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If you take an economy and increase it by 2%

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a year or 4%

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per year,

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effectively you've got an exponential growth process.

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And we live on a finite planet.

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And whilst most consumption is underpinned in some way by material consumption,

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whether food,

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whether land,

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whether plastics,

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whether oil and gas,

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whether minerals,

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etc.,

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you don't have to be a genius to work out that eventually something's got to give.

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Today I'm talking to Professor Tim Benton,

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one of the world's leading experts in food systems and food security.

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Over the next 90 minutes he's going to give us a real masterclass to demonstrate why the current global food system is just about to break and what it would take to save it.

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This is without a doubt one of the best and most powerful conversations

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I've had the privilege to host on the Deep Seat podcast yet and I promise you,

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you won't regret listening to it.

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This episode was made in partnership with Soul Capital.

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I'm your host,

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Raphael,

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and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.

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Hi Tim,

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welcome to the Deep Seat Podcast.

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Hello Raphael,

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lovely to be here.

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Could you maybe start by introducing yourself for the listeners,

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telling us a little bit about your personal journey and what led you to become so passionate about food systems in general?

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Yeah,

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this is a really difficult question to answer because I'm,

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in a sense,

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I do a lot of things.

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At heart,

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I guess I'm an ecologist.

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I started off as a academic ecologist working on a range of things to do with ecosystem modelling and ecosystems,

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understanding why populations go up and down or different species and so on.

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So long term interest in biodiversity.

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And then I started working on agricultural.

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biodiversity and trying to understand why some insects were going down in numbers and some were going up in numbers.

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And that led me on a long detour into trying to understand what sustainable agriculture meant.

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And then I came to that kind of realisation being a systems person that it's not about,

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you can't define sustainable agriculture without defining the food system

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come up with a recipe for sustainable agriculture and then you scale that up worldwide it might become unsustainable and that's kind of the history of our area so i started working on food systems and then i left academia for a while and worked for the government uh trying

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to integrate across different government departments thinking about food and food security and the challenges ahead then i went back to academia and then i just finished a stint where i was research director

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at Chatham House,

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the Royal Institute of International Affairs,

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where I was really working on the geopolitics of issues to do with food,

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land,

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sustainability,

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climate and so on.

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So I've had this long journey but food has kind of been at the heart of it for reasons that I'll come to in a little while no doubt.

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Great.

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I want to start with a big question.

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If you were given five minutes to speak in front of every single person in the UK?

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The floor is yours,

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you can say whatever you want.

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What will you say?

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I guess I would start off by saying my generation,

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so I'm in my

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60s, has lived a life of unrivaled prosperity and peace effectively.

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And we've kind of got used to living in a world of plenty.

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material wealth and consumption.

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And yet,

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almost everything that we rely on relies on the planet also being sustainably managed,

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whether it's food,

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whether it's climate,

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whether it's water availability,

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whatever.

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And because we've kind of got used to this overabundance of stuff and expect everything to be on tap,

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we're in the situation where we're making the planet

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unhealthy and just as humans are starting to really suffer from the perils of broadly overconsumption whether it's overconsumption of fuel or plastic wrapping or food and it's making us ill and our life expectancy is going down because of it.

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The world is also getting to the point where it is sufficiently unhealthy that we've got effectively we've got ourselves

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stuff that comes from the planet,

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the less able the planet is to absorb those demands.

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And the more likely it is that the planet won't be able to continue to...

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to let us get away with it in a way.

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And within that,

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the food system is perhaps the biggest contributor that people often don't think of in terms of its impacts on land use,

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biodiversity,

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climate,

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pollution around the world and therefore is a very big unsustainable body of work.

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uh in everyday activity and at the same time the food system is not doing what it should do if you or i were to design it from scratch which is to feed people healthily and nutritiously so what we've got is increasingly a

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food system that makes quite a lot of profit

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uh for particularly for some people uh within the system makes quite a lot of profit makes food abundant and relatively cheap for most people particularly in the rich world but it's making us ill and is making the planet ill so put

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all of that together effectively if you look into the future you can see a world where the pressures of climate change and biodiversity loss and unsustainable land use

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Soil degradation,

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etc.

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And the human costs of poor diet,

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whether it is illnesses associated with obesity,

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diabetes,

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heart disease,

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or whether it's cancers or whatever,

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plus the weight of plastic packaging and the pollution from fertilizer,

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pesticides,

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plastic,

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etc.,

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etc.,

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will not make the world unlivable,

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but will make the world much more challenging to live in.

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and particularly challenging to our way of life.

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And I think there has been a lot of conversation over the years about all lifestyle change,

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blah,

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blah,

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blah.

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But what worries me most at the moment,

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particularly in 2025,

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and over the last five years is the relationship between broadly the politics and geopolitics of sustainability,

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and what that does to the way our democracies work the way our

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countries relate to each other.

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And you can see,

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looking ahead,

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if you just follow the sorts of things that have happened over the last five,

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six years,

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whether it is Trump or whether it is Brexit or whether it is COVID or whether it is the Ukraine war,

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you can just see those sorts

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partly being driven by climate change but partly being driven by countries competing to maintain the standard of living and the expectation that we can still continue with infinite economic growth.

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And why do I say that?

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If you take all of our governments,

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everywhere in the world wants to have a positive GDP.

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So that's

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2%, 3%,

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4%,

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8%

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of your China economic growth per year.

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So if you take an economy and increase it by 2%

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a year or 4%

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per year,

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effectively you've got an exponential growth process.

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And we live on a finite planet,

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and whilst most consumption is underpinned in some way by material consumption,

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whether food,

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whether land,

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whether plastics,

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whether oil and gas,

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whether minerals,

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etc.

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You don't have to be,

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and Malthus first pointed this out,

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didn't he?

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200 and something years ago.

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You don't have to be a genius to work out that eventually something's got to give.

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And so for me,

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the sustainability argument is not a kind of middle class nice to have.

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Let's all be organic.

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wear sandals and,

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you know,

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grow a long bushy beard and live in a commune.

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It's not about that.

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It's about trying to maintain the world so peace and prosperity can stay the norm rather than be something that was particularly of the 20th century.

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So one of the things you said is that we can't have exponential growth on a finite planet.

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Right now,

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economic growth is tied to use of resources and therefore more growth,

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more resources getting used.

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We get to a point where that's not possible anymore.

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growing the economy while reducing our material footprint.

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What do you think about that?

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Well,

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I mean,

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there's obviously some strength in the argument in the sense that

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Malthus was obviously wrong at the time and Paul Ehrlich was wrong in the

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60s.

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But logically,

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that will only get you so far.

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So if...

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Very technological technological advance increases the efficiency of our resource use.

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That doesn't stop it that just means we use it at a slower rate and eventually the maths are quite simple an exponential growth process will overtake the sum of the kind of

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global resources.

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And,

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you know,

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you quote AI,

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AI can be absolutely fantastic at increasing the efficiencies of things.

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But it comes with a downside,

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of course.

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I mean,

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if you think about the data centers and the heating that's required,

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and the resources that go into running those computers,

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let alone the technology that comes out the other end.

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And if you look at our history of technological advancement,

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a lot of it is based,

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yes,

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on increasing efficiency.

