Box 4. Finding virtuous cycles in the food system
The food system can serve as an example of how a dominant paradigm in globalization created a set of interlocking vicious cycles, or circles, termed the ‘cheaper food paradigm’. Investment in increasing agricultural productivity, coupled with increasing the competitiveness of markets, through the liberalization of trade, have long been the central pillars of food price reduction. Reducing food prices has two nominal public-goods outcomes: it increases the availability of and economic access to food, and therefore contributes to food security (locally and globally); by reducing necessary household expenditure, it frees up income for consumption growth in other goods and services, supporting other sectors, jobs and economic growth.
However, the drive towards productivity has also led to increases in the intensity and scale of land use, with consequences for soils, air and water quality, appropriation of water and biodiversity loss. The benefits of global markets, and maximizing comparative advantage, has led to the global concentration of food production into a small handful of commodity crops, grown in a few ‘breadbasket’ regions. Grain is also sufficiently cheap that it supports livestock, leading to a growth in the global herd. The availability of cheap calories, the lack of availability of expensive nutrients, and cheap meat have fuelled a global shift away from undernutrition, as the principal global cause of dietary ill-health, to over-consumption of calories. As prices decrease, more food is wasted. And, as per head availability of food, including meat, increases, the emissions from the food system, including deforestation to produce commodity and feed crops, increases, driving climate change.
Climate change has affected yields and their nutritional quality, creating further pressures to intensify in compensation, or extensify: to use more land to produce food. As emissions grow, reaching climate change mitigation goals requires an increasing need for land-based mitigation, including biomass production for biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technologies, and afforestation. By driving climate change, consumption growth increases competition for land and reduces the efficacy of agriculture. Meanwhile, habitat destruction and a warming climate both further increase the risks of pathogens travelling between animals and people.
Climate change, together with environmental degradation, has created ecological disruption, mixing wild animals and their pathogens in new ways and allowing pathogens to infect new hosts. Peri-urban expansion into ecosystems mixes farmed animals with wildlife in new ways. Furthermore, a larger herd, genetic monoculture and high densities of animals associated with intensified production have increased the risks of viral transmission among animals and to humans. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, rightly claims attention today, but it should be noted that in 2019, African swine fever caused the death (from disease, or from culling) of one-quarter of the global population of domestic pigs.
The drive for economic growth and profit maximization in a globalized world has led to complex provisioning systems that connect the world across space and across sectors. Food provision in any country is not a simple function of local agriculture, but typically depends on land, water, input and food manufacture, transport and retail, supported by access to financial systems and IT infrastructure, such as GPS. Supply chains have become both longer and more reliant on the ‘just-in-time’ management approach. This has led to greater systemic fragility. The potential for a climate hazard or health crisis to lead to a risk cascade that amplifies the impact increases: a supply disruption leads to an exaggerated market response, fuelling poor policy interventions and further amplifying effects. Thus, in addition to the vicious cycles leading to escalating environmental impacts, the same drivers are undermining the resilience of the system.
In short, a focus on productivity growth to provide more food, more cheaply, creates positive, reinforcing feedbacks that end up amplifying negative outcomes. These are increasingly to the detriment of the public-good aims for which the food system was shaped.
Turning vicious into virtuous cycles
However, a sustainable, efficient, low-waste food system could stay within planetary boundaries and sustain the Earth’s population, with greater equity and resilience (as embodied in the UN SDGs) in the face of increasing disruption to climate, health and natural systems. Particularly in low- and middle-income countries, a virtuous cycle approach could support growth and increase employment (SDG 1), as well as reducing pollution and waste (SDGs 6, 13, 14 and 15), helping countries to leapfrog straight to circular systems and institutions (SDGs 9 and 12), without following the traditional model of eliminating existing (often informal) circular systems – traditional cultures of repair and reuse – and then reintroducing them down the line.
A circular approach is a framing that contributes to creating virtuous cycles, by aiming to turn extractive, linear supply chains into circular ones, where waste is recycled as an input. In farming it would: aim to reduce agricultural inputs; employ regenerative models that prevent the leakage of natural resources (such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and water) from the food system; and stimulate the reuse and recycling of resource losses. Where arable land is used to produce plants for human consumption (a circular approach would first prioritize this use of land), by-products include crop residues, co-products from industrial food processing, food losses, food waste and human excreta. A circular model aims to prevent human edible by-products, such as food losses and food waste in patterns of production and consumption (SDG 12).
When such options have been exhausted, the focus then shifts to recycling the remainder of those losses into the food system, together with by-products inedible for humans, in order to enrich the soil or fertilize crops. This focus on organic waste recovery can, in turn, improve sanitation and generate value and livelihoods, often for some of the poorest in society. By-products are also used to feed animals: pigs, poultry, farmed fish or insects can utilize by-products and convert them into valuable food and manure, supporting human health, environmental outcomes and agricultural livelihoods. Ruminants can create nutritional value from grasslands by converting grass products into milk, meat and manure.
In contrast to the cheaper food paradigm, a circular model sees the role of farm animals in the food system as converting by-products that humans cannot or do not want to eat into nutrient-dense products, such as meat, milk and eggs, and manure and ecosystem services. By converting these biomass streams, farm animals recycle nutrients within the food system that otherwise would have been lost in the process of food production. The rice-duck (and rice-duck-fish) system is one such circular agri-food model, a traditional technology in China, which also serves as an example of an NBS in terms of climate change, since it helps to reduce methane emissions from agriculture. In this model, ducks eat pests and weeds in rice paddies, meaning little or no pesticides or herbicides need be used. By paddling around the paddies, they help to stir up nutrients in the water, helping the rice plants grow stronger without the use of chemical fertilizer, while duck waste serves to add nutrients.
Such circular approaches create a greater diversity of outputs, which are better for community nutrition, public health and economic resilience. They thus help to support SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), while minimizing deleterious impacts on clean water (SDGs 6 and 14), climate (SDG 13), and nature (SDG 15). SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) also includes the target of halving global food waste and food losses.
