As seen before, food is a vital & common need for all of humanity.

That’s why it also plays an important role in the world citizens’ relationships (social, economic, and geopolitical) but also has a very strong impact on our environment.

To understand in a nutshell the 21st-century global challenges linked to food that we are facing, we have summarized the main issues, by gathering a few strong facts.

Summary

I – Food Production Impact Resource Management & Overuse Pollution & Loss of Biodiversity Farmers Labour & Dependence

II – Food Access & Waste Hunger & Undernourishment Food Desert & Importation Dependency Food waste

III – Food Quality & Health Issues Food Nutritive Quality Loss Food Frauds Junk Food

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I – Global Production Footprint

 

>> Resources Management & Overuse

 

 

	Fact 1: Food & agriculture are the largest consumers of water, requiring 100 times more than we use for our personal domestic needs. Up to 10 % of the water we take from rivers and groundwater goes into irrigation, about 10% is used in domestic applications, and 20% in industry.
	Fact 2: We use roughly 1/2 of global habitable land for agriculture. At the upper end of the spectrum, we find meat products, with the land required for beef or mutton up to 100 times larger than cereals.
	Fact 3: The food sector (including input manufacturing, production, processing, transportation, marketing consumption) accounts for around 95 exa-Joules, so approximately 30% of global energy consumption.

 

 

>> Pollution & Loss of Biodiversity

 

 

	Fact 4: About 33% of the total global warming effect can be attributed to the food system (only for farming and land-use like deforestation) and about 80% of the deforestation of the Amazonian forests to meat production.
	Fact 5: In 2004 in the US, 44% of stream, 64% of lake, and 30% of bays and estuarine assessed were classified as polluted. This is mainly due to the massive use of pesticides & fertilizers that add toxins linked with the excess nitrogen & phosphor concentration and erosion.
	Fact 6: Today our food energy and proteins come mainly from 15 plants and 8 animal species, with disturbing consequences for nutrition, food security, and a major driver of biodiversity loss. 75% of the genetic diversity found in agricultural crop has been lost over the last century and this genetic erosion continues.

 

 

>> Farmers Labour & Dependence

 

 

	Fact 7: In 2017, 4 corporations are sharing more than 60% of the seeds & agrochemical world’s market: Monsanto-Bayer, Dupond-Dow, Syngenta-ChemChina and BASF.
	Fact 8: Farmers have little control over the prices of their products sold to main food corporations, and they continue to receive a smaller and smaller portion of consumers’ spending to the benefit of intermediaries like processors, exporters, and groceries.
	Fact 9: In Southeast Asia, most farmers heavily depend on synthetic pesticides as their main method of pest control. They are aware of the adverse health effects associated with pesticide use like cancers, skin, and respiratory diseases, but also consider pesticides to be highly effective and indispensable farms’ inputs due to soil fertility loss.

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II – Food Access & Waste

 

>> Hunger &  Undernourishment

In 2019 :

– 11% of the world’s population – 820 million people – are undernourished. This means they have a caloric intake below the minimum energy requirements.

– 22% of children younger than five are ‘stunted’ – they are significantly shorter than the average for their age, as a consequence of poor nutrition or repeated infection.

– 9% of the world population – around 697 million people – are severely food insecure, and 1 in 4 people globally – 1.9 billion – are moderately or severely food insecure. (Source Our World In Data)

 

 

>> Food Deserts & Importation Dependency

 

 

In 2015, 1 in 6 people in the world rely on imports to feed them.

There are at least 34 countries who are unable to produce their own food due to water and land limitations, which represents a large portion of the global population who must rely on imported food in order to avoid starvation.

By the year 2050, more than half of the world’s population is expected to rely on food sourced from other countries, this is partly due to climate change effect, loss of land fertility, reduction of freshwater reserves, and growing population.  (Source World Atlas)

 

>> Food waste

 

 

About a third of all the food produced worldwide is wasted before reaching their selling place, more explanations about the food wastage footprint by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) :

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III – Food Quality & Health Issues

>> Food Nutritive Quality Loss

 

 

A growing body of research shows that rising carbon dioxide levels and soil erosion are making our food less nutritious, robbing key crops of vitamins essential to human development. According to the Global Hunger Index, 2 billion people worldwide already suffer from “hidden hunger,” in which people starve as a consequence of malnutrition even though they are consuming enough calories.  (Source Scientific American Network)

Many pesticides are potentially toxic to humans and can have both acute and chronic health effects, depending on the quantity and ways in which a person is exposed. (Source WHO)

 

>> Food Frauds

 

 

In the last decades, we can observe an increasing number of food frauds, the 5 most common frauds are :

• Adulteration: An extraneous substance is added to a food product, reducing its quality
• Substitution: Replacing part or all the product with a similar substance
• Dilution: A cheaper liquid substance is added to a high-value product
• Misrepresentation or mislabelling: a product is labeled or marked to portray its quality, origin, freshness or safety incorrectly
• Counterfeiting: Products or ingredients are illicitly produced as replicas of a real product

The main edible products concerned by frauds are oils, milk, coffee, spices, teas, fishes, fruit juices, and honey. (Source Hub)

 

 

>> Junk Food

 

 

Eating a poor quality diet, high in junk food – high in calories and low in nutrients -, fast food, and highly processed food is linked to a higher risk of obesity, depression, digestive issues, heart disease, and stroke, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and early death. As you might expect, frequency matters when it comes to the impact of junk food on your health.

Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese. 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese. (Source Washington Post)

 

So now that we know that our current food production and consumption systems are responsible for:

• the loss of biodiversity and food quality;
• pollution, erosion, and exhaustion of the soil;
• the waste of important resources like land, fuel, water, or even food itself;
• unfair access to food provoking malnourishment on one side and obesity on the other;

You need to know that hundreds of solutions exist around the world: ancient wisdom, sustainable practices, new innovations, collective initiatives & knowledge, …

With the spread of these solutionq, we can reverse the food footprint, ensure food security & quality, regenerate the soil, and drawdown the greenhouse gas concentration present in the atmosphere.

 

Main Sustainable Principles:

• Extend regenerative farming and practices that take into account the interactions that the soil’s life (plants, micro-organisms, insects, and animals) naturally have, and help optimize them to suppress the need for industrial pesticides and fertilizers.

 

• Diversify farm activities as much as possible by taking into account the land’s physical limit.

 

• Change food diet to a plant-rich diet or by diversifying the sources of essential nutrients (like insects, algae) and privilege products produced locally, seasonally, organic, and from small scale farms.

 

 

• Relocalize food production as close as possible from the consumption place to reduce transportation and intermediaries

• Improve the irrigation system and water retention to reduce water waste and improve plant absorption.

 

• Upcycle non-sold veggies and fruits in other products.

 

• Compost the food waste to create free rich fertile soil.

 

 

• Improve the traceability of food, to ensure where and how it was produced, and help the consumer to really know what they buy and its consequences on the environment and health.

 

Some of those alternatives can be implemented on a small scale by a community to a much larger scale by a city or a country, and many are cheap, easy to reappropriate or in open source licenses!

You could become the next changemaker that will help to make a positive change in your community, your city or in the world!