Today, 16th October, marks World Food Day, commemorating the day the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was created.
After 80 years of existence, I wonder whether the FAO has enough power and the right governance to deliver on its aims of “creating a peaceful, sustainable, prosperous, and food-secure future”.
There is a lot of money to be made by the food industry in maintaining the status quo - from the traders and financiers to those selling inputs to farmers.
Yet we’re seeing this status quo simply isn’t working any more.
People and wildlife are suffering from a food system that isn’t working
Modern farming in many parts of the world has been hugely successful in terms of yields, but we still have between 638 and 720 million people globally facing hunger in 2024. Also notably, for the first time, there are more children in the world who are obese than underweighti - a different form of malnutrition.
Farmers globally have an ever-shrinking share of the food pound and struggle to pay workers and treat the land and animals well.
Fishers and the marine environment are also suffering through over-exploitation of stocks and use of damaging practices for a rapacious food system.
Most crucially is the alarming evidence demonstrating just how rapidly we are eroding the natural systems on which we depend.
From soil to sea, ecosystems are failing: who’s accountable?
Our ecosystems, like soil, and natural pollination services are in a bad way. The UK State of Nature report shows how our pest predators, pollinators and water systems have been in decline since the 1970s.ii One in six UK fish stocks are overfished and yet are still being fished beyond their safe limits, including core species like Celtic Sea cod and haddock.iii
Something is not working – for us, for nature, for farmers, for fisherfolk. And whilst there are many drivers for this including poverty and inequality, conflicts and (the highly relevant) climate crisisiv, we also need to look hard at whether we have the right levers being pulled by the right players.
Are those profiting from the cheap food agenda and the global trade in low-cost food commodities having too much influence over national decisions and regulations?
Feeding us means protecting nature
Other than pollination by bees and the role of earthworms, the rest of the work done by nature in our food system is often overlooked and poorly understood. Almost all our food supply needs nature.
From the insects, microbes, fungi, spiders, slugs and plants creating a rich soil medium for us to grow food in, to the vast range of pollinating invertebrates and the amazing work of the snails, fungi and fish breaking down plant matter so nutrients in them can be reused.
Putting a figure on the human value of all these nature services is extremely difficult. The ONS suggests the total asset value of ecosystem services alone in England was £5.431billion for agriculture in 2020 but that does not cover all the assets related to food productionv.
The UK Government’s Food Security Report 2024vi makes it clear that climate change and ecological breakdown pose existential threats to food security.
It’s a vast natural workforce out there, and we should be looking after it far better than we are.
We must rethink our use of land and sea to break free from harmful food systems
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Around 70% of all UK land is farmed. As our recent report on the UK pig and poultry sector showed, a huge amount of land is used for feeding animals and for accommodating the unsustainable levels of manure that they make.
We also allocate land for sugar, for producing biofuels, and producing crops for foods that are making us ill.
Why are we not allocating land use wisely? It is partly because we are locked into ways of eating, cooking, and dining designed and derived by large corporate interests.
We can and must be better at using the land to produce healthy food for us, make space for nature and protect ecosystems everywhere. This also goes for fish and other food from the marine environment.
Overfishing, pollution, mismanagement of stocks and the continued use of damaging practices like bottom trawling show we are doing the same to the precious marine natural environment.
This has all made food ingredients cheap and plentiful but at the expense of nature and our health, and at the very real risk of collapsing the ecosystems we depend on.
System changes could bring food security and protect nature
Our new 25-year vision for food and farming sets out where we need to make significant changes to how we design our food system. Our approach echoes the detailed proposals in a new Government-funded 2050 Roadmap designed by UK universities for changing the whole food system so it is resilientvii.
As the new UK Government team at the head of Defra considers all its decisions – from a food strategy to achieve a Good Food Cyle, to a land use strategy to manage all the competing demands - it must consider the essential nature of ecosystems.
The solutions are already well known for diverse nature-friendly farming, sustainable fishing, agroecological diets and a just transition for those providing us with food. Society just needs to have a stronger say in decision making and via governance structures than those interested in short-term profits.
World Food Day is an international day celebrated on 16th October, to commemorate the day the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization was created in 1945.