The Global Food System Is Ripe for Change

A growing threat—and an even bigger opportunity.

Food production has altered our planet more than any other human activity. It accounts for 24% of greenhouse emissions and 70% of all freshwater usage; it is perhaps the single greatest cause of biodiversity loss. Food production is also the cause of 80% of global habitat loss—a trend that is accelerating.

In addition to growing demand for more food, many farming practices actively degrade soil health over time, until eventually it’s no longer productive. Often farmers are forced to abandon the degraded land and convert new landscapes for crops or grazing. If we don’t reverse these trends, we could lose another 400 million hectares of natural habitat by 2050—an area twice the size of Mexico.

And yet the vast scale of our food system means it can be one of the greatest levers for positive change to the planet. We are at a pivotal moment in history: there has never been a better—or a more crucial—moment to make changes across the food producing sectors.

What are regenerative food systems?

The scale of the opportunity

Currently, 37% of the Earth’s land area is used to produce food, to say nothing of all the food we source from the ocean, which makes up a growing portion of global diets. Implementing regenerative practices across all of these land-and-seascapes represents an enormous opportunity, but also a herculean challenge. It requires system-wide change that goes far beyond farmers, fishers and pastoralists. Here’s how we can get there.
 

Encourage governments to reform subsidies

For starters, we can work with global policy makers to improve fiscal policy around food. Globally, governments spend as much as $500 billion a year on farming, forestry and fisheries subsidies that degrade nature—more than twice what they are spending to protect or restore nature. We need to work with policymakers to shift these subsidies away from practices focused exclusively on production and output to support growers in this shift to regenerative practices that restore soil and water health while also sustaining or increasing production.

Reward market actors for performance

Government subsidies underpin market realities, and market actors throughout the food supply chain are increasingly taking responsibility for their role supporting nature. But while many consumer-facing companies have made advances in transparency and accountability, similar progress has not been made along the rest of the supply chain. Until it is, it is hard to reward farmers for good practices.

Dozens of companies signed a commitment to eliminate deforestation and conversion from key commodity supply chains by 2020—none of them met the commitment. Soy and beef traders still do not report on basic metrics about habitat conversion as recommended by the Accountability Framework, which many companies cite as the reference point for their commitments. We simply cannot accept another decade of missed targets—now is the time our collective bar should be set at exceeding them. There’s a growing willingness to reward companies that are progressing on such goals, but we can’t reward their performance if they aren’t reporting on it.

It’s time to grow positive.

Our need for food is not going away or shrinking—it is growing. And the way we currently grow food is degrading the planet in ways that, paradoxically, make it harder and harder to grow food. But I am confident we can escape this negative feedback loop. By leveraging the pace of technological innovation, harnessing the rapidly evolving science of regeneration and capitalizing on the new commitments from global companies toward regenerative business models, a new food economy is on the horizon.

A regenerative food system is our best option—not just to protect nature, but to ensure human life survives and thrives. Together we can turn today’s biggest threat to nature into its greatest opportunity—a food system that creates positive growth for communities, economies and the planet.