It’s hard enough for world leaders to figure out the future of coal, oil and gas in a warming world. What about the future of bread and milk?
The food system accounts for around 30 percent of global greenhouse emissions from farm to fork to garbage dump, and it is a major culprit in biodiversity loss. Small farmers in poor countries, already on the edge of subsistence, are among the most vulnerable to climate hazards. And hunger has risen in the last three years, as the coronavirus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have upended the global food and energy supply chain. About 735 million people today are hungry, according to the World Health Organization.
So how do we feed ourselves without further damaging the planet or worsening rising levels of hunger? This year’s United Nations climate summit has confronted this question like never before.
“For the first time there is a broad acknowledgment that the food agenda is aligned with the climate fight across the board,” said Ed Davey of the World Resources Institute, who worked with organizers of the summit, known as COP28, on its food agenda.
That sets up potential (food) fights. Changing the way the world eats is fraught with difficulties, arguably as difficult as changing how the world produces energy. Rising food prices can bring down governments. Farmers can be a powerful political lobby in countries as diverse as the United States and India. Changing food habits can be tricky, and the global agricultural commodity trade is huge and influential.
At this year’s climate summit, though, came small but significant steps.
More than two-thirds of the world’s countries endorsed an agreement to retool the global food system, though it’s vague, lacks concrete targets, and is nonbinding. The United Nations food agency issued a landmark report laying out what it would take to align the global food system with the goal to limit average global temperature rise to manageable levels. The United States and the United Arab Emirates together committed about $17 billion toward agricultural innovations to address climate change.
Not surprisingly, this year’s summit attracted an array of food company executives. Multinational seed manufacturers sought government support for new technologies. American dairy exporters sought to tell a “positive story” about their industry. The North American Meat Institute, which sent its representatives to the summit to emphasize “the role of animal agriculture in driving sustainability and food security solutions,” sponsored a panel to promote the nutritional value of animal protein.
The most significant nudge came from the Food and Agriculture Organization. Just as the International Energy Agency laid out a road map for the energy transition several years ago, the F.A.O. last week laid out a pathway toward aligning the global food system with global climate goals. The organization said it would mean cutting food waste by half and methane emissions from livestock by 25 percent, both by 2030. It would also require planting a more diverse range of crops than the staples that dominate global agriculture.
The F.A.O. road map means doing different things in different countries. In North America, food experts said, it means nudging citizens to eat less meat and dairy, which produce high emissions. In countries of sub-Saharan Africa, it means increasing agricultural productivity. Every country must cut food loss and waste.
“We are at this reckoning point where we have to move away from pure awareness raising and actually start changing habits,” Yvette Cabrera, a food waste expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said.
Road maps, of course, are only that until someone starts following the directions. In this case, that’s up to national governments. That’s where the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action comes in. It commits countries to including agricultural emissions in their next round of climate targets, in 2025. It contains no other targets or timelines, nor prescribes any specific policies.
So far, 154 countries have signed on. India, which has long been sensitive to any global accords that impact food security, was a holdout.
One measure of the coming food fight is that it’s unclear whether there’s any appetite to include agricultural emissions targets in the main agreement, which is the subject of bitter negotiations at the moment. The latest draft does not include them.
