As Thanksgiving approaches, many of us are planning feasts with family and friends. Few things connect society as thoroughly as food does. From subsistence hunters to the first farmers to barbecuing suburbanites, food touches all of us.
Less evident is the inordinate role that food plays in exacerbating some of our toughest global challenges.
- Greenhouse emissions: Agriculture contributes with up to 35 percent of the greenhouse emissions, making it the single most important contributor to climate change.
- Poverty: Nearly 80 percent of the world’s poor depend on agriculture for employment or subsistence.
- Natural habitat and biodiversity loss: Half of the land mass of the planet has been converted to make room for crops and livestock.
- Ocean decline: Three quarters of the world’s fisheries are fully or over-exploited and huge dead zones are created by discharges of fertilizer.
- Epidemic obesity: Obesity has more than doubled globally since 1980.
- Health care costs: The diseases associated with overweight and obese patients represent 23 percent of the health care costs in the U.S. at $147 billion annually.
These issues are not just correlated, they are interdependent.
As societies become predominantly urban, they become increasingly removed from food production, and the relationship between people and the food they eat becomes increasingly complex. Globalized consumers today have fewer opportunities to become aware of the true cost and consequences of food production, trade, processing, ingestion and waste. The invisibility of these consequences is reinforced by the impulse to simplify and focus only on individual facets of the food system (technological innovation, environmental impacts, obesity-related diseases, etc.) as discrete challenges to be tackled independently.
Each of these challenges can, alone, be daunting; the prospect of tackling all of them collectively can leave decision-makers, institutions and philanthropic donors feeling paralyzed. But, with the right framework to identify and understand the many interdependencies, we believe we could all have the means to accelerate, with the right incentives in place, a coordinated shift towards a more sustainable and healthy food system. To get meaningful action one needs to identify the set of relevant actors, what their incentives are, how they determine which direction to shift the system, and how to coordinate and monitor their commitments and actions. Efforts to shift the global soy market have shown that alignment of objectives among different social and economic actors is not just possible, but effective in producing soy with high productivity and reduced environmental impact.
Though complex, these factors are not random. Our globalized, complex food markets are highly structured and dominated by an increasingly smaller number of actors that have a disproportionate control on how food is produced, processed and distributed. Similarly, health organizations, including health insurance companies, have a controlling effect that allows them to detect health cost impacts and advocate for healthier food choices. New research and big data analysis offer tools to increase transparency in the value chains and the impacts up and down the production-to-waste continuum.
At the Moore Foundation, we are implementing a market-based approach to “greening” the supply chains of selected agricultural and seafood commodities and collaborating with others in our sector to amplify and connect our efforts. Our participation in the Climate and Land Use Alliance and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food helps us refine the foundation’s sharp focus on specific conservation outcomes, while eyeing the broader, interdependent system and understand our role in the systemic change. With a framework to analyze complex problems, we believe philanthropy can play a significant role in the transition of the food system — from one where profits are privatized and costs socialized to one where the trade-offs that sustainability demands will be made in a balanced and transparent way.
Guillermo Castilleja, Ph.D., is the senior fellow of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He chairs the steering committee for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
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