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Demand can be changed and should be shaped by social needs through regulatory change, leading to structural change in markets.
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Demand can change (or be changed), but is difficult, both politically and for reasons related to incumbency.
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The current unsustainability of farming is a form of market failure that can be corrected.
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There are many policy levers that could restructure the market to internalize externalities (see IPCC (2019), special report on ‘Climate Change and Land’, Table 5.6) but power dynamics and politics make them difficult to deploy.
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A healthy diet is also a (more) sustainable one.
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Although this may be the case, it is not necessarily so.
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Agroecological approaches can provide sufficient nutrients for healthy diets, without impinging on natural habitat if consumption patterns change.
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This is possibly true, but it would require very radical structural change in terms of both markets and behaviours, and therefore may be implausible.
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Agroecological approaches are more sustainable than sustainable intensification.
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Like-for-like comparisons show agroecological farming to have less impact at both farm and landscape scale, but the lower relative yield means more land is needed if the same amount is to be produced. Sustainability at the system level is contingent on demand.
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Source: Chatham House research.
Assumption 1: Demand can be changed, and should be shaped by social needs
Framing: Given the increasing evidence that existing food systems are unsustainable for health and for the environment, and valuation exercises which show that the total systemic costs outweigh the benefits, there is a growing recognition that dietary change is necessary as a common solution to human and environmental issues (including climate change). Indeed, Version 2 incorporates the assumption that it is of social benefit to redesign food systems to produce health, environmental and social outcomes. In particular, animal-derived foods are responsible for twice the greenhouse gases of plant-based foods and about four times the aggregate land use, yet deliver only 18 per cent of global calories. Changing meat consumption can have very large systemic impacts across health and the environment, especially given that there is a growing evidence base of adverse health-related impacts associated with meat consumption. For example, one study has shown that substituting beans for beef in the US diet could achieve approximately one-half to three-quarters of the greenhouse gas reductions under the 2020 US target. In addition, such a dietary change would free up 42 per cent of US cropland (692,918 square kilometres). Further to the scope for reducing demand for agricultural products through dietary change, food waste is a recognized issue, accounting for up to one-quarter of global calorie production. Given both these issues, there is significant opportunity for changing the pressures on land by making the system more efficient. Focusing on the production of foods that contribute directly to nutrition outcomes, and on reducing the aggregate demand for agricultural production, would require significant structural reform in terms of the market (see Assumption 2, below).
Critique: The first critique of this assumption is based on the perception that demand is difficult to shift (as outlined in Assumption 3 of Version 1). Dietary change of the scale required is very unlikely to occur solely through consumer choice at the point of sale, but rather through structural systemic change that would have to be licensed by citizens’ votes (see Assumption 2, below). The creation of sufficient political space to drive systemic change will require changing social attitudes (i.e. the social normalization of the acceptability of change) as well as relaxing some of the assumptions that drive Version 1 (e.g. that economic growth arising from increasing per head consumption of food provides social goods). This may be very difficult to achieve.
The second critique of Assumption 1 rests on the argument that supply is difficult to shift. Given that the global food system is underpinned by increasingly intensive farming systems and substantial capital investments, can the supply side change? This issue is analogous to many debates associated with low-carbon energy and transport systems, including the potential for ‘sunken assets’. How feasible is it for livestock farmers to transition out of livestock farming to the degree that Version 2 may imagine? While switching to a plant-rich diet is theoretically feasible, the world currently underproduces fruits and vegetables to a significant degree (perhaps by about two-thirds, in relation to supplying everyone with the internationally recommended five portions a day of fruit and vegetables). Supply-side changes would have to be very substantial to enable this version of sustainability, and incentives would need to change accordingly. The literature suggests that a transition may become more feasible with a ‘repurposing of subsidies’ to de-risk the social and economic impacts of system change, but this alone is likely to be insufficient due to entrenched social and cultural norms.
There is a commonly expressed opinion that healthy and sustainable diets are typically too expensive to scale to a whole-of-population or global level. Currently, they are indeed too expensive for the poor across the world.
