COVID-19 and our food system: The pandemic on our plate?

Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) has just issued a wide-ranging critique of our global food system. “Is the next pandemic on our plate? Our food system through the lens of Covid-19” is a strong and urgent call for fundamental reform in the wake of COVID-19. It was written by Peter Stevenson, CIWF’s chief policy advisor and leading commentator on the future of food, farming and animal welfare.

This has particular resonance for the EU in view of the European Green Deal: and especially the “Farm to Fork” strategy, which refers to “designing a fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food system”.

The key message from CIWF is that COVID-19 has highlighted the danger of ignoring potential crises until they are hard upon us. Other crises – climate change, antibiotics resistance, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity and pollution – are rapidly coming down the line. We are doing too little to tackle these pending disasters. And in each case our food system plays a major part in generating these problems. We must change the way we farm, and what we eat.

The main supporting messages are:

• Serious diseases can jump from wild animals to humans. In addition, the crowded, stressful conditions in factory farms can be the perfect breeding ground for infectious diseases, some of them zoonotic. Also the high level of disease in factory farms leads to the routine use of antimicrobials: driving antimicrobial resistance in animals, and in turn undermining their efficacy in human medicine. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks are associated with intensive domestic poultry production. Our cruel abuse of wild and farmed animals is damaging our health.

• Industrial animal agriculture – and associated intensive crop production based on monocultures and agro-chemicals – plays a major part in several environmental crises i.e. pollution and overuse of water, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and deforestation. UNFAO calculates that soils are now so degraded that we have only about 60 years of harvests left.

• Industrial animal agriculture depends on feeding human-edible cereals to livestock. 57% of EU cereals are used as animal feed. This is notably inefficient. For every 100 calories fed to animals, just 17-30 enter the human food chain as meat or milk. Livestock enhance food security only when they convert materials we cannot consume e.g. grass into food we can eat.

• Factory farming inflicts lives of utter desolation on animals: crates in which sows cannot even turn around; cages where hens are unable to stretch their wings; cattle confined in mega-dairies or feedlots. Factory farming treats animals not as living, sentient beings, but as mere units of production created solely to engender profit and cheap food.

• We have developed a food system which does precisely the opposite of what it is meant to do – it makes people ill: mainly because of high-calorie, unhealthy diets. We need to produce more nutritional food: and reducing meat consumption would produce benefits for health, climate and the environment. Instead of meat we should move to predominantly plant-based diets.

• Our current economic model is predominantly quantitative in its focus on growth and GDP. It pays little attention to the need for growth to proceed in ways that do not damage natural resources and well-being (human and animal).

• Factory farming produces food that is “cheap” only by economic sleight of hand, and ignoring the wider costs which are not born by producer or buyer, but by society and the planet in terms of human health and natural resources

• Current food systems primarily benefit large multi-nationals who sell the feed, the pharmaceuticals, the fertilisers, the cages etc. They wield great political influence over policy-makers

• Let’s build a system which is healthy, socially just, environmentally regenerative, and respectful of animals. We need to move to forms of farming that work in harmony with natural processes such as agroecology, circular agriculture and agro-forestry: restoring biodiversity, and enabling pollinators, farmland birds and other wildlife to flourish.

• Fiscal measures should be used to support healthy, humane and sustainable food: subsidies and tax breaks for food produced to high environmental and animal welfare standards: taxes on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and on unhealthy environmentally-damaging food (and no subsidies).

• By halving all food loss and waste, including that of feeding cereals to animals, and over-consumption beyond nutritional needs, we could readily feed the projected world population of 9.7 billions by 2050. We just need to use what we produce more wisely.

• To conclude, maintaining and further embedding a flawed food system based on over-production and consumption of animal- based products will lead to further pandemics, dangerous levels of climate change, undermine antibiotics and degrade soil fertility. An alternative food system can deliver on a wealth of public goods, and help keep ourselves, our planet and the animals we share it with safe into the future.

COMMENT

• In short, our food system is using up finite resources at an unsustainable pace. In economic terms, we are spending the only capital available to us, the planet, in a spendthrift and wasteful manner, and at breakneck speed.

• COVID-19 underlines the dangers in a particularly stark way.

• The way out of this crisis is not a return to “business as usual”. That is what landed us in the crisis in the first case. Just to take one statistic, current methods of food production/consumption would lead to an 87% rise in Greenhouse Gas emissions by 2050 (base line 2010).

• Serious reform is well over-due.

• All need to play a role. This is particularly true of the EU. The Green Deal refers to the EU building “on its strengths as a global leader on climate and environmental measures”.

• 2.1.6 of the Green Deal specifically refers to the EU becoming “the global standard for sustainability”. Measures proposed include: 40% of Common Agricultural Policy to contribute to climate action; significant reduction in use of chemical pesticides; area under organic farming to increase; circular economy including reduction of food waste; and stimulating sustainable food consumption. All these need to be addressed and implemented.

• Above all, what is needed is a comprehensive, root and branch reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and its system of subsidies, which should be repurposed as suggested by CIWF.

• There have been many previous attempts to reform the Common Agricultural Policy, without any radical results. Large multi-nationals peddle the argument that industrial agriculture gives us cheap food, and is vital to feed the world. EU governments wish to be seen to protect their farmers. The salience of these arguments is totally undermined by the CIWF paper, and should be strongly challenged: factory farm food is not cheap because of the hidden costs; present policies are not helping the farmers, but the middlemen, the companies; factory farming is not “modern”, it is old thinking, conceived in our grandparent’s generation, reflecting outdated practices.

• The devastation wrought by COVID-19 provides the opportunity, and the necessity, for fundamental change. Reform of the subsidy system would be a practical and obvious place to make a start, showing intent, potentially yielding early results, and sending a powerful signal.
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#Covid19; #CIWF; #CompassionInWorldFarming; #Pandemic; #ClimateChange; #FactoryFarming; #EuropeanGreenDeal; #FarmToFork; #CommonAgriculturalPolicy


Sir David Madden

Vice-Chair, Compassion in World Farming; and Distinguished Friend of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.