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Nourishing Humanity without Destroying the Planet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2021
Abstract
As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay discusses some of the major challenges we will face in feeding the world in 2050. A first challenge is nutritional: 690 million people (9 percent of the world's population) are currently undernourished, while 2.1 billion adults (28 percent of the population) are overweight or obese. The current global food system is insufficient in ensuring that the nutritious foods that make up healthy diets are available and accessible for the world's population. Moreover, by 2050, as the global population increases, food demand will increase by 50–60 percent. A fundamental challenge is meeting this demand while not wreaking irreversible havoc on natural resources, the environment, and planetary systems. A body of scientific research has coalesced around the need to reduce food loss and waste, adopt environmentally sustainable production practices, and shift toward plant-dominant diets. Other long-standing food system problems include deficits in providing fair wages and decent working conditions for food system workers, threats to smallholder farmer livelihoods, and tens of billions of animals kept in welfare-deficit confinement conditions. These food system challenges are bad states of affairs that matter from a variety of moral perspectives. In other words, there is a robust moral case for addressing these challenges. Yet concerted policy action in this area is insufficient and largely absent, pointing to the underlying challenge and complexity of political inertia.
Keywords
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- Roundtable: Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System
- Information
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
References
NOTES
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2 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene,” p. 3.
3 Marco Springmann, Michael Clark, Daniel Mason-D'Croz, Keith Wiebe, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Luis Lassaletta, Wim de Vries, et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits,” Nature 562, no. 7728 (October 10, 2018), pp. 519–25, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0594-0. Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”
4 Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits.”
5 For example, in a business-as-usual scenario, agricultural emissions in 2050 may make up 70 percent of total allowable emissions across all sectors of the economy (where allowable emissions refers to the level that allows us to keep global warming at two degrees Celsius). See Searchinger et al., Creating a Sustainable Food Future, p. 24.
6 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene”; and Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits.”
7 Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits”; and Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”
8 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”
9 As explained by the World Health Organization, “Wasting is defined as low weight-for-height. It often indicates recent and severe weight loss, although it can also persist for a long time. It usually occurs when a person has not had food of adequate quality and quantity and/or they have had frequent or prolonged illnesses. Wasting in children is associated with a higher risk of death if not treated properly. Stunting is defined as low height-for-age. It is the result of chronic or recurrent undernutrition, usually associated with poverty, poor maternal health and nutrition, frequent illness and/or inappropriate feeding and care in early life. Stunting prevents children from reaching their physical and cognitive potential.” “Malnutrition,” World Health Organization, n.d., www.who.int/health-topics/malnutrition#tab=tab_1.
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12 As Jessica Fanzo writes in Nature: “The World Bank estimates that up to 115 million extra people will fall into extreme poverty (living on less than US$1.90 per day) in 2020 owing to the economic shocks of the pandemic. This, in turn, will have significant impacts on food security, nutrition and health. It is projected that 130 million more people will face acute food insecurity by the end of 2020, in addition to the estimated 135 million who faced it in 2019.” Jessica Fanzo, “Cooperate to Prevent Food-System Failure,” Nature, December 9, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03444-5.
13 Swinburn et al., The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change, pp. 800–801.
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20 “Transforming Agrifood Systems and Fostering Inclusive Rural Development in the Context of COVID-19 to End Rural Poverty,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, November 29, 2020, www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/2020/11/end-rural-poverty/; and International Labour Office, Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), 9th ed. (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2016).
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23 Ibid.
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25 Akisha Townsend Eaton, “Suffering of Animals in Food Production: Problems and Practical Solutions,” in Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 445–73.
26 Ibid.; Chris Schlottman and Jeff Sebo, “Industrial Agriculture,” chap. 6 in Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach (London: Routledge, 2018); and Bob Fischer, “Contemporary Animal Agriculture,” chap. 2 in The Ethics of Eating Animals: Usually Bad, Sometimes Wrong, Often Permissible (New York: Routledge, 2019).
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31 Schlottman and Sebo, Food, Animals, and the Environment; Tyler Doggett, “Moral Vegetarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, Fall 2018 edition, September 14, 2018, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/vegetarianism/; and Fischer, The Ethics of Eating Animals.
32 For example, Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene”; Searchinger et al., Creating a Sustainable Food Future; and Swinburn et al., The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change.
33 Swinburn et al., The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change, p. 806.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Lancet Commission, quoted in ibid., p. 795.
37 Ibid., pp. 815–18.
38 Ibid., p. 802.
39 For increase of power, see ibid., p. 814; for weak demand for policies addressing undernutrition, ibid., p. 816; for insufficient demand for policies addressing overnutrition, ibid., p. 791; for framing problems and solutions to resonate, ibid., p. 825.
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43 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”
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