The core issue is the expanding agricultural footprints. Already the size of all of Asia plus all of Europe have been converted into farmland and that is not without a cost – biodiverse habitats destroyed, pristine forests compromised and the nature’ footprints have shrunk. The farming sprawl is thirty times that of the urban sprawl. If current trends unfold, the world farmers will need to convert more area to fill nearly 10 billion human bellies by 2050. That would wipe out more forests and other natural carbon storehouses, our best defenses against climate change. And on top, some millions would still go hungry.
The food system itself is not climate friendly and probably the most destructive. Award-winning journalist Michael Grunwald dives into We Are Eating the Earth to show how the biggest of our dilemmas about feeding the world can be resolved without devouring the planet. Land is our most precious resource, because it has the twin-task of producing much more food and absorbing much more carbon to save us. Crops, like us, are carbon-based life forms that grow on the earth and as Mark Twain said, they’re not making more of it.
Land is the vast reservoir of carbon, holding three times as the atmosphere and four times as much as above-ground vegetation. If the Paris climate summit targets have to be met, the world will need to eliminate three-fourths of food-related emissions by 2050. But soils have not yet been prepared to sequester such emissions, extractive agriculture instead depletes soils. Four Per Thousand global campaign, to increase the carbon content in farm soils by 0.4 percent, can trap 89 percent of agricultural emissions. That’s lot of carbon, at least on paper.
Grunwald has evidence to argue that every piece of land needs to be valued either as a potential food source or a potential carbon sink. Only by efficiently using the land can ‘eating the land’ remain only an imagination. The book cleverly frames the solution around efficiency: pointing out that the more food we can produce on less land, the more land we can keep in its natural state.
Quitting fossil fuels can only be part of the solution, the challenge is the need to preserve ecosystems that store carbon.
Grunwald takes guidance from a brilliant scientist Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, who began his career as a lawyer to navigate how science and politics influence agricultural interests. Is meat really that bad? Searchinger’s answer boil down to this: ‘It’s land….meat uses too much land, just like ethanol.’ One cow meat is as much as 100 chickens, emitting 50 times more greenhouse gases than coal, But who cares as more animals suffer and die before reaching our plates.
Food is now as big a climate challenge as oil and coal. We Are Eating the Earth is a warning to the present generation to keep the planet habitable for the next generation. The production of our food harms the environment in more than many ways. While the farms that feed the world might not consume the entire earth, two-fifths of our planet’s land area remains vulnerable. More sobering still, that figure is growing as the global population continues to grow and more people become wealthy enough to eat meat.
Most of what Grunwald narrates is realistic. Clearly, eating ‘plant rich diets’ is the best opportunity to reduce carbon pollution. Need it be said that only systemic changes can stop frying the planet. Guilt-tripping ordinary people into individual actions may have modest impacts which distract from corporate and government actions with disastrous impacts. We Are Eating the Earth is strongly recommended as one of the most important works on climate this decade. Read the book and decide for yourself what needs to be done!
Grunwald has recommended four steps: Produce more food per acre; Protect key habitats and keep them off limits to food production; Reduce demand for meat, biofuels, and other land consuming products; Restore unproductive lands to nature. In conclusion, he advocates both systemic change and personal action. Each of us is eating the earth and how we eat matters.
by Michael Grunwald
Simon&Schuster, New Delhi
Extent: 379, Price: Rs.999.