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But when

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you switch to another resource,

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and then you switch to another resource.

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And,

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you know,

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wild-caught fisheries are an example of that,

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that you fish the common fish,

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and when the common fish become less common,

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you fish the uncommon fish,

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and when they become less common,

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you move to somewhere else and fish their fish.

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And eventually,

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there isn't very much place left to go where you can do that sort of thing.

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So the argument must be logically correct.

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Malthus's argument must

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the rate at which we cross our planetary carrying capacity but the data is there i mean the whether you like them or loathe them the kind of concept of planetary boundaries that has uh been with us for the last 15 20 years uh

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most of the planetary boundaries are being crossed and those are the kind of safe spaces for humanity whether it is climate change and then essentially the world

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in 2015 that one and a half degrees of climate change was a kind of safe planetary boundary but we're crossing that now uh and biodiversity loss is continuing apace and i know i was just reading something as i was having a cup of tea earlier about uh

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slender-billed curlew going extinct across

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Europe and

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Asia and Africa,

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a very common bird going extinct.

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And for every common bird that might go extinct,

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the number of bugs and beasties that are also going extinct and the soil microbiota,

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etc.,

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etc.

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So everything ecologically that we rely on is at risk and it's an absolute risk,

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whereas technology...

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Provides a relative improvement,

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but not an absolute improvement.

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Right.

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Do you think that staying within planetary boundaries necessarily means reducing our comfort of life?

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Or is it possible to have a happy,

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fulfilling,

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abundant life while staying within planetary boundaries?

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I don't quite understand what you mean by an abundant life,

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but you can certainly have a prosperous life.

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You can have a life free,

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freer of anxieties because increasingly the kind of tight interconnectedness of our world means that we are prone to the ripple effects of a war over there or a political event over there and supply chain disruptions,

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etc.

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Climate is causing increasing anxieties,

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etc.

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And,

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you know,

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a lot of the information shows that you need a certain amount of wealth,

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but beyond a certain level,

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getting richer doesn't make you happier.

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And I think in this part of the

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21st century,

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we are increasingly recognising the value of human connectedness and local communities and the kind of...

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The things that my grandparents might have seen as normal,

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but in our modern world where we're rushing around constantly glued to your phones,

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doing social media constantly,

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never really having a proper conversation with people,

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not knowing your neighbours,

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etc.

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doesn't help you be a happy and well-adjusted person.

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And,

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you know,

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post-Covid in the rich world,

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the...

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The kind of epidemic of mental health issues,

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the epidemic of health issues.

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It would be a strong argument to say we must continue doing the same thing because it makes us happy,

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because increasingly it's not making us happy.

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Right.

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Yeah.

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When I mentioned abundance at the start of this question...

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I guess that was what I was implying or referring to is that we think of abundance as financial abundance,

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material wealth.

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But it could also very much be abundance of social connection,

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of pure air,

255
00:14:44.439 --> 00:14:45.679
of healthy food,

256
00:14:46.280 --> 00:14:47.621
of healthy gut microbiota.

257
00:14:47.661 --> 00:14:47.981
I don't know,

258
00:14:48.021 --> 00:14:50.082
like all of these things that make for a good life.

259
00:14:50.102 --> 00:14:50.342
Exactly,

260
00:14:50.422 --> 00:14:52.103
as opposed to an abundance of consumption.

261
00:14:52.764 --> 00:14:53.004
Because,

262
00:14:53.824 --> 00:14:54.105
you know,

263
00:14:54.765 --> 00:14:58.767
I'm getting to the point where I'm sort of slowing down from a work perspective.

264
00:14:59.712 --> 00:15:05.838
But I certainly recognize that just being able to go and walk on the hills at home,

265
00:15:06.258 --> 00:15:06.879
watch the birds,

266
00:15:06.919 --> 00:15:07.779
take the dog for a walk,

267
00:15:08.400 --> 00:15:08.640
you know,

268
00:15:09.081 --> 00:15:22.733
and be part of nature and not rush and rush and consume and consume and always be doing something and buying something and ordering something makes me a much saner and healthier person.

269
00:15:23.514 --> 00:15:23.714
Right.

270
00:15:26.396 --> 00:15:29.640
half of this conversation is going to be centered more around the solutions.

271
00:15:30.400 --> 00:15:31.261
But before we get there,

272
00:15:31.281 --> 00:15:33.143
we have to get a bit deeper into the problems,

273
00:15:33.243 --> 00:15:33.484
right?

274
00:15:34.725 --> 00:15:36.026
Why do you think the food system,

275
00:15:36.027 --> 00:15:38.068
the current food system is so fragile?

276
00:15:38.449 --> 00:15:40.671
And what's likely to happen if we continue down this path?

277
00:15:42.787 --> 00:15:43.007
Okay,

278
00:15:43.047 --> 00:15:45.389
I think it's fragility as a consequence.

279
00:15:45.549 --> 00:15:48.731
So let's start at the beginning.

280
00:15:49.712 --> 00:16:09.626
A very highly complex socio-economic system in which the food system is embedded is predicated primarily on economic growth driven by maximising consumption and minimising price,

281
00:16:10.627 --> 00:16:11.407
a whole range of things,

282
00:16:11.787 --> 00:16:12.448
including food.

283
00:16:13.168 --> 00:16:22.450
So if you start off from the assumption that economic growth is the biggest shaper of the way our societies work,

284
00:16:22.470 --> 00:16:24.251
at least from a political perspective,

285
00:16:24.271 --> 00:16:29.412
and this is why elections are increasingly fought on,

286
00:16:29.712 --> 00:16:32.133
will it make me richer or poorer kind of thinking,

287
00:16:33.633 --> 00:16:37.774
then anything that can maximise volume and minimise price maximises

288
00:16:40.231 --> 00:16:41.692
assess your economic perspective.

289
00:16:43.113 --> 00:16:45.115
And when it pertains to food,

290
00:16:45.675 --> 00:16:48.757
getting you to eat a whole lot of stuff is a good thing.

291
00:16:49.018 --> 00:16:54.322
It puts money in people's pockets and pays for farmers and pays for food system actors and so on.

292
00:16:54.982 --> 00:16:55.843
And the cheaper it is,

293
00:16:55.943 --> 00:16:57.924
the more money you have to spend on other things.

294
00:16:58.665 --> 00:17:05.290
So our food system is kind of embedded in that thinking that from the Second World War

295
00:17:07.015 --> 00:17:07.255
you know,

296
00:17:07.716 --> 00:17:13.360
maximizing the availability of food and minimizing its price is good and keeps the economic wheels turning.

297
00:17:15.481 --> 00:17:25.329
And what that means is that we have invested hugely on a global basis to produce lots and lots of food that's cheap and palatable and makes you want to buy it.

298
00:17:26.229 --> 00:17:28.611
That's not the same as food that is good for you.

299
00:17:29.132 --> 00:17:32.534
That's food that makes you want to buy it.

300
00:17:33.695 --> 00:17:36.817
And we have invested a lot in shaping the system,

301
00:17:37.037 --> 00:17:42.220
and particularly since global liberalization of trade at the end of the

302
00:17:43.460 --> 00:17:43.580
1980s.

