staying alive. Now, we use those same plants in vertical farming, but you don't need it anymore. And so actually, there's a huge breeding program that could happen to improve the overall production and economics of vertical farming for vertical farming specific plants that you could actually then produce more from. And because you're able to control all of the sources, they taste magical because they can just basically put all their energy into producing wonderful flavors. So, All up, I think there is a little bit of a role, but I still see it more as a niche role compared to something like precision fermentation, which I think can be wildly successful.
00:33:39
Speaker 2: One of the earlier stories I wrote was about this guy named John Leary, who'd worked with local communities in places like Senegal, where he was helping restore degraded farmland into what are called forest gardens. where some trees, some crops were grown together to provide fruit and vegetable and maybe some cereal, which did a mixture of like giving food security to the community that is growing because it's a different types of fruits and different types of foods covering all types of nutrients that you want, but also essentially converting wasteland into a useful asset. But again, Only a few countries have done that, and it feels like a win-win-win that more places could do, but it really is difficult to see how it scales.
00:34:28
Speaker 1: That's the issue with a lot of these sort of approaches is the scaling. Because what they're doing is actually fighting against a broader external system that is pushing a certain model of agriculture. So we see sort of large agribusinesses, we see the sort of multinational interests trying to find new markets as all, you know, capitalistic companies will do. But unfortunately, instead of having the power to push back on that and say, no, we're going to go a different way and we're going to actually do something that actually leapfrogs where you guys are at, you're often in a situation where the pressure is to go down the same intensification road as other countries and also pressure for deforestation that actually erodes those benefits. So at the very time when in the high-income countries we're talking about bringing back those sorts of production systems, so multi-cropping, agroforestry, agroecological approaches. You'll have companies that are really trying to push hard into the developing countries to produce in the same way that we always have. It's not too dissimilar to other trends. Tobacco, we saw a reduction in tobacco in high-income countries. Now that's being pushed to middle and lower income countries. So you can see the sort of same sort of pattern continuing on. In terms of scaling, I think this is coming back to your point about policymakers again. It's like there is a real, I think, fear of touching this because of the impression that they get from the public. I think misinformed impression, but the impression nonetheless. And I think what people don't realize is unlike say, in other areas like the energy transition. A lot of these food system transformations are going to happen anyway because of the physics of the situation, because of climate change. Energy is exposed to climate change, but not quite as much as agriculture. There's no AC on a field. And so, policymakers, both in lower income and upper and higher income countries, are going to have to deal with this. And I think high income countries especially have a responsibility towards lower income countries to not export production systems that are going to erode the foundations going forwards.
00:36:35
Speaker 2: So now we can start to imagine a system without fossil fuels. Maybe they play a tiny part in some form because we need it for fractional demand at the end of the century. I can't imagine a world where there is no agriculture. So we need a net zero agriculture system. What does that look like?
00:36:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that really looks like the picture I mentioned before. So in high income countries and actually upper middle income countries, we have the shifts to eating more plants, better for us, better for the land. And then you're able to use that land as a land sink. I mean, you know, so many of these climate models, they have quite a lot of carbon dioxide removal involved in them. And the least regret carbon dioxide removal that we should be looking at is then reducing having the return to potential natural vegetation or so-called rewilding, active or passive, or however you want to do it. Even sort of bringing more carbon back on the land as well in farming, for example. So you've got to sort of straddle this situation where you're wanting to bring down carbon from the atmosphere onto the land to reverse a lot of the carbon that we've lost from soils through the centuries. while making sure that the food system is resilient and you're producing enough. So that's going to be a tightrope that we're going to have to walk while addressing both the production and the consumption side. Because if your production side changes, as it is in the UK right now, we've got these investments for the Sustainable Farming Initiative, we've got investments for nature, for example. But if we don't address the consumption side, we just buy it from elsewhere. So that's why there's lots of good campaigns to buy British beans, to buy British legumes, our plant proteins, because that then syncs up the production side changes with the consumption side changes. And ultimately, the picture is that the way I see it in high income nations, at least in upper middle income nations, is you would have this shift, you would save a huge amount of land, and that land then allows you to do some of the production operations that you just mentioned, which are more resilient. they generally do take more land because you're not treating land like that factory anymore. So you are going to need some of that spared land to do that. You're also going to have land that can be set aside in reserve through different years if you get hit by a yield. I mean, yield losses in this country, we've seen normally wheat yields at around 8 tonnes per hectare in the UK. Last year it came in at 6.9 and we had the earliest harvest in 20 years because of the dryness. That equates to more land area. you know, if we're going to continue having those sorts of damages. And how are we going to get that land? And it's just got to have to be through these plant-rich transitions. I think on top of that, you know, you do have a role for technology on open field agriculture. So precision farming, for example, where we apply water and fertilizers and pesticides, herbicides very, very accurately through the field. You have all sorts of automation that's going to be important this is why i work in the areas because i'm simultaneously utterly terrified about all of the impacts and multi-bread basket failures which uh you know the odds that the chances are going up but on the same side i'm so so excited by the opportunities This is what.
00:39:46
Speaker 2: Keeps me going on the climate beat. So thank you for joining the show, Paul.
00:39:50
Speaker 1: Great. Thank you, Akshay.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: And thank you for listening to Zero. We'll link to Paul's book, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, in the show notes. Now for the sound of the week. That is the sound of two tarantulas drumming, tapping their feet rapidly to say they're ready to mate. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Somersadi and Alyssa MacDonald. I'm Akshat Rati, back soon.
