’Tis The Season for Report Roulette
Seven key reports on food, farming, and land you may have missed
I’m going to focus on some good news for a change. First, something unrelated to food and climate: what’s happening in Syria. Yes, I know it’s complicated. Yes, I know there’s more than a passing chance things *may not* get better.
Having lived under a terrible dictatorship, however, I will never not rejoice when a dictator falls and people glimpses a brighter future where they can lead dignified lives.
What made me particularly emotional was seeing families reuniting after years of living apart, not knowing whether the other was still alive, and scenes of prisoners being released from the dungeons, including the notorious Sednaya. I’m very happy for my Syrian friends. I hope we will see something similar in Myanmar in the near future.
Second, judges blocked the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, the second and fourth-largest grocery chains in the United States. Given that the top four chains have cornered 69% of the market, concentration would have gotten even worse if this merger went ahead.
“The decision is a victory for consumers, grocery workers, smaller-scale suppliers and the Federal Trade Commission,” Errol Schweizer wrote in this Forbes piece.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m drowning in reports. Between the multiple multilateral and technical meetings on biodiversity, climate, plastic, desertification and now, more biodiversity, I’m bombarded with more reports than I can read.
This week I spent some time going through the interesting ones so you don’t have to. Here’s a rundown of the most intriguing aspects of my selection, and in the interest of fairness, I’ve arranged them in the order in which they were released.
2.5%
This the measly portion of climate finance that is going to food systems, despite the latter contributing a third of global man-made greenhouse gas emissions and accounting for 15% of global fossil fuel use. It gets worse: if we consider how much goes to “sustainable, agroecological food systems”, we get 1.5%.
The calculation comes from an updated report by the Global Alliance For The Future Of Food. It’s particularly disheartening because despite an overall increase in funding, this is a further reduction from 2022, when the organisation’s first report found less than 3% of climate finance was allocated to fixing food systems.
Between 2017 and 2022, public climate finance almost doubled, growing from US$321 billion to US$640 billion. Yet the flow to food systems was a mere $16.3 billion, of which only $9.1 billion could be labelled “sustainable”, the report said.
In comparison, public subsidies amounting to US$470 billion a year goes to measures that distort prices and are harmful for the environment and human health, according to a 2021 report by three U.N. agencies.
As a result, smallscale farmers are losing out, the Global Alliance’s latest report said. Their analysis showed that of the $9.1 billion going to sustainable food systems, only $1.3 billion (15%) “targeted activities most relevant to small-scale farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and women”, amounting to 0.1% of all climate finance in 2021-2022.
70%
This is the increase in pesticide use between 2000 and 2022, and the Americas accounted for half of the use in 2022, followed by Asia (29%) and Europe (13%). Given what we know of pesticides’ impact on humans, biodiversity, and the environment, this is a shocking and mind boggling figure.
It wasn’t easy picking out a single statistics from a 384-page tome full of numbers, otherwise known as the FAO Statistical Yearbook. For example, more than half of chemical fertiliser use is in Asia (led by China and India), four crops account for about half of global primary crop production: sugar cane (20%), maize (12%), wheat (8%) and rice (8%), and their production has increased by 56% since 2000.
There’s more. We now produce 55% more meat than we did in 22 years ago. China, the U.S. and Brazil accounted for 60% pork, 44% cattle and 40% of chicken production in 2022. Concentration is even worse in palm oil: in 2021, 84% came from Indonesia (62%) and Malaysia (22%) alone.
Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems grew by 10% between 2000 and 2022. Half of this is related to the production of crops and livestock including energy use, known as “farm-gate emissions”. Around 54% of such emissions are from livestock, and 37% from ruminant burps alone.
The report is choc-a-bloc with numbers for anyone who’s interested in digging deeper. Last stat: each year, Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia withdraw between 9 to almost 40 times their available renewable freshwater resources.
5,000 trillion
That’s the amount of kilocalories of food that were traded in 2021, more than double the number in 2000, according to The 2024 State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) which explores the intricate linkages between food trade, diets and nutrition.
A lot of us sees food trade, particularly the international dimension, with a suspicious eye but few places in the world can be truly self-sufficient when it comes to being able to produce everything its inhabitants need for a healthy, diverse diet.
Food trade increases the availability of micronutrients - between 2010 and 2020, per capita trade of B-vitamins riboflavin and thiamine and the minerals calcium and zinc increased by around 40% - and often lowers food prices, but it also has negative consequences, which the report acknowledges.
For example, a 10% increase in income results in an 11% increase in the demand for imports of ultra-processed foods, which in 2021 accounted for 7% of globally traded calories and 12% of food imports in high-income countries. This partly explains why hunger declined to 9.2% in 2022 from 12.7% in 2000 and adult obesity increased from 8.7% to 15.8% in the same period.
The report said WTO rules and regional trade agreements “impose potential constraints” on governments’ ability to improve its citizens’ nutrition levels. For example, front-of-package labelling, which allows consumers to understand the nutritional aspects of a product, is classified as a “Technical Barrier to Trade”, meaning exporting nations could challenge it for restricting/affecting trade.
46%
This is the efficiency of nitrogen fertiliser, meaning only 46% of nitrogen applied as fertiliser is taken up by the crops and the rest “runs off into freshwater bodies, and coastal areas with dire consequences for the environment”. It’s not a brand new figure but it is one worth repeating over and over and over.
A special report on land launched at the beginning of the 16th conference of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) reiterated this concerning figure and presented many more.
For example, 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries including climate change, changes in land use, and freshwater systems, have already been breached. Two are close to hitting the limits. Planetary boundaries are scientifically determined thresholds essential for maintaining Earth’s stability.