303
00:17:45.041 --> 00:17:47.402
If a country is really good at producing something,

304
00:17:48.383 --> 00:17:50.664
it makes its most profit from overproducing it,

305
00:17:50.684 --> 00:17:53.706
exporting it around the world and so on.

306
00:17:53.707 --> 00:18:02.911
So we have this very big complex system predicated on fewer and fewer crops that are produced in larger and larger scale at higher and higher intensity.

307
00:18:04.543 --> 00:18:10.867
uh to produce foods that more or less the whole world eats these days and you know the top eight crops account for some

308
00:18:11.568 --> 00:18:28.158
70 odd percent of our calories on a global basis and almost wherever you are in the world you'll eat the same thing flavors will change the way it's cooked will change but it's mainly the same sort of major crops wheat rice maize barley soy etc

309
00:18:28.198 --> 00:18:28.998
etc sugar

310
00:18:30.851 --> 00:18:33.894
So we have got this big interconnected food system,

311
00:18:34.575 --> 00:18:46.647
huge amounts of resources go into making livestock feed and therefore livestock cheap within the same sort of rational global interconnected system.

312
00:18:48.449 --> 00:18:53.875
And because economic growth is predicated on selling more to bigger markets.

313
00:18:55.139 --> 00:18:58.781
Governments support that with research for farming intensity.

314
00:18:59.481 --> 00:19:06.443
Governments support that with subsidies for growing the right sort of crops that will maximise economic income to a country.

315
00:19:08.424 --> 00:19:11.685
And so we have this system which is globally interconnected,

316
00:19:12.886 --> 00:19:15.227
very lacking in diversity.

317
00:19:16.507 --> 00:19:20.049
really based on a few crops grown at large intensity at scale.

318
00:19:21.210 --> 00:19:28.735
And the externalised costs or the costs of that system that are externalised to other systems,

319
00:19:28.935 --> 00:19:30.115
health system particularly,

320
00:19:30.456 --> 00:19:31.516
environmental systems,

321
00:19:32.217 --> 00:19:35.939
are unaccounted for in this kind of standard economic thinking.

322
00:19:36.780 --> 00:19:42.223
And if you just take the ill health costs associated with poor diets in the UK alone...

323
00:19:42.687 --> 00:19:46.030
There's an estimate that goes up to 268 billion pounds,

324
00:19:46.911 --> 00:19:48.552
so 300 billion euros.

325
00:19:49.193 --> 00:19:51.995
And that is the direct costs of being ill.

326
00:19:53.256 --> 00:19:53.777
Diabetes,

327
00:19:53.797 --> 00:19:54.257
cancers,

328
00:19:54.437 --> 00:19:54.978
heart disease,

329
00:19:55.058 --> 00:19:55.198
etc.

330
00:19:56.139 --> 00:20:00.102
The social care costs of looking after people who are not at work,

331
00:20:00.322 --> 00:20:01.864
the production costs,

332
00:20:01.944 --> 00:20:09.430
the UK economy of people not

333
00:20:10.951 --> 00:20:15.796
of the food system externalized to health systems is about seven trillion,

334
00:20:16.416 --> 00:20:17.837
about seven percent of global GDP,

335
00:20:18.218 --> 00:20:18.718
something like that.

336
00:20:19.879 --> 00:20:22.181
And then if you look at it from an environmental perspective,

337
00:20:23.002 --> 00:20:27.726
the food system accounts for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions when you kind of tot it all up.

338
00:20:30.249 --> 00:20:33.495
is probably the biggest polluting sector by some margin,

339
00:20:35.058 --> 00:20:38.184
accounts for somewhere north of 50%

340
00:20:38.585 --> 00:20:39.767
of global land use.

341
00:20:41.855 --> 00:20:59.449
major driver of biodiversity loss on a global basis and all of these things are important and climate change is becoming increasingly a problem not just in mitigating it and thinking about how you change the system to stop it emitting but

342
00:20:59.509 --> 00:21:10.679
in adapting to droughts and heat waves and so on and it's not just in agriculture it's not just an agricultural drought it's a storm that blocks

343
00:21:11.879 --> 00:21:15.040
and stops trains transporting stuff around.

344
00:21:15.740 --> 00:21:17.961
And as those impacts grow,

345
00:21:18.801 --> 00:21:22.162
countries are becoming more worried about how they feed their populations.

346
00:21:23.463 --> 00:21:28.464
Isn't enough land to go around to produce the sorts of food that demand projects into the future?

347
00:21:29.225 --> 00:21:35.867
So we're in a globally interconnected system where almost every country depends on imports of fertilizer.

348
00:21:36.723 --> 00:21:37.104
food,

349
00:21:37.744 --> 00:21:38.285
packaging,

350
00:21:38.726 --> 00:21:38.866
etc.,

351
00:21:39.607 --> 00:21:45.435
in a world that's becoming more volatile because of climate change and climate change's interaction with politics and geopolitics.

352
00:21:46.256 --> 00:21:50.582
And so looking ahead with a growing global population...

353
00:21:52.399 --> 00:21:58.464
what you can see if you just take that line back to even 2015.

354
00:21:58.484 --> 00:22:00.686
2015 pre-Brexit,

355
00:22:00.826 --> 00:22:01.466
pre-Trump,

356
00:22:02.227 --> 00:22:03.508
pre-Covid,

357
00:22:04.108 --> 00:22:06.430
pre-shooting war in Europe etc.

358
00:22:06.870 --> 00:22:11.434
If you just say well if you project that line forwards with the rise of the right

359
00:22:13.339 --> 00:22:17.663
and all of the forces that are leading to countries to backtrack on climate change commitments.

360
00:22:18.944 --> 00:22:23.568
The libertarian arguments that no one shall ever tell me what I should eat,

361
00:22:24.608 --> 00:22:26.850
I just demand to carry on eating what I want to eat.

362
00:22:28.251 --> 00:22:32.415
The inward-looking nationalism that's leading to things like Trump's trade wars.

363
00:22:33.395 --> 00:22:45.033
and increase increasing risks of conflict and contestation our global globalized system is increasingly fragile and so if you're a country like the uk

364
00:22:46.979 --> 00:22:48.140
about 40%

365
00:22:48.141 --> 00:22:49.181
of our food is imported.

366
00:22:50.102 --> 00:22:51.183
Were something to go wrong,

367
00:22:51.283 --> 00:22:55.788
put yourself into a scenario where we have a third world war or something like that.

368
00:22:56.969 --> 00:22:59.151
We don't have enough food in the country to feed ourselves.

369
00:22:59.171 --> 00:23:10.763
We rely on trade but trade is becoming more flaky and our demands for our land use at such a large level to produce meat

370
00:23:11.551 --> 00:23:14.853
that we can have every meal instead of meat as a kind of occasional treat,

371
00:23:14.893 --> 00:23:16.934
as part of a healthy diet.

372
00:23:18.094 --> 00:23:31.081
We're driving the system in the wrong direction whilst at the same time it is a just-in-time food system which is becoming more fragile to shocks which are getting bigger and heavier and faster all the time.

373
00:23:31.681 --> 00:23:33.723
So just looking ahead...

