Here is the full transcript of journalist George Monbiot’s talk titled “Can We Feed Ourselves Without Devouring the Planet?” at TED Talks 2023 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Environmental Impact of Farming
What’s the worst thing we’ve ever done to the planet? The answer is tough to hear and many people recoil from it because it conflicts with some of our most cherished beliefs. Farming. Farming is the greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of wildlife loss, the world’s greatest cause of extinction.
It’s caused roughly 80 percent of the deforestation this century. Only 29 percent of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species. And the rest are poultry. Just four percent of mammals, by weight, are wild.
36 percent is accounted for by humans, and farmed animals make up the remaining 60 percent. Yes, look, we all need food and we all need farming. But that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it’s also among the world’s foremost causes of climate breakdown, of water pollution, of air pollution. But, perhaps most importantly, it’s the foremost cause of land use.
The Importance of Land Use
Now I’ve come to see land as perhaps the most important of all environmental questions. Every acre of land that we use for our own purposes is an acre that can’t support wild ecosystems, such as forests and wetlands and savannahs, on which the great majority of the world’s species depend. It’s our use of land which, above all, is driving the sixth great extinction of species.
Now, there are some thrilling and world-changing solutions to these great crises, and I’ll be coming to those in just a minute. I mean, some of them are mind-blowing and have the potential to solve several problems at the same time. But in order to understand them and the need for them, first, we need to understand the scope and direction of the global food system.
Agricultural Sprawl and Land Use
We rail against urban sprawl, and rightly so. But all our homes and businesses and infrastructure occupy just one percent of the planet’s land. Agricultural sprawl is a far greater ecological threat. Farming occupies 38 percent of the planet’s land.
Most of the rest, incidentally, is protected areas, forests, deserts, ice and mountains. So we have this vast amount of land being occupied. A lot of people complain about intensive farming and the harm that it does to us and our world, and this harm is real. But so is the harm caused by extensive farming, which means using more land to produce a given amount of food.
The Impact of Pasture-Fed Meat
Now, I know some of you will find this a shocking statement, but the most damaging of all farm products is pasture-fed meat, and that’s because of the agricultural sprawl it causes. You remember that 38 percent of land used by farming? Well, only 12 percent of the land is covered by crops. The remaining 26 percent is used for pasture, mostly for cattle, sheep and goats.
Our environmental crisis is not driven by intensive farming or by extensive farming, but by a disastrous combination of the two. The problem is not the adjective — it’s the noun. Farming itself is threatened by the environmental harm that it’s contributed to, such as climate breakdown and soil depletion and the exhaustion of water supplies.
But there could be an even greater threat to our food supplies. It’s possible to see the biggest threat that the global food system faces as the global food system. It’s beginning to look a bit like the global financial system in the approach to 2008.
Now for a long time, we thought we were beating hunger. Between the 1960s and 2014, hunger was declining fairly steadily. But then, in 2015, the trend began to turn, and the number of chronically malnourished people began rising and has continued to rise ever since. Astoundingly, that rise began just as world food prices were falling.
Understanding Complex Systems
So what’s going on? Well, the world food system, like global finance, is a complex system, and complex systems behave in counterintuitive ways. They’re resilient under certain conditions, because there’s weird self-organizing dynamics to stabilize them. But if they’re pushed by an extreme amount of stress, then those same self-organizing dynamics can start transmitting shocks across the network.
And beyond a certain point, they can tip the whole network past its critical threshold, whereupon the system collapses, suddenly and unstoppably. Now over the past few years, the crucial elements of systemic resilience that we call redundancy, modularity, circuit breakers and backup systems have been stripped out by corporate strategies. On one estimate, just four companies now control 90 percent of the global grain trade.
The Concentration of Food Production
Only four crops, which are wheat, rice, corn and soy, account for almost 60 percent of the calories that farmers produce. And the production for export of those crops has become highly concentrated in a handful of nations, including Russia and Ukraine. Nations have polarized into superexporters and superimporters, and much of this trade passes through vulnerable choke points, such as the Turkish Straits and the Suez and Panama Canals.
Had the blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 — by that giant container ship, you remember that — had that coincided with the closure of the Turkish Straits in 2022 by the war in Ukraine, then the food chain for hundreds of millions of people might have snapped. The reason why hunger is rising seems to be that, as the food system has lost its resilience, more and more contagious shocks are being transmitted across it.
The Impact on Poorer Nations
Now, we in the rich nations, we scarcely noticed the shocks being caused by speculative surges and export bans and bottlenecking and other issues like that, until 2020, when COVID began to make us more aware of some of the issues we were facing.