The third critique is that food prices will increase. There is a commonly expressed opinion that healthy and sustainable diets are typically too expensive to scale to a whole-of-population or global level. Currently, they are indeed too expensive for the poor across the world, but especially in low- and middle-income countries., However, this critique may lose some force due to the economics of the market, which suggest that as supply increases, economies of scale reduce prices. A recent analysis of global dietary consumption patterns concludes that a combination of dietary shift (reducing consumption of expensive meat), increasing the scale of fruit and vegetable production, and subsidy reform would mean that overall dietary spending would – for much of the world – reduce upon the adoption of a healthy and sustainable diet. While this may eventually be the case, in the interim a significant increase in social safety nets would be required to avoid rising inequality and food insecurity; this in itself may reduce the plausibility of the assumption.
Assumption 2: The current unsustainability of farming is a form of market failure that can be corrected
Framing: The current unsustainability of farming represents a form of market failure, in that it allows production costs to be levied on the environment (and on health systems) in unsustainable ways. It thus follows that the market is unlikely to solve the issues, given that they were caused by the market. Instead, there is a need for policy and regulation to create structural change, to reform the market and change the drivers that allow externalization of costs. Indeed, market failure is an often-cited and principal rationale for governments to intervene in markets. Some of the suggested market-shaping interventions that could enable progress towards Version 2 include:
- Reforming agricultural subsidies to reduce environmental and health externalities;
- Investing more public money in research and technology needs for more sustainable agriculture (agroecological research, rotations and farming systems, and a wider focus – on horticulture, rather than on productivity growth in grains and livestock);
- Using the rationale of the ‘polluter pays’ principle to internalize more environmentally friendly agriculture, and to ensure that environmental standards are enhanced;
- Embedding strong environmental standards into trade agreements;
- Reducing land pressure, by reducing waste and incentivizing low-waste approaches;
- Developing pro-health, system-positive agricultural policy to ensure sustainable nutrition: changing the focus from ‘increasing productivity’ to ‘what should be grown and how?’;
- Fully utilizing a range of demand-side measures, such as public procurement, awareness-raising and education, changing the food environment, and using food taxes to shape consumer demand in a pro-health, pro-environmental way. Furthermore, making use of the many existing ways of encouraging citizen involvement in food system design, particularly at the local level: this includes moving away from seeing people simply as consumers, and moving towards involving citizens in shaping the system; and
- Understanding that, in order to achieve better outcomes for food systems, it might be necessary to address systemic power imbalances, particularly with respect to the consolidated corporate power which may undermine the role of consumer choice to shape the market, and which provides an ‘intensification trap’ for farmers.
Critique: The principal critique of Assumption 2 in this version is based on the experience gained in attempting other market-shifting transformations – whether these are aimed at reducing harmful tobacco use or at transforming power systems from high-emitting fossil fuel systems to low-emitting systems based on renewable energy. The constraints fall into a number of categories: political will, social will, the will of incumbent market actors to change (and the power they can leverage to maintain the status quo) as well as the plausibility of both the long-term pathway and the end goal. With reference to the energy transition, political will is tempered by all of these issues: if politicians move too fast, changes in price or availability can lead to social unrest (e.g. the gilets jaunes [yellow vests] disputes that began in France in late 2018), and economic growth becomes uncompetitive due to the costs of transition. All countries are therefore required to move in step. These issues apply equally in food system transitions, and a single country cannot transform its food system while existing in a liberalized global trading system, as ‘sustainable production’ in the domestic system will be undermined by imported food produced more cheaply at lower standards. Similarly, the incumbent food industry has strong political and lobbying power which enables it to delay or rebut change. Thus, significant regulatory change is often deemed implausible, because it relies not only on domestic approaches that need to be politically and socially acceptable, but also on the reform of multilateral bodies (for example, of the World Trade Organization – WTO, to enable more sustainable trade).