374
00:23:35.075 --> 00:23:41.722
I can't easily see a scenario where we don't get ourselves into a situation,

375
00:23:42.663 --> 00:23:45.086
as perhaps with climate change and the energy transition,

376
00:23:45.546 --> 00:23:54.015
we don't get into our situation where the world lets us get away with it for much longer without something seriously breaking.

377
00:23:57.723 --> 00:23:58.504
Once it's broken,

378
00:23:59.084 --> 00:24:01.125
we'll have a chance to rebuild it.

379
00:24:02.266 --> 00:24:03.887
But it's not fit for purpose today.

380
00:24:04.588 --> 00:24:06.529
With today's externalization of costs,

381
00:24:07.129 --> 00:24:10.532
it's increasingly less fit for purpose as every year passes.

382
00:24:12.533 --> 00:24:31.367
do anything about it the problems just mount as we climb yeah okay so you have to if i have to try and recap that with my own words um the current food system is currently driving a destruction of natural ecosystems loss of biodiversity climate change then it's climate change um and um

383
00:24:31.368 --> 00:24:41.735
and then there's the yeah so the adaptation to climate change so the fact that it's it's less and less resilient to to shocks and the shocks are getting bigger and bigger so therefore there must be a

384
00:24:42.771 --> 00:24:44.793
in the near future where the system breaks.

385
00:24:44.933 --> 00:24:47.455
It just cannot produce anymore to feed people.

386
00:24:49.056 --> 00:24:52.478
Do you think we need to unfortunately wait until that breaking point,

387
00:24:52.538 --> 00:24:55.420
until it hurts so much that we have no choice but to act?

388
00:24:55.501 --> 00:25:03.146
Or do we have a chance at making the right decisions today or soon to avoid the system breaking?

389
00:25:05.308 --> 00:25:05.528
Well,

390
00:25:06.148 --> 00:25:09.031
one would hope we can make the right decisions.

391
00:25:10.931 --> 00:25:19.297
And one of the reasons I got interested in working in the science policy interface and the science politics interface was

392
00:25:20.398 --> 00:25:21.718
10, 15 years ago.

393
00:25:22.199 --> 00:25:25.281
I kind of had faith that if you put the evidence in front of people,

394
00:25:26.021 --> 00:25:26.862
it would convince them.

395
00:25:29.023 --> 00:25:29.603
But it doesn't.

396
00:25:31.345 --> 00:25:33.866
There is too much incumbency,

397
00:25:34.987 --> 00:25:35.207
you know,

398
00:25:35.227 --> 00:25:41.651
the sorts of level of influence that the big actors have.

399
00:25:41.835 --> 00:25:42.055
have,

400
00:25:42.455 --> 00:25:46.898
whether politicians or whether the industry itself,

401
00:25:48.399 --> 00:25:49.080
to change.

402
00:25:49.280 --> 00:26:05.491
And I think what has happened with the radicalisation of politics in the last five years is that the centre ground has effectively disappeared and the political space for tackling some of these big challenges looking into the future.

403
00:26:06.311 --> 00:26:08.713
has shrunk to almost non-existence.

404
00:26:09.334 --> 00:26:10.414
And you can see in

405
00:26:11.415 --> 00:26:12.436
UK, in Germany,

406
00:26:12.496 --> 00:26:20.523
and in other places that countries that used to lead on climate change are now backtracking quite fast because they know that climate change,

407
00:26:20.603 --> 00:26:22.444
dealing with climate change or food,

408
00:26:22.865 --> 00:26:25.467
changing food systems is a vote loser.

409
00:26:26.128 --> 00:26:27.609
And so how do they get in government?

410
00:26:27.889 --> 00:26:29.630
And to a certain extent,

411
00:26:30.831 --> 00:26:34.815
the institutions that run the way we live

412
00:26:36.027 --> 00:26:42.130
are so slow-moving and unadaptable that they won't change until they're forced to change.

413
00:26:42.710 --> 00:26:44.130
I think it was Nietzsche who said,

414
00:26:44.190 --> 00:26:44.631
wasn't it,

415
00:26:45.351 --> 00:26:46.171
whoever you vote for,

416
00:26:46.211 --> 00:26:47.032
you get the government,

417
00:26:47.452 --> 00:26:48.492
and to a certain extent,

418
00:26:48.772 --> 00:26:49.753
whoever you vote for,

419
00:26:50.233 --> 00:26:54.075
you get a government that's bound by an ever-tighter set of rules about what is possible,

420
00:26:55.075 --> 00:26:59.957
and that doesn't allow us to tackle these things at the speed with which they need to be tackled.

421
00:27:00.677 --> 00:27:03.999
And so whilst I have hope that...

422
00:27:05.159 --> 00:27:06.620
The system doesn't need to break.

423
00:27:07.882 --> 00:27:13.426
It probably needs to creak pretty heavily at the seams before people really start waking up and saying,

424
00:27:14.007 --> 00:27:17.069
I'm more frightened of the future than I am of the change now.

425
00:27:18.731 --> 00:27:21.153
I really hope you're enjoying this conversation so far.

426
00:27:21.473 --> 00:27:26.977
I just need to take a few seconds of your time to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast,

427
00:27:27.478 --> 00:27:28.118
Sol Capital.

428
00:27:29.119 --> 00:27:33.483
Sol Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture.

429
00:27:33.887 --> 00:27:37.589
by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils.

430
00:27:38.149 --> 00:27:39.209
They're a fantastic company,

431
00:27:39.309 --> 00:27:43.191
I love what they're doing and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast.

432
00:27:43.651 --> 00:27:44.892
If you'd like to learn more about them,

433
00:27:44.912 --> 00:27:47.393
I will leave a link in the description of this episode.

434
00:27:48.153 --> 00:27:49.434
Let's get back to the conversation.

435
00:27:50.734 --> 00:27:52.755
If you had the opportunity to sort of...

436
00:27:53.179 --> 00:28:10.769
devise a plan to tackle what needs to be tackled as you as you said um what are the big solutions you see uh promising solutions that you think you would use to to do that um well

437
00:28:10.889 --> 00:28:21.174
if you i've done a lot of work on scenarios for the future in the last decade and across most of the scenarios for

438
00:28:23.271 --> 00:28:29.496
The sorts of things that will tackle the majority of the problems,

439
00:28:29.616 --> 00:28:31.058
so that's climate change,

440
00:28:31.718 --> 00:28:32.179
nature,

441
00:28:33.159 --> 00:28:35.581
pollution and all of those elements,

442
00:28:36.522 --> 00:28:43.548
and healthy diets on a global basis.

443
00:28:47.191 --> 00:28:48.232
to change what we eat.

444
00:28:48.592 --> 00:28:55.357
So you can't get a technological solution on the supply side and leave the consumption side alone.

445
00:28:56.097 --> 00:28:56.818
That won't work.

446
00:28:58.098 --> 00:29:08.405
And so the sorts of things that I think would fit us most for the future would be us as consumers being less demanding in terms of

447
00:29:11.268 --> 00:29:12.309
Eating healthily,

448
00:29:12.549 --> 00:29:14.432
so more whole grains,

449
00:29:15.593 --> 00:29:17.215
diversity of fruits and vegetables,

450
00:29:17.495 --> 00:29:18.417
leafy greens,

451
00:29:19.718 --> 00:29:21.340
less animal source foods.

