Reflections on a talk by George Monbiot- how can we feed the world sustainably?
Sasha shares what she took away from a talk by George Monbiot, a British writer known for his environmental activism.
On the Monday of half term, I sat down to watch the Guardian Live “in conversation with George Monbiot” event, in which he introduced his new book, “Regenesis” – all about how modern farming is, to put it bluntly, inefficient, corrupt, and unsustainable. I present below a very brief rundown of some of the points he made (full review coming after I finish the book itself).
The problem with fertilizers, and a potential solution
First, he spoke of fertilisers. In agriculture, due to the overuse of the farmland, farmers use a lot of fertilisers – both chemicals and manure. Except, since the amount used is often very generous, most of the useful minerals and ions, like nitrates, wash off (leaching) into the nearby water sources, resulting in eutrophication (excess algal growth that suffocates the water). Farmers often use manure to promote their produce as organic, and yet up to 37% more nitrates wash off the soil when you use manure over alternatives.
Monbiot brought up a pioneering farmer friend of his – Tolly – who relies on the rhizosphere to grow his crops, without the use of any fertiliser. The rhizosphere is the immediate region around a plant’s roots that is involved in the exchanges between the soil, microorganisms, and the plant, and it is this symbiotic relationship that allows all the necessary nutrients to be locked around the crop. With this strategy, Tolly has managed to hit the lower bound of the commercial farmers’ yield, which is a phenomenal breakthrough.
Should subsidies be scrapped?
Another main argument he made was about subsidies, and the way they only really profit the rich and powerful. He mentioned that above 90% of all our crop production is controlled by only a handful of corporations, which monopolise all new food technologies that are made, rendering fresh produce too expensive for a lower-income household to regularly purchase, increasing the pressure on food banks. Monbiot even said that the one good outcome from Brexit has been the departure of the UK from the EU’s agricultural agreement, which operated very corrupt subsidy policies. The rules to obtain funding boiled down to simply owning arable land, and appearing to grow food on them, which benefitted nobody other than the already prosperous companies behind the land ownership.
He went on to urge us to discourage corporate intellectual property rights, especially over up-and-coming agricultural technologies, to allow for fairer food distribution. He brought up the example of the Land Institute, who have recently developed a new strain of genetically modified rice that is perennial. This gets rid of the need to create a “catastrophe”, as he put it, every year by ploughing the land to sow yet another batch of annual crops (which are economically efficient due to their quick life cycle); instead, the same rice plants have produced a constant yield for the past six years in an experiment in China, proving to be a huge success for the industry. The author stressed the importance of us having multiple strategies of producing food, so that we are not so dependent on one superproducer that the global food security crashes if any problems arise (for example, the invasion of Ukraine).
A criticism of newer techniques
Lastly, Monbiot spoke briefly (but rather passionately) about how some new developments are, perhaps… less of a good idea. Turns out the new craze of vertical farming isn’t as efficient as we thought. It has often been branded as a more economically efficient alternative to regular horizontal agriculture, except the numbers don’t add up. He argued that it’s very unlikely that a farm like that, requiring a new structure to be built, with a high energy and water bill is superior to the current system, in which the energy comes from sunlight, not from artificial sources. He finished by saying we need to learn from our mistakes and notice that many of these start-ups fail very quickly, and yet more and more farmers are switching to vertical farming without truly considering all variables.
Those are probably my biggest personal takeaways from the session; however I would very much recommend reading the book – “Regenesis” – for a deeper understanding of how we can “feed the world without devouring the planet”.