Model shows pathway to feeding the world

Earth has the capacity to feed the world’s population on a healthy diet if countries make fundamental changes to their food production systems and consumption, a study has found.

Model recommends less meat and more nuts, pulses and legumes. Image credit: Melchoir/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The study modelled the changes needed to feed 10 billion people while maintaining the global ecosystem. It found that dietary changes, improved farm management, and waste reduction will be necessary to avoid famine and farmland depletion in the future.

If global food production patterns do not change, the environmental impact of food could nearly double by 2050, the researchers warned. The resulting loss of forest, desertification and water stress would accelerate climate change and could cause irreversible damage to wide stretches of farmland, the model found.

“We propose a flexitarian diet,” says lead researcher Marco Springmann, from the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. This would mean eating less red meat and more plants.

The researchers propose that red meat should feature only once a week in people’s diet, but that the consumption of pulses, nuts and legumes, which contain high amounts of proteins, should be stepped up. If these changes could be rolled out globally, greenhouse gas emissions from farming would be reduced by half, they say.

Agriculture itself also needs to be revised to prevent land depletion. Really ambitious technological changes and improvements in management are essential to avoid crossing planetary boundaries for land use, water use and fertilizer application.

These changes would be particularly beneficial in the developing world, where better irrigation technology, water storage, and education would make a big difference to agricultural yield and reduce loss from draught.

In the study, the researchers pointed to the large amount of food that is wasted in industrial agriculture and said this was another potential for improvement.

Around one-third of all food grown and reared for humans is lost during production and transport, or wasted in households and during industrial food processing, they said. Their models showed that, if this figure could be halved, it would reduce the environmental impact of food production by 16%.

Very strong and progressive government regulation would be necessary to achieve the proposed transformations. We need new dietary guidelines, many of which still encourage the consumption of red meat and large amounts of bread and dairy products. The guidelines we have today are outdated and don’t reflect current evidence on healthy eating. (SciDev.Net)

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