Assumption 3: A healthy diet is also a (more) sustainable one
Framing: Version 2 implicitly assumes that there is, or can be, alignment between ‘healthy’ and ‘sustainable’ food, and that furthermore, the trade-offs between climate-friendly and biodiversity-friendly production can be managed through the extensification of production, enabled through demand contraction arising from the adoption of healthier, lower-impact, diets. While there is a significant debate about what constitutes a healthy diet, and further debate about what constitutes a ‘healthy and sustainable diet’ (a topic reviewed also in the IPCC’s 2019 special report on ‘Climate Change and Land’), there is reasonable consensus that there can be alignment between healthy and sustainable diets. The IPCC report concludes:
The primary alignment of healthy and sustainable diets is through eating more whole foods and fewer processed foods: the 2021 Global Nutrition Report states that: ‘A healthy diet consists of plenty of fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts/seeds, whole grains and oils high in unsaturated fats, and little to no red and processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, refined grains and oils high in saturated fats.’
Critique: If structural changes in food systems enabled the whole world to eat a diet as defined in Assumption 3 above, the production of fruits and vegetables would need to increase markedly, concurrent with a reduction in grains, oils and sugar – as current food systems focus on yields and calorific, not nutritional, security. This would imply radical changes to the horticultural sector, which could result in either a ‘Version 1’ global intensification of horticulture and international trade, or a ‘Version 2’ transition towards more mixed farming systems, where local horticulture is embedded in farming landscapes and there is a move away from monocultures. Thus, while a healthy and sustainable diet, based more on fruits and vegetables and less on animal-derived foods, might support more heterogeneous farming systems with more regionalized supply chains, the robustness of this assumption is weak.
Assumption 4: Agroecological approaches can provide sufficient nutrients for healthy diets, without impinging on natural habitat
Framing: The assumption is that, if demand were to change – particularly, if there was a reduction in ruminant meat consumption, with its very large land use requirement, and people ate the ‘right’ amounts of the ‘right’ crops – and if food waste was reduced, agroecological approaches could ‘feed the world’. There is typically a yield penalty for agroecological approaches to farming, which ‘[ranges] from 5 per cent lower organic yields (rain-fed legumes and perennials on weak-acidic to weak-alkaline soils), 13 per cent lower yields (when best organic practices are used), to 34 per cent lower yields (when the conventional and organic systems are most comparable)’. This means that, all things being equal, more land would be required to produce the amount of food produced today. However, proponents of Version 2 argue that all things would not be equal, because the inefficiencies arising from waste, overconsumption and diets that are out of balance with nutritional needs would, in theory, cause demand for land to decline. At the moment, it is estimated that global production of calories would be sufficient to feed over 10 billion people, but a significant proportion is fed to livestock, which is a form of inefficiency. Thus, by focusing on the efficiency of the system (people being fed healthily and sustainably per unit area), significant land savings are available to compensate for changing farming practices. A recent UK-focused study highlights the co-dependency between land use and diets, in which – assuming significant changes in diets – food produced in an agroecological UK farming sector would release 10 per cent of current agricultural land for nature restoration or other uses.
Critique: Clearly, the proportion of land used for agriculture in any one food system depends both on the specific drivers for that system (e.g. regulation, markets, and international trade liberalization) and the extent to which the demand side is able to tackle waste and overconsumption. As discussed in the critiques of Version 1, how much the demand side can change in order to facilitate changes to agriculture is an open question, and one’s individual position in this regard is perhaps based to a significant extent on what one regards as plausible. As summed up in a recent paper by Barbieri et al., ‘[f]eeding the world organically would thus require profound adaptations of human diets and animal husbandry’. We are not aware of studies that test the plausibility of demand-side assumptions – arising either from changes in the diets demanded or from structural changes in food systems – in line with the global land use that would be required for lower-yielding agroecological approaches; many studies that address this make assumptions that demand will rise (Version 1, Assumption 1) and, therefore, productivity gains in agriculture will be needed.
