Tag: WWF

Feed humans before livestock – World Wildlife Fund

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Transform UK farmland to boost food resilience and tackle nature crisis, says WWF.

By, Brendan Montague, The Ecologist (Creative Commons 4.0)

Half of the UK’s wheat harvest each year – equivalent to 11 billion loaves of bread – is being used to feed livestock in an “inherently inefficient” process that is fuelling climate change, a WWF report reveals.

The report shows the extent of farmland used to grow crops that are being used to feed animals instead of people. It explores the benefits for people, climate and nature of using more of the UK’s arable land to grow crops for human consumption instead, such as addressing the climate and nature crises and boosting the UK’s food resilience.

The latest report in WWF’s Future of Feed series highlights the fact that dairy and meat products provide only 32 percent of calories consumed in the UK and less than half of protein despite livestock and their feed making up 85 percent of the country’s agricultural land use.

Habitats

Growing crops like cereals to feed farm animals accounts for a significant proportion of this land-use footprint, according to the analysis in the report.

Wheat and barley grown to feed farmed animals in the UK using 2 million hectares of land – 40 percent of the UK’s arable land area.

Wheat grown in the UK each year to feed livestock – mostly chickens and pigs – makes up half of our annual wheat harvest and would be enough to produce nearly 11 billion loaves of bread.

Oats grown in the UK to feed livestock each year make up a third of our annual oat harvest and would be enough to produce nearly 6 billion bowls of porridge.

The UK imports large quantities of soy to feed pigs and poultry, fuelling the destruction of precious habitats overseas, like the Brazilian Cerrado.

Affordable

Replacing animal feeds like soy and cereal with alternatives like grass, by-products from the food supply chain, and innovative feed ingredients such as insect meal, would free up land to grow food for people, including high-value crops like fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and could be at the heart of a transition to nature-friendly regenerative agriculture.

The report recognises that this approach to feeding farm animals would necessitate a reduction in the overall numbers of livestock in the UK.

Kate Norgrove, executive director of advocacy and campaigns at WWF said: “We can’t afford to stay locked into a food system that’s not fit for purpose, with food prices soaring.

“Far too much of the food we eat is produced in ways that are fuelling the climate crisis and driving catastrophic nature loss, yet failing to deliver affordable, healthy food for all.

Biodiversity

“To make our food system truly shock-resistant we need to accelerate a shift to sustainable production, including rethinking the way we are using huge quantities of the UK’s most productive land to grow food for livestock instead of people.

She added: “UK governments can future-proof our food and bring huge benefits for nature and climate at the same time by ramping up support for farmers to transform our landscapes, making space for nature in farms and forests, fields and fens.”

Focusing purely on the carbon footprint of food production risks fuelling agricultural intensification and masking other negative environmental impacts, like pollution from the slurry or land conversion for feed production in chicken farming, which can have a low carbon footprint in comparison with pasture-fed beef, the report states.

It also highlights the importance of looking at a wider range of measures to evaluate the environmental impact of all aspects of food production, taking account of pressures on land, water, and biodiversity before drawing conclusions.

Climate Change Experts: The Science is ‘Scary’

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(8 Aug 2019) Two authors of a landmark U.N. report on the relationship between climate change and land say the science behind global warming is “scary” and warned that food insecurity is a growing problem.

Koko Warner, who contributed to a chapter on risk management and decision-making in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, said she had lost a lot of sleep about what the science is saying and urgent action needs to be taken.

She and two other experts on climate and conservation spoke to the Associated Press after the U.N. backed IPCC released the report at the World Meteorological Organisation’s headquarters in Geneva.

The special report, written by more than 100 scientists and unanimously approved by diplomats from nations around the world, made further warnings about the issue of global warming.

It also laid out actions that governments, farmers, and the general public can take to help battle climate change.

The scientists said if people change the way they eat and grow food it could help save the planet from a far warmer future.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, who contributed to chapter of the IPCC report on food security, said climate change is already impacting food security and extreme weather events caused by climate change are also affecting the supply chain of our food.

Earth’s land masses are warming twice as fast as the planet as a whole.

While heat-trapping gases are causing problems in the atmosphere, the land has been less talked about as part of climate change.

Global Policy Manager for WWF’s Climate and Energy Practice Fernanda Carvalho said the report touched on “everything” with regard to land and climate change, though she said the conservation group would have liked to see more of a focus on biodiversity.

Climate Change Drivers: Food Choices or Electricity Generation and Transportation? Q&A with EarthTalk

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A chef told me that our food choices are the major driver of climate change around the world, but it seems to me that electricity generation and transportation are really more the problem, no?
-Melanie G., Moodus, CT

It depends how you slice it. Producing electricity (power plants) and getting ourselves and our stuff around (transportation) do generate the majority of greenhouse gas emissions around the world. But while the agriculture sector in and of itself is only responsible for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of our food choices ripples throughout other sectors as well, with the untold transport miles devoted to shipping food within and between continents, driving to and from restaurants and the grocery store—and all the disposable packaging food is wrapped in that gets tossed into landfills.

Meanwhile, we all use lots of electricity and gas to cook and prepare our food and to keep it cool in the fridge until we’re ready for it. And since we throw away some 30 percent of the food we buy, much of the carbon emitted to produce and transport it is for naught. No doubt, our food choices are an important factor in moving society away from our profligate use of fossil fuels and toward a greener future.

Whether or not you’ve already taken steps to reduce your carbon footprint by driving or flying less and boosting the efficiency of the buildings and appliances where you live and work, you can do a lot more by changing your diet. The UK office of the non-profit WWF has teamed up with Knorr Foods, one of the largest food brands globally, to launch a new initiative called The Future 50 Foods which encourages people to diversify their diets beyond the carbon-intensive staples so many of us rely on day-to-day.

Greater diversity in our diets is essential, as the lack of variety in agriculture is both bad for nature and a threat to food security,” reports WWF. “Currently 75 percent of the world’s food comes from just 12 plant and five animal species.”

This so-called dietary monotony is not just bad for our bodies, given the lack of diversity and limited consumption of some vitamins and minerals, it is also linked to a decline in the diversity of plants and animals used in and around agriculture. According to WWF, we’ve lost some 75 percent of the genetic plant diversity in agriculture since 1900.

Some of the “future 50 foods” that WWF and Knorr would like us to eat more of include some familiar ingredients—lentils, kale, wild rice— as well as others that you’ve probably never heard of let alone considered eating, like pumpkin flowers, cactus and fonio, a nutrition-rich, ancient West African grain that Cooking Light magazine calls “the new super grain that could replace quinoa.”

Fonio Paddy
WWF and Knorr are working together to encourage people around the world to diversify their diets so as to include more climate-friendly foods — such as fonio, a West African grain which is not only nutritious but also easy to grow without lots of chemical inputs. Credit: Communication JOKKALE, FlickrCC.

Many of these have higher yields than the crops we currently rely on and several are tolerant of challenging weather and environmental conditions, meaning they could not only reduce the land required for crops, but also prove invaluable in the face of growing climate uncertainty,” says WWF. “It’s essential that we change our eating habits to ensure we protect our planet whilst feeding the growing global population.”

CONTACTS: WWF; Knorr’s Future 50 Foods Report; Cooking Light

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk.