We as a society don't respect food. We have no sense of history. We unleash gratitude on abstract and subjective bullshit and refuse to see what is in front of our noses. The abundance of food that we take for granted and waste is precarious. Life, as we know on this planet, can change at a moment's notice.
For those who are willing to learn - here:
The next crisis could well be worse. After all, global harvests have been mostly unaffected by Covid-19, and food prices didn’t rise dramatically in 2020 (though they have been edging up in early 2021). When lockdowns shuttered restaurants, school cafeterias and workplace eateries — the food service industry that formerly accounted for about half the food consumed — suppliers pivoted within a few weeks, finding ways to repackage their products into smaller portions for retail sale.
But we may not be so lucky next time. “It’s not unlikely that sometime over the next decade or two we will have a significantly worse drought,” says Tim Benton, a food systems researcher at Chatham House, a UK-based think tank. Such a drought or some other equally severe weather event, or a major crop disease outbreak, could decrease global food production by 10 or 15 percent, he says, leading to skyrocketing food prices, hunger and widespread panic. “That is orders of magnitude worse than Covid.”
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Our modern food system emphasizes efficiency over resilience — and that comes at a cost. Vast monocultures of Russian wheat, American corn and Brazilian soybeans feed a worldwide market, but the lack of genetic diversity leaves crops vulnerable to disease. Meat-packing plants have grown larger, allowing economies of scale — but when Covid-19 hit two beef-packing plants in Alberta last spring, the resulting closures reduced Canadian beef-processing capacity by an estimated 40 percent.
And at every link in the food supply chain, growers and processors have become used to dealing with single buyers or sellers, thus avoiding the extra expense of catering to multiple needs. Many vegetable growers, for example, sell only to the food service industry, allowing them to focus their packing lines on the large quantities that commercial buyers seek.
“We have stripped out redundancy in the name of efficiency to drive down prices,” says Benton. “We have stripped out diversity. We expect to be able to buy goods whatever the season. And, as Covid has illustrated, we have lost the flexibility in our supply chains. If you lose your buyer, you end up throwing things away.”
This is already changing, as food producers, processors and shippers struggle to cope with Covid-19. In Thailand and Malaysia, for example, small-scale farmers and fishers have taken advantage of ubiquitous mobile phones to sell their products directly to local consumers online, finding new markets as their usual wholesalers have stopped buying. And already, at least one large food-processing firm that once bought its raw material from a single supplier told Swinnen it is now sourcing more widely. “It’s diversifying your supply system — and diversification is always good in terms of risk management,” he says.
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Resilience will be even more important as the effects of climate change bring not just hotter growing seasons but also more extreme droughts and storms. To cope, farmers will need to consider measures such as changing their crop mix to favor less water-intensive crops, Richards says.
Any efforts to make food systems more resilient must also deal with the massive role of international trade in food products. American consumers eat Peruvian asparagus and Australian lamb while Chinese eat American pork and Brazilian soybeans, in a global carousel of food trade that tops $1 trillion annually. In essence, many countries are outsourcing the production of their foods to places better able to grow them cheaply.
This has helped keep food prices low, but at some risk. “You’re essentially betting on the stability of the world to provide your food,” says Benton. If we can’t count on that stability — in a future threatened by climate change and the political turmoil it might cause, say — that bet starts to look like a bad idea.
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