Assumption 5: Agroecological approaches are more sustainable than ‘sustainable’ intensification
Framing: There is a very large literature indicating that agroecological approaches can bring more environmental benefits than more intensive, ‘conventional’ farming. These benefits include improved soils, the reduction of antibiotic usage in livestock farming and increased biodiversity. The latter arises not only from a reduction in intensity, but also from increasing the heterogeneity of the individual farm and the landscape, allowing animals and plants to utilize different habitats at the same time. The picture on water quality and greenhouse gases is more mixed. Some studies suggest water quality (primarily from nutrient leaching) is improved under organic agricultural systems, while others suggest it is worsened. This is likely to be related to the fact that organic fertilizer, if applied at the wrong time, can cause substantial run-off, but can lead to less run-off if incorporated into soils: thus, there is a high degree of context dependency. In the case of greenhouse gases, organic farms often emit less (but they also produce less, so when assessed in terms of greenhouse gas intensity (emissions per kg) they may show similar results). Inevitably, because agroecological approaches involve a lower yield per unit area than more intensive approaches, they need a greater area of land to produce the same weight of food.
‘Sustainability’ at the farm scale can be measured in multiple ways, given the complexity of agricultural impacts on the environment, and the trade-offs between them. Nevertheless, the assumption that agroecological approaches are ‘more sustainable’ is empirically testable at the farm level across multiple metrics. The evidence has been well reviewed – at least, considering organic agriculture as a suite of agroecological approaches – and, typically, agroecological farming approaches have lower aggregate environmental impacts.
Critique: There are numerous ways in which these conclusions can be open to criticism (e.g. geographical bias according to study location, scale bias – focusing on farms, and ignoring landscape characteristics – and product bias). However, when such biases have been addressed, and like-for-like comparisons made, organic farms are typically better in terms of biodiversity, though the effect varies depending on the plant or animal group under consideration. The sustainability of agroecological approaches at the level of the farm is therefore rather less contested than the observation that a farm producing the same amount of output would need to be, on average, larger than an otherwise identical conventionally intensive farm (and thus relatively land-inefficient). Therefore, the principal critique is that in a world where demand is assumed to grow, land-inefficient production methods require more land in order to produce the amount of food required, with implications for the ability to spare land for nature. Whether agroecological approaches are more ‘sustainable’ at the system level therefore depends on the extent that demand can change and can accordingly reduce the overall requirement for food.
Version 2: The ideological underpinnings
This version of the linkage between agroecological approaches and food system sustainability rests on ideologies that range from living in better harmony with nature (the notion of stewardship), to reducing the risks to society from crossing planetary boundaries (and variants of ‘doomsday-ism’). Unlike Version 1, which often sees nature as a form of capital that can be converted into monetary capital, Version 2 can see natural capital as humanity’s ‘life support’, and as both irreplaceable and irreducible.
Conceptually, it may be possible for Version 2 to occur: structural changes to the market would enable demand-side reductions sufficient for the production of enough foods to fulfil nutritional needs from agroecological approaches, while also sharing land with nature. However, in order for that to happen, very significant social, regulatory and thus structural changes would need to take place within food systems. In particular, there is an explicit need to limit consumption to what can be produced sustainably: this need runs counter to the predominant ideology of free-market capitalism, which assumes that supply should be innovated to allow demand to be fulfilled. Rather than putting economic growth at the heart of economic thinking, a more holistic approach would be needed to recognize citizens’ well-being as more important (combining, in part, human health benefits and access to a safe and enriching natural environment). Thus, Version 2 requires some ‘taming’ of current visions of capitalism: designing markets to primarily deliver public goods. Markets are crucial to delivering this version of sustainable food systems, but they need to be better structured and governed to ensure equitable outcomes for people and for the planet. Collectively, these outcomes can be characterized as follows: ‘If we structure markets better, people will be incentivized to consume in a healthy and sustainable way, and this will enable more nature-positive farming by reductions in demand.’
Version 2 of sustainability is less reliant than Version 1 on technological approaches to boosting yield, but more reliant on holistic farm-system technology development. However, it requires far greater innovation in institutions to underpin radical social change (e.g. in the areas of trade, land and food governance, and social movements).
