New horizons

Agriculture had its ‘green’ revolution fifty years ago. Now it’s time for the low-carbon revolution, says Jonathon Porritt.

It’s not so long ago that if you started chatting to someone about ‘the low-carbon food economy’, they might have thought you were referring to some dietary fad. Today, while not everyone is convinced of the idea that climate change is caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions (56% said so in a recent Ipsos MORI opinion poll), the term ‘low-carbon’ is at least entering everyday-speak. The occasional outburst of climate gossip may even be overheard down the proverbial Dog & Duck (as in “my carbon footprint is definitely smaller than yours”), and there is no doubt that this summer’s floods will have added to the maelstrom of debate.

But are people getting it? By ‘it’ I mean what is really needed to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate?

So much of the discussion is focused on just two things: technology fixes and lifestyle changes. Land use barely features, though it affects every single aspect of our lives: food production, biofuels, transport, recreation, private property, flood control…

“The transformation of today’s food production and distribution systems will mean much more emphasis on the local and regional”

I’m sincerely hoping that the new Rural Climate Change Forum [see ‘Footprints on the farm'] will go further than Defra has previously done in linking climate change and land use. This was something that was hugely understated in its chapter on Land Use in the government’s 2005 Climate Change Programme. Certainly the Forum’s remit sounds dead on – to stimulate new thinking about managing the land so that it produces the food and other services we need from it for a fraction of the current carbon footprint.

Different farmers and landowners across the country will no doubt have a different take on climate change, in terms of its threats and opportunities. But with the best will in the world, the threats do seem to weigh somewhat more heavily on farmers than the opportunities. On the horizon lie not only shifting weather patterns, but the shadow of tougher policy as awareness grows about the impact of the greenhouse gases emitted by the production of our food. Not to mention the food miles…

Lambasting the sector isn’t going to get us very far. And sadly, the ‘carrots’ on offer to farmers don’t look as substantial as they ought to be. Apart from the obvious financial benefits of getting really good at using much less energy, farmers enjoy few incentives to wean them off their CO2-intensive practices. Under the recently negotiated Rural Development Programme, for instance, there is a lot about agri-environment measures, biodiversity and so on, but mighty little about either flood control or climate change per se.

All of which makes for some interesting pressure points as the rest of the food industry (processors and retailers in particular) start raising their game on the low-carbon challenge. The decision by Marks & Spencer to become carbon neutral by 2012 (primarily through dramatic improvements in energy efficiency, building design, renewable energy and the use of biofuels) and Tesco’s ambitious climate change strategy (including a commitment to put carbon labels on its products [see ‘Carbon's vital statistics'], have transformed both public and industry perceptions of just how urgent this now is.

“It is going to take a while for people to re-learn the basic fact that today’s food economy is almost 100% dependent on the use of fossil fuels.”

But it is going to take a while for people to re-learn the basic fact that today’s food economy is almost 100% dependent on the use of fossil fuels. That is what ‘efficiency’ in the industry basically means: bigger farm machines, more chemicals derived from oil, global sourcing, longer supply chains, more processed food – all of which has come with a bigger and bigger carbon footprint.

There’s no doubt that these increases in agricultural productivity have brought about one of the greatest achievements of modern civilisation – largely eliminating global food scarcity. There’s no way that human numbers could have risen as dramatically as they have without them. Yet the hidden costs of this success story are soil erosion, chemical pollution and unsustainable water consumption, as we began to discover several decades ago. It is only more recently that we are revealing some of the equally profound carbon costs.

As food retailers start to calculate the full extent of their carbon footprint, both upstream (raw materials and production) and downstream (the energy required to cook their products), we’re able to pinpoint where the true impacts are coming from. Our increasingly meat-intensive diets are one example. A new study from the National Institute of Livestock & Grassland Science in Japan calculated that a single kilogramme of beef is responsible for the same amount of CO2 as is emitted by the average European car over 150 miles.

To many, all this points to the need for a wholesale transformation of today’s food production and distribution systems. The ‘low-carbon food economy’ will mean much more emphasis on local and regional rather than global, on hyper-efficient supermarkets and distribution systems and on organic and low-impact farming. Some of today’s lowcarbon pioneers in the modern food economy are featured in this Special Publication. But I suspect that what we are seeing now is only the start of the low-carbon revolution just around the corner.

Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future
and chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission

11 October 2007

Jonathon Porritt