For sustainability's sake we need more industrial agriculture and more supermarkets

There is often a certain gap between the results of scientific inquiry and what we’re told are said results. The idea that all the people to come will eat the fluffy animals out of house and home being a case in point:

The global food system is on course to drive rapid and widespread ecological damage with almost 90% of land animals likely to lose some of their habitat by 2050, research has found.

A study published in the journal Nature Sustainability shows that unless the food industry is rapidly transformed, changing what people eat and how it is produced, the world faces widespread biodiversity loss in the coming decades.

The study’s lead author, David Williams from Leeds University, said without fundamental changes, millions of square kilometres of natural habitats could be lost by 2050.

He said: “Ultimately, we need to change what we eat and how it is produced if we are going to save wildlife on a global scale.”

Likely suggestions are that we all go vegetarian and also that there be “international planning of agricultural land use”. We would translate that last as the revival of colonialism. White folks in the global north - possibly located in Leeds - get to tell poor brown folks in the global south where they can plant their half acre of maize. We suggest that this is not an advance in human civilisation. That even before we consider the success of all those Soviet attempts at the planning of farming. Tsarist Russia exported grain, today’s same areas export grain, the interim, when it was all planned, imported grain.

However, the paper itself tells us something different:

The projected severity of agricultural land-cover change on habitat area means that proactive policies to reduce future demand for agricultural land will probably be required to mitigate widespread biodiversity declines. To investigate the potential of such proactive approaches, we developed a scenario that implemented four changes to food systems: closing crop yield gaps globally, a global transition to healthier diets, halving food loss and waste, and global agricultural land-use planning to avoid competition between food production and habitat protection.

OK:

The impacts of individual approaches varied regionally. Closing yield gaps was projected to have the largest overall benefits

Right:

Transitioning to healthier diets and reducing food waste were projected to have considerable benefits,

Excellent:

In contrast, projected benefits from global land-use planning were far smaller,

So the colonialism part is the least effective and therefore - obviously - is the bit that should be done last if there is still some gap to be filled. The we all become vegetarians bit is also a second order success. We can leave that to one side perhaps until we’ve, again, seen whether there is a gap that still needs to be filled.

Filling the yield gap is code for “industrial farming”. Instead of those poor, brown, global south, folk trying to raise maize on a half-acre with nothing but hand tools and sweat we want 500 acre fields and vast tractors like they use in Iowa. For that’s how we raise yields to those of Iowa.

Food waste, as the FAO keeps telling us, comes in two flavours. Yes, there’s the mystery pizza at the back of the fridge that’s a result of the hyper-consumerism of the BOGOF sale. But this is trivial in comparison to the 50% of all food wasted between farm and fork in places without supermarkets. For properly defined a supermarket is the efficient logistics chain that gets food from farm to fork. to fork from farm

So, our first two answers are fire up the monster tractors, GM the heck out of the crops, call Monsanto for the herbicides, spray the land with fertilizers, and get Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour - possibly Dreyfus, Bunge and Cargill as well - handling that job of moving the resultant greater production around. That is, we’d like more industry, more technology, more capitalism, more markets in our food system. Entirely the opposite of what is usually suggested of course.

And here’s the thing. That is the scientific answer. Raise yields, waste less and then see what fraction of the problem still remains. And aren’t we all supposed to follow the science these days?