In addition, deforestation and climate change have reduced by 20% the capacity of trees and soils to absorb excess CO₂ over the last decade. The main culprit? Conventional agriculture. Agriculture caused 90% of recent deforestation, mainly due to expanding cropland in Africa and Asia, and due to livestock grazing in South America.
“Land degradation hotspots primarily stem from intensive agricultural production and high irrigation demands, particularly in dry regions such as South Asia, northern China, the US High Plains, California and the Mediterranean,” it said, adding that more than 50% of world’s major rivers have been disrupted by dam construction and 47% of aquifers are being depleted faster than they replenish.
Three-quarters
Some 77.6% of Earth’s land became permanently drier during the three decades to 2020, said a new UNCCD report that looked at global and regional trends on aridity, “the climatic and enduring condition of too little life-supporting moisture”.
The landmark report - aridity has been notoriously hard to measure and document - also warned that human-caused climate change is behind the recent rise in aridity that began in the 1990s. If we don’t slash greenhouse gas emissions, another 3% of the world’s humid areas could become drylands by the end of this century.
Once an area becomes a dryland, it also becomes especially vulnerable to climate change, so we’re talking about a vicious cycle. Areas affected by the drying trend include almost all of Europe, parts of the western United States, Brazil, parts of Asia, and central Africa. Europe could see the largest proportionate increase of drylands within this century.
Some 22% of the planet’s land including in the central U.S. and parts of Southeast Asia experienced wetter conditions, but the overarching trend is one of dryness. Scientists have projected that increasing aridity could cause losses of staples crops like maize, wheat, and rice running into millions of tonnes.
“Unlike droughts - temporary periods of low rainfall - aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation,” Ibrahim Thiaw, UNCCD Executive Secretary, said at the report’s launch. “Droughts end. When an area’s climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost.”
None
No a single income group in the UK “meets dietary recommendations”, said the second UK Food Security Report. Published every three years, it provides an analysis of the national food security status. But it’s 466 pages so I focused on the executive summary, introduction, and overall findings for the five main themes.
“Mean intakes of saturated fat, free sugars and salt exceeded the recommended maximum, and mean intakes of fibre, fruits and vegetables, and oily fish fell below the recommended minimum across adults in 2019,” it said.
Still, diets for the rich are typically closer to meeting the recommendations. For example, they eat 13% less fruits and vegetables than recommended but the poorest 10% on average eat 42% less. The UK is dependent on imports of nutritious foods like fruit, vegetables and seafood but households also waste a lot of food: 115.7kg per person in 2021.
The combined impacts of geopolitical and climate events have made food much more expensive in the UK, the report said. In fact, a 2023 analysis by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found energy costs and climate change added £605 to the average household food bill in 2022 and 2023.
This might continue: the latest government data showed that compared to 2023, wheat harvest decreased by 20% and oilseed rape by 32%, “the third lowest total production for wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape since modern records began in 1984”, said ECIU. Extreme weather has been cited as a key cause.
1.4 billion hectares
That’s how much land impacted by salinity (the accumulation of dissolved salts in the soil) and it’s equivalent to 10.7% of total global land area. Another billion hectares is at risk due to the climate crisis and human mismanagement, said The Global Status of Salt-Affected Soils.
Both nature (climate change and related phenomena) and humans (irrigation with poor quality water, deforestation, over pumping, overuse of fertilisers, etc) drive salinity. But excessive salinity reduces soil fertility and undermines crop yield, by up to 72% for rice, 68% for bean, and 40% for potato in the most extreme cases.
10 countries account for 70% of these soils: Australia, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Russia, U.S., Iran, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and China, in that order. But more than 90% of land in Oman, Uzbekistan, and Jordan are affected.
The report estimates that 10% of irrigated cropland and 10% of rainfed cropland are affected by salinity and if the current trajectory of temperature rises continue, this might go up to between 24% and 32% of the total land surface, mostly in developing countries.
Yet two out of three surveyed countries don’t have regulations on the sustainable use and management of salt-affected soils. In half of those surveyed, there is no government body to monitor or supervise them.
Thin’s Pickings
How we made food from industrial waste - It’s Complicated/ The Guardian
An interesting look at the history of UPFs.
African competition authorities only see the tip of the iceberg of anti-competitive conduct - Shamba Centre for Food & Climate
A new paper from the Shama Centre team on the crucial but oft-overlooked issue of anti-competitive behaviour by food enterprises in Africa.
When competition laws do not exist or are not enforced, it leads to concentration of agri-food markets, and we all know monopolies are good only for the few. The rest of us have to deal with price rises, unfair terms, and a lack of choices.
Their Fertiliser Poisons Farmland. Now, They Want Protection From Lawsuits. - The New York Times
The title is self-explanatory but Hiroko Tabuchi went on to detail how Synagro, a company now owned by Goldman Sachs, sells treated sludge from homes and factories to farms as fertiliser. However, such fertiliser “can contain harmful “forever chemicals” known as PFAS linked to serious health problems including cancer and birth defects”.
Synagro is now lobbying Congress to limit farmers and others from being able to sue them to clean up the resulting pollution. The company says it didn’t manufacture these chemicals but continues to sell the fertiliser laden with them.
How drought insurance can leave millions without food - Bloomberg
Gautam Naik and Antony Sguazzin on “a niche and chancy form of insurance” that makes payouts, the amount of which is agreed in advance, only when a specific metric is triggered, and how it has worked - or not - on drought-affected farmers in Malawi.
They point to the hypocrisy of the rich world that is pushing insurance as a way for poor nations to recover from climate changed-induced weather disasters, even though it was the rich world’s decades-long behaviour that has been the main driver of climate change.
As a Malawian told the journalists: “We are suffering for sins we didn’t commit.”
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