452
00:29:21.621 --> 00:29:23.323
Not vegetarian or vegan,

453
00:29:23.523 --> 00:29:25.005
but not.

454
00:29:26.564 --> 00:29:28.465
twice a day for every meal,

455
00:29:28.645 --> 00:29:29.145
more or less.

456
00:29:30.405 --> 00:29:32.466
If we ate the right amount to be healthy,

457
00:29:33.146 --> 00:29:34.566
we would also consume less.

458
00:29:35.627 --> 00:29:38.268
If we worked on waste,

459
00:29:39.208 --> 00:29:39.628
we would,

460
00:29:39.988 --> 00:29:40.208
you know,

461
00:29:40.408 --> 00:29:41.468
a dietary change,

462
00:29:41.729 --> 00:29:43.109
changing the composition of diets,

463
00:29:44.229 --> 00:29:45.250
reduction of waste,

464
00:29:45.950 --> 00:29:50.951
those two things alone in the rich world sort of situation,

465
00:29:51.611 --> 00:29:51.991
OECD,

466
00:29:52.332 --> 00:29:52.552
EU,

467
00:29:52.752 --> 00:29:53.592
those sorts of places.

468
00:29:54.196 --> 00:29:55.456
would save about 50%

469
00:29:55.836 --> 00:29:56.997
of each person's footprint.

470
00:29:58.697 --> 00:30:12.681
So you can imagine a world where reducing the pressure on the demand side by designing a food system that is predicated on providing healthy diets and a diversity thereof gets

471
00:30:12.721 --> 00:30:17.982
us away from some of this huge monoculture of only a small number of crops and 60%

472
00:30:18.363 --> 00:30:23.284
of European land use going into cattle feed or livestock feed.

473
00:30:24.028 --> 00:30:25.969
So you can imagine a system where you get away from that,

474
00:30:26.269 --> 00:30:27.709
you grow a diversity of stuff.

475
00:30:28.349 --> 00:30:31.790
Because of the challenges of globalisation and these long supply chains,

476
00:30:32.610 --> 00:30:36.131
it would probably have to be more resilient if it was shorter supply chains.

477
00:30:36.132 --> 00:30:37.192
So more regional food,

478
00:30:38.032 --> 00:30:38.932
more local food,

479
00:30:39.192 --> 00:30:41.773
and that brings all sorts of other socio-economic benefits.

480
00:30:42.193 --> 00:30:45.734
And if you take the pressure off producing ever more,

481
00:30:46.394 --> 00:30:47.435
ever more intensively,

482
00:30:48.155 --> 00:30:52.096
then you can start moving into the world of agroecological farming.

483
00:30:52.296 --> 00:30:52.716
techniques,

484
00:30:52.796 --> 00:30:53.836
regenerative farming,

485
00:30:54.537 --> 00:30:55.657
managing soils well,

486
00:30:55.837 --> 00:31:02.699
using small wasps as part of biodiversity to kill aphids rather than pesticides.

487
00:31:03.219 --> 00:31:04.539
You know those sorts of things,

488
00:31:04.719 --> 00:31:07.320
healthy pollinators etc etc.

489
00:31:07.880 --> 00:31:13.022
So that sort of vision would give you a healthy population,

490
00:31:14.042 --> 00:31:16.103
it would give you a low waste system,

491
00:31:16.683 --> 00:31:20.764
it would give you a sustainable land use and it wouldn't necessarily take up

492
00:31:21.004 --> 00:31:26.348
more land because you're making so much saving by changing your dietary composition and reducing waste.

493
00:31:26.449 --> 00:31:33.234
So there is no reason for farmers to feel threatened by that,

494
00:31:34.035 --> 00:31:35.136
because it's a matter of,

495
00:31:36.236 --> 00:31:36.857
at the moment,

496
00:31:37.077 --> 00:31:40.220
the food system rewards unsustainable production.

497
00:31:40.360 --> 00:31:42.121
That's the only way you can really make a profit,

498
00:31:42.822 --> 00:31:43.943
is if you're unsustainable.

499
00:31:44.463 --> 00:31:47.566
If you turn that round and say you can only make a profit if you're sustainable,

500
00:31:48.887 --> 00:31:50.548
we might pay more for it.

501
00:31:50.836 --> 00:31:52.257
an individual item of food,

502
00:31:53.297 --> 00:31:55.057
but some items of food would become cheaper.

503
00:31:55.558 --> 00:31:56.578
If we're eating less,

504
00:31:57.078 --> 00:32:00.859
it doesn't necessarily mean that the household budget would go up.

505
00:32:00.979 --> 00:32:05.621
So you would end up being able to redirect the rewards to farmers.

506
00:32:06.641 --> 00:32:08.942
You'd still need producers,

507
00:32:08.982 --> 00:32:09.722
manufacturers,

508
00:32:11.723 --> 00:32:12.383
supermarkets,

509
00:32:12.443 --> 00:32:12.583
etc.

510
00:32:13.344 --> 00:32:13.824
So there...

511
00:32:14.664 --> 00:32:30.948
um economic income wouldn't necessarily be threatened but you'd end up on the other side of this transition with a better land use better biodiversity better climate and a healthier population and people the actors in the system getting rewarded in the right way how

512
00:32:30.949 --> 00:32:42.352
do we um hire you as a leader of that movement to make things happen no so you you said changing our

513
00:32:44.224 --> 00:33:03.095
changing the way we farm um so that's changing the whole system that's changing the whole system because i mean the challenge for most people who are brought up through educational systems get trained as a specialist in one particular area so the number of conversations i have in this kind of um

514
00:33:04.495 --> 00:33:12.700
uh modus are typically well how do we change agriculture or how do we change nutrition or

515
00:33:13.080 --> 00:33:35.109
how do we change the trade environment or something like that but effectively to make the system better we have to change everything uh simultaneously and you could say well we change agriculture and that changes the price and availability of food and therefore people will have to change their diets or you can say we change diets and that changes the reward farmers therefore we have to change agriculture

516
00:33:35.349 --> 00:33:42.372
whichever way you look at it everything will have to change

517
00:33:42.932 --> 00:33:43.413
as a plan,

518
00:33:43.733 --> 00:33:44.794
a coordinated plan?

519
00:33:46.635 --> 00:33:46.935
Otherwise,

520
00:33:46.955 --> 00:33:49.117
how else do you get everything to change all at once?

521
00:33:49.897 --> 00:33:50.077
Well,

522
00:33:50.678 --> 00:33:52.339
there are two scenarios.

523
00:33:53.220 --> 00:33:59.224
One is that the world falls apart and therefore you can't rely on trade.

524
00:34:00.105 --> 00:34:02.006
So let's just run with that for a minute.

525
00:34:03.587 --> 00:34:04.348
Across Europe...

526
00:34:04.992 --> 00:34:05.492
For example,

527
00:34:06.994 --> 00:34:09.255
a lot of the nitrogen fertilizer still comes from Russia.