But those shocks, for years, have been hitting the poorer nations with weak currencies, which stand at the end of the queue. And what they saw is that local food prices can surge even as global prices remain low.
Now, these problems are likely only to become worse as the system becomes less stable and is possibly approaching a critical threshold. Governments prevented the banks from collapsing by bailing them out with future money. But you can’t bail out the food system with future food.
Seeking Solutions
So we face two enormous issues here. One, the environmental harm caused by the food system, and secondly, the possibility that the system itself could collapse. Might there be a solution, a solution to both these problems? Can we find a way of feeding the world without devouring the planet?
Well, there are some fascinating new techniques for growing crops being developed by farmers and scientists. I’m especially interested in the potential of perennial grain crops, which are being developed in particular by The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. If we can grow grain on plants that stay in the soil from year to year, we can greatly reduce the damage to the soil caused by plowing and the amount of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, irrigation required to establish new crops.
Innovative Farming Techniques
Other farmers are finding really amazing ways of boosting their yields without using either fertilizers or manure. Crucial as all these developments are, they can only be partial solutions to the issues we face. Because perhaps our most urgent task is replacing the protein-rich and fat-rich foods that we currently obtain from animals and from crops like soy and oil palm.
If the biggest problem that farming is causing is the amount of land it uses, then perhaps the biggest environmental solution is shifting food production off the land and into the factory. Now, I realize that’s another shocking statement. Many people hate the idea of food being produced in factories, forgetting, somewhat, that almost all the food we eat passes through a factory at some point in its production.
Precision Fermentation: A Potential Solution
In fact, the great majority of the animals we eat are factory farmed. Well, in Helsinki, Finland, I visited a company called Solar Foods, which is using a technique called precision fermentation to create a protein-rich flour from a soil bacterium that eats hydrogen. It requires no farm products at all.
I was the first person outside the lab to eat a pancake made from this flour. Amazingly, this pancake tasted just like a pancake. Rich and mellow and filling. But this isn’t just about making pancakes.
The Potential of Microbial Protein
These flours, which have a protein content of about 65 percent, could form the basis of much better alternatives — cheaper alternatives, healthier alternatives — to the animal products and some of the plants, like soy and coconut and oil palm, that we currently eat. In fact, they could trigger a whole new cuisine, a shift as profound as the neolithic revolution. Most importantly, they require just a tiny fraction of the land and a tiny amount of the water and fertilizer needed to raise either crops or animals.
And this is why I see precision fermentation as perhaps the most important environmental technology ever developed. It could be all that stands between us and environmental collapse. Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, which was first developed by NASA in the 1960s. But it’s not rocket science.
It actually requires no major technological breakthrough. The bacteria being multiplied by Solar Foods use hydrogen in similar ways to how plants use sunlight. But this process, powered ultimately by solar energy — using the electricity to make the hydrogen — is far more efficient than photosynthesis.
Are you horrified by the idea of eating bacteria? Well, if so, I’ve got bad news for you. You eat them with every meal. In fact, some of our food, like cheese and yogurt, is deliberately inoculated with live bacteria.
Addressing Concerns and Potential Benefits
If you’re still disgusted by the idea of eating microbes, could I invite you to visit a factory pig or factory chicken farm? And the slaughterhouse, which kills and processes the animals that it raises? That’s what disgusting looks like.
So we have this extraordinary potential. If we can replace the protein which we currently obtain from the flesh and secretions of animals with protein from single-celled organisms, we could release vast tracts of the planet from our impacts, restoring forests and salt marshes and freshwater marshes and mangroves, and steppes and savannahs and kelp forests and seafloors. This great rewilding could stop the sixth great extinction in its tracks.
The Potential for Global Impact
It could save Earth’s systems, it could draw down vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Moreover, it could be the only chance some countries have of breaking their dangerous dependency on exports from distant places. A lot of the countries which are most at risk of mass starvation, they don’t have enough fertile land and water to produce the food they need from farming, but they have plenty of something else — sunlight, which is what you need to sustain food production based on hydrogen.
Now, these technologies are yet to be fully commercialized, but companies like Solar Foods have applied for permission to release their products onto the market. I hope that when they do, innovative chefs will step up to design the new diet, the new cuisine that the technology promises. And I would love to see a microbial brewery in every town, run by small local companies, producing protein-rich foods tailored to local markets.
The Path Forward
For that to happen, we have to stop the disastrous corporate concentration we’ve seen in the rest of the food chain. Intellectual property rights should be weak, and antitrust laws should be strong. We have the possibility here of solving two of our great existential crises with the same strategy.
By shifting the production of protein-rich food off the farm, and into the factory, we could help solve these great predicaments of hunger and extinction. Thank you.