528
00:34:10.897 --> 00:34:12.218
And to a certain extent,

529
00:34:12.518 --> 00:34:12.818
Russia,

530
00:34:13.038 --> 00:34:19.483
Putin has subsidized its gas exports as nitrogen fertilizer into Europe,

531
00:34:20.003 --> 00:34:22.145
undercut the European fertilizer industry.

532
00:34:26.128 --> 00:34:28.009
hybrid war that we're in,

533
00:34:28.409 --> 00:34:29.670
he could turn off the taps.

534
00:34:30.470 --> 00:34:34.473
And that would lead Europe scrabbling around for where does its fertilizer come from?

535
00:34:34.673 --> 00:34:35.733
Is there enough in the world?

536
00:34:36.354 --> 00:34:36.574
Yes,

537
00:34:36.654 --> 00:34:40.296
but we would be taking it away from other places that might need it.

538
00:34:40.336 --> 00:34:41.096
Prices would go up,

539
00:34:41.136 --> 00:34:41.997
food prices would go up,

540
00:34:42.097 --> 00:34:42.217
etc.

541
00:34:43.057 --> 00:34:44.238
And if we're in a shooting war,

542
00:34:44.358 --> 00:34:46.579
what happens to the food trade from other parts of the world?

543
00:34:46.799 --> 00:34:48.961
So you can see a kind of scenario like that,

544
00:34:49.341 --> 00:34:52.102
which forces us to do things differently.

545
00:34:56.280 --> 00:35:00.922
government will have to intervene as prices change to make them not entirely regressive.

546
00:35:01.562 --> 00:35:02.143
Prices change,

547
00:35:02.203 --> 00:35:03.203
people's habits change,

548
00:35:03.463 --> 00:35:03.583
etc.

549
00:35:04.203 --> 00:35:05.124
So that's one route.

550
00:35:05.944 --> 00:35:14.387
The other route is that it needs regulatory and legal changes and changes in trade that could be driven by government.

551
00:35:15.168 --> 00:35:18.389
But at the moment there are no votes in that for government.

552
00:35:18.549 --> 00:35:19.670
So government won't act.

553
00:35:20.310 --> 00:35:22.651
Industry won't act.

554
00:35:26.110 --> 00:35:27.871
People want it to change.

555
00:35:28.651 --> 00:35:37.074
And then it becomes a sufficiently strong electoral issue that they're electing governments who are thinking about the long term rather than the short term.

556
00:35:37.515 --> 00:35:37.995
I see.

557
00:35:38.335 --> 00:35:39.577
And so ultimately,

558
00:35:39.617 --> 00:35:43.297
it's got to be led by citizens saying we want the world to be a different place,

559
00:35:43.657 --> 00:35:44.958
not by politicians.

560
00:35:45.218 --> 00:35:46.738
And certainly it won't be by industry.

561
00:35:55.639 --> 00:36:00.041
things will break to some extent and that will give us no choice but to rebuild.

562
00:36:00.081 --> 00:36:04.443
So basically what we're doing here is coming up with the blueprint for rebuilding,

563
00:36:04.483 --> 00:36:04.682
right?

564
00:36:06.963 --> 00:36:07.083
Well,

565
00:36:07.144 --> 00:36:09.064
I have faith in you youngsters.

566
00:36:09.784 --> 00:36:09.925
Yeah,

567
00:36:10.404 --> 00:36:10.605
well...

568
00:36:11.405 --> 00:36:11.525
No,

569
00:36:12.405 --> 00:36:12.565
but

570
00:36:12.966 --> 00:36:14.966
I think there is reality that,

571
00:36:15.487 --> 00:36:17.007
as I said right at the start,

572
00:36:17.508 --> 00:36:23.050
I have lived through a period of peace and prosperity where it's become a complete norm.

573
00:36:23.862 --> 00:36:29.425
that the world is calm and it's only about making more money and getting wealthier,

574
00:36:29.626 --> 00:36:32.526
and that's the route to lifelong happiness and all the rest of that.

575
00:36:33.267 --> 00:36:35.309
And that's clearly not the case.

576
00:36:35.349 --> 00:36:35.488
And,

577
00:36:35.628 --> 00:36:35.909
you know,

578
00:36:35.948 --> 00:36:39.410
I've particularly been struck recently,

579
00:36:39.851 --> 00:36:40.150
and

580
00:36:40.931 --> 00:36:41.512
I'm off to

581
00:36:42.291 --> 00:36:43.592
Rome to speak at their

582
00:36:44.132 --> 00:36:46.854
80th birthday celebration this week.

583
00:36:48.510 --> 00:36:51.353
The number of things that are doing their 80th birthday this year,

584
00:36:52.153 --> 00:36:58.719
not a surprise because that was the end of the Second World War where a lot of our state institutions were effectively reinvented.

585
00:36:59.439 --> 00:37:08.287
And there is something I think about how our institutional ability to change gets kind of locked in,

586
00:37:09.248 --> 00:37:12.331
locked into a sort of very resilient to change.

587
00:37:16.934 --> 00:37:21.197
have been popular in terms of politics in the last few years.

588
00:37:21.758 --> 00:37:23.320
They're always trying to catch up,

589
00:37:23.399 --> 00:37:24.800
how do we deal with this problem?

590
00:37:24.860 --> 00:37:25.180
Well,

591
00:37:25.181 --> 00:37:33.466
we can't deal with it this way because we've got this kind of institutional and legal framework that has been evolved over a long period of time.

592
00:37:33.646 --> 00:37:38.851
And I think there comes a point where we have to reform institutions.

593
00:37:40.099 --> 00:37:44.881
to make them fit for purpose and maybe 80 to 100 years is about as long as we can expect.

594
00:37:45.441 --> 00:37:48.603
But that doesn't mean that has to be a revolution that is bloody.

595
00:37:49.443 --> 00:37:54.166
We can have reforming institutions if there is enough popular support from it democratically,

596
00:37:55.307 --> 00:38:00.930
but the history of the last five years is the support for that sort of change is going backwards not going forwards.

597
00:38:01.610 --> 00:38:03.012
But your generation,

598
00:38:04.592 --> 00:38:07.974
you might reinvent the ability to say hey grown-ups.

599
00:38:08.774 --> 00:38:25.081
it's time to wake up and smell the coffee let's do things differently let's let's hope so that's certainly what we're trying to do here no i'm trying to find inspiring or incredible stories about people who change the world or people

600
00:38:25.141 --> 00:38:34.506
who have spent their lives studying this and sharing this information with people so that we can be more there can be more of us aware of this

601
00:38:35.287 --> 00:38:50.760
but big task ahead you know big task ahead but it but my my title when i worked across government was champion for uh global food security um for the uk's global food security program and

602
00:38:51.760 --> 00:38:52.041
in the

603
00:38:52.981 --> 00:39:00.968
1950s there was a tv program called champion the wonder horse an american tv program and my mom always used to call

604
00:39:01.008 --> 00:39:02.969
me champion when I got this job,

605
00:39:03.470 --> 00:39:04.550
meaning wonder horse.

606
00:39:04.930 --> 00:39:06.072
And so I hated the term.

607
00:39:06.171 --> 00:39:07.852
But then by the time

608
00:39:08.253 --> 00:39:09.293
I'd done it for five years,

609
00:39:10.234 --> 00:39:14.797
that kind of notion that it needs changemakers to champion issues,

610
00:39:15.597 --> 00:39:21.661
to create the politics and to make the change real for people on the ground,

611
00:39:21.801 --> 00:39:28.005
because

612
00:39:29.947 --> 00:39:31.467
why you're doing the job that you're doing.

613
00:39:31.787 --> 00:39:33.789
And it's kind of why I was doing the job that I was doing,

614
00:39:34.970 --> 00:39:37.291
in a sense that we see the need to change.

615
00:39:39.132 --> 00:39:44.756
And it's not a matter of kind of lecturing people,

616
00:39:44.836 --> 00:39:50.740
it's a matter of having the conversations and thinking more than today or tomorrow.

617
00:39:51.001 --> 00:39:58.265
It's about thinking for the long term and your children's generation and your grandchildren's generation and what sort of world will we leave them?

618
00:40:00.838 --> 00:40:16.065
i want to come back a little bit to these three big levers that you mentioned earlier starting with changing our diets and you mentioned the impact of animal agriculture and land use and concepts like that maybe you could expand a little bit on this yeah

619
00:40:16.185 --> 00:40:25.350
so historically meat was always something of a treat on average

620
00:40:26.098 --> 00:40:29.319
It was something that you had maybe

621
00:40:30.440 --> 00:40:35.482
Sunday roast or something in the middle of the last century,

622
00:40:35.862 --> 00:40:36.863
my kind of grandparents'

623
00:40:37.003 --> 00:40:37.583
generation.

624
00:40:39.464 --> 00:40:44.686
And since we've really invested in the intensification of agriculture,

625
00:40:45.887 --> 00:40:49.608
grain has become so cheap that for the first time in human history,

626
00:40:49.688 --> 00:40:53.650
it's become possible to feed grain not to humans but to animals.

627
00:40:54.611 --> 00:40:54.992
And so,

628
00:40:56.316 --> 00:40:56.557
you know,

629
00:40:56.558 --> 00:40:58.683
the history of innovation has been...

630
00:41:00.547 --> 00:41:03.068
if you innovate in productivity,

631
00:41:03.188 --> 00:41:03.948
you grow more.

632
00:41:04.929 --> 00:41:06.250
And naively,

633
00:41:06.310 --> 00:41:08.631
you would think from a market perspective,

634
00:41:09.151 --> 00:41:10.772
demand drives supply,

635
00:41:11.232 --> 00:41:12.853
but innovation drives supply.

636
00:41:13.914 --> 00:41:16.275
And then marketing makes demand catch up.

637
00:41:16.915 --> 00:41:24.800
So being able to produce an excess of wheat and maize and things like that didn't stop farmers growing that excess.

638
00:41:24.900 --> 00:41:28.882
It just meant that that excess has been repurposed into bioethanol

639
00:41:29.382 --> 00:41:30.523
animal feed effectively.

640
00:41:31.123 --> 00:41:35.527
So we can afford to feed what used to be human food to livestock now,

641
00:41:36.848 --> 00:41:42.692
and so meat is very freely available or very cheap on a global basis more so than ever before.

642
00:41:42.712 --> 00:41:54.281
So we eat more of it and it's always been a kind of high status food as well but as a result we use

643
00:41:56.286 --> 00:41:56.827
And of course,

644
00:41:57.027 --> 00:42:05.334
ruminant livestock is a major driver of global greenhouse gas emissions and a driver of land use change.

645
00:42:05.494 --> 00:42:10.818
Chopping down rainforests and things like that make cattle ranches and grow soya for cattle feed.

646
00:42:11.479 --> 00:42:15.782
So the footprint of animal agriculture on a global basis is very,

647
00:42:15.882 --> 00:42:16.563
very large.

648
00:42:17.944 --> 00:42:24.569
And if you project forwards and imagine a global population of,

649
00:42:24.609 --> 00:42:25.010
I don't know,

650
00:42:25.590 --> 00:42:25.770
10,

651
00:42:26.351 --> 00:42:26.891
10 and a half,

652
00:42:27.011 --> 00:42:27.672
11 billion.

653
00:42:28.653 --> 00:42:31.755
If everybody eats the way that the West eats now,

654
00:42:33.077 --> 00:42:35.399
there isn't enough land to go round.

655
00:42:36.059 --> 00:42:36.800
And at the moment,

656
00:42:37.521 --> 00:42:39.302
there's barely enough land to go round.

657
00:42:40.403 --> 00:42:52.714
And the land that's being used at the moment is being used in a broadly unsustainable way with too much fertiliser and pesticide and too little worry about soils and therefore is even more

658
00:42:52.914 --> 00:42:55.596
challenged by adapting to climate change.

659
00:42:55.836 --> 00:42:56.857
But if you look forwards,

660
00:42:57.737 --> 00:43:03.881
the global land requirements of keeping our food system doing more or less the same thing get bigger and bigger and bigger.

661
00:43:05.422 --> 00:43:11.946
And in a world where the geopolitics is getting sharper and more contested,

662
00:43:12.727 --> 00:43:17.170
you can see lots of situations where countries are really going to struggle to feed themselves.

663
00:43:18.091 --> 00:43:26.321
And then what do you do if trade is disruptible by wars and climate change impacts?

664
00:43:27.042 --> 00:43:27.782
do as a country?

665
00:43:28.963 --> 00:43:29.123
Well,

666
00:43:29.643 --> 00:43:30.384
if you've got power,

667
00:43:30.484 --> 00:43:31.404
you use that power.

668
00:43:32.185 --> 00:43:40.369
You buy land in other countries or you bully other countries to supply you preferentially or you swap something,

669
00:43:40.849 --> 00:43:43.591
oil and gas for food or whatever it might be if you're a Gulf stater.

670
00:43:44.732 --> 00:43:46.572
But as that gets pointier,

671
00:43:46.633 --> 00:43:51.835
you can expect more conflict to arise and more contestation to arise.

672
00:43:51.975 --> 00:43:53.396
And then you get this

673
00:43:56.838 --> 00:43:57.858
having more climate change.

674
00:43:58.659 --> 00:44:03.461
The combination of those two is making our land footprint more and more flaky,

675
00:44:04.201 --> 00:44:06.543
and that's making the politics more contested.

676
00:44:07.263 --> 00:44:07.563
And so,

677
00:44:08.363 --> 00:44:08.643
you know,

678
00:44:09.504 --> 00:44:11.985
20 years ago we had this lovely vision of a nice,

679
00:44:12.025 --> 00:44:12.365
calm,

680
00:44:12.465 --> 00:44:13.106
collective,

681
00:44:13.726 --> 00:44:14.586
rules-based,

682
00:44:14.666 --> 00:44:17.468
cooperative world where everybody traded with everybody else.

683
00:44:17.868 --> 00:44:20.449
The last five years have shown that that's not going to happen.

684
00:44:21.229 --> 00:44:22.410
And if you go forward...

685
00:44:22.690 --> 00:44:24.171
then you get into a situation,

686
00:44:24.911 --> 00:44:27.392
which is what we've had historically over the years,

687
00:44:27.492 --> 00:44:43.278
where countries are fighting for each other for resources or fighting not necessarily guns and tanks and aeroplanes fighting but cyber and conflict and coercion and you know a whole range of other things that can go on through power asymmetries.

688
00:44:43.779 --> 00:44:46.300
So there isn't enough land,

689
00:44:46.540 --> 00:44:48.881
particularly if you look into the future,

690
00:44:49.501 --> 00:44:51.482
to do all of the things that we expect land to do.

691
00:44:52.322 --> 00:44:54.703
But if you go to any government,

692
00:44:54.763 --> 00:44:56.524
you will not find a ministry of land.

693
00:44:57.685 --> 00:44:58.125
Land,

694
00:44:58.265 --> 00:44:58.926
like food,

695
00:44:59.146 --> 00:45:01.987
is normally split up over lots and lots of different ministries.

696
00:45:02.728 --> 00:45:04.269
And governments,

697
00:45:04.709 --> 00:45:05.489
as with food,

698
00:45:06.150 --> 00:45:06.750
have a real...

699
00:45:07.110 --> 00:45:23.123
problem in thinking about the complexities of the system as a whole because you have energy requirements going into one ministry food requirements going into another ministry water requirements going into perhaps an environment ministry or a water ministry and nature requirements getting lost somewhere in

700
00:45:23.124 --> 00:45:35.994
the margins and no one's putting all the pieces together and everybody's expecting land to be available to do what we want it to into the future but you can see that there's the chance at least of that being much more of a finite resource than most

701
00:45:36.870 --> 00:45:37.333
countries,

702
00:45:37.515 --> 00:45:39.548
most governments and most people believe.

703
00:45:40.662 --> 00:45:42.083
We're struggling for land.

704
00:45:42.123 --> 00:45:44.403
We need more and more of it to keep feeding the growing population.

705
00:45:44.483 --> 00:45:45.204
There's a higher,

706
00:45:45.264 --> 00:45:45.744
higher demand.

707
00:45:45.864 --> 00:45:46.864
Less exchange on diets.

708
00:45:47.124 --> 00:45:47.464
Yeah,

709
00:45:47.504 --> 00:45:48.685
that's what I wanted to get to because,

710
00:45:49.145 --> 00:45:49.385
I mean,

711
00:45:49.705 --> 00:45:50.285
the numbers

712
00:45:50.885 --> 00:45:55.467
I read preparing for this interview was that approximately 50%

713
00:45:55.847 --> 00:45:58.488
of the world's land is used for agriculture.

714
00:45:59.188 --> 00:46:00.388
The rest is 1%

715
00:46:00.888 --> 00:46:02.089
is human infrastructure.

716
00:46:02.849 --> 00:46:03.829
So all the cities,

717
00:46:03.889 --> 00:46:04.190
roads,

718
00:46:04.550 --> 00:46:04.950
factories,

719
00:46:04.990 --> 00:46:05.290
everything.

720
00:46:06.234 --> 00:46:08.975
And then the rest is like deserts,

721
00:46:09.095 --> 00:46:12.456
mountains or places where it's really hard to grow food anyway.

722
00:46:12.636 --> 00:46:13.876
Or forests,

723
00:46:13.956 --> 00:46:16.317
protected forests like the Amazon rainforest for example.

724
00:46:18.297 --> 00:46:19.198
And from that 50%

725
00:46:19.878 --> 00:46:22.499
of global land that we use for agriculture,

726
00:46:23.739 --> 00:46:25.239
two thirds of that is grazing lands,

727
00:46:25.279 --> 00:46:26.640
pastures for animals.

728
00:46:26.940 --> 00:46:28.680
And then from the one third left,

729
00:46:29.281 --> 00:46:33.762
half is for human consumption directly and the other half is for either feed.

730
00:46:34.522 --> 00:46:36.003
for animals or biofuel.

731
00:46:36.623 --> 00:46:45.187
So essentially the part of the total habitable land that we actually use to grow food for ourselves is actually quite small.

732
00:46:45.807 --> 00:46:48.448
A massive part of that is for animal agriculture which,

733
00:46:50.369 --> 00:46:50.969
tell me if I'm wrong,

734
00:46:50.989 --> 00:46:57.332
but the numbers I found were saying that animal products were providing roughly

735
00:46:57.752 --> 00:47:00.913
20% of our calories that we consume worldwide,

736
00:47:00.973 --> 00:47:01.613
a bit less even,

737
00:47:01.753 --> 00:47:02.454
a bit less.

738
00:47:03.114 --> 00:47:07.836
While the plants we grow directly for human consumption are more than 80%

739
00:47:08.797 --> 00:47:09.477
of those calories.

740
00:47:09.697 --> 00:47:14.339
So it feels like just to provide a small part of our global diet,

741
00:47:14.439 --> 00:47:15.920
we're actually using more than 80%

742
00:47:16.220 --> 00:47:16.920
of the land.

743
00:47:17.580 --> 00:47:20.782
So what does it tell you?

744
00:47:22.079 --> 00:47:28.767
It tells us that our food system is designed by the market forces rather than designed by rational human beings.

745
00:47:29.227 --> 00:47:31.550
So just to make this concrete,

746
00:47:31.690 --> 00:47:33.171
if you remember at the start of the

747
00:47:34.953 --> 00:47:37.356
Ukraine war when Russia invaded,

748
00:47:39.454 --> 00:47:45.658
It blockaded Odessa and there was something like 20 million tons of grain in Odessa.

749
00:47:46.598 --> 00:47:52.261
And there was a bit of a panic on global markets and all around the world grain prices went up.

750
00:47:53.522 --> 00:48:00.146
And countries like Egypt couldn't get enough grain at a price they could afford and bread prices went up and so on.

751
00:48:00.226 --> 00:48:03.688
And so it was a real problem and it contributed to the cost

752
00:48:08.454 --> 00:48:18.503
But that same amount of grain in Odessa would have been saved if across the EU27 as was,

753
00:48:20.385 --> 00:48:24.649
everybody ate one day less of pork or chicken a week.

754
00:48:25.870 --> 00:48:29.053
So that's the amount - a marginal change in the European diet.

755
00:48:30.042 --> 00:48:34.245
could have effectively freed up the same amount of grain that was blockaded in Odessa,

756
00:48:34.865 --> 00:48:37.627
the blockade of which caused a global food crisis.

757
00:48:38.147 --> 00:48:44.472
So a marginal change in the consumption of animal foods can make a huge difference to global land take.

758
00:48:45.152 --> 00:48:59.957
um and so looking ahead we know we need more land for planting trees if we're going to take carbon out of the atmosphere uh carbon storage that if we're going to do that that land's got to come from somewhere and

759
00:49:00.337 --> 00:49:10.161
the best place is a not to chop down rainforests to grow more soy for livestock in the first place but to reduce our demand for livestock in some way shape

760
00:49:14.642 --> 00:49:30.451
other parts of the world too so that's why the composition of the diet is not the calories per se although most people in europe eat too many calories and waste too many calories it's not the composition per se it's the it's

761
00:49:30.491 --> 00:49:42.158
not the amount per se it's the composition so particularly the ratio of grain and vegetables to meat products or meat and dairy right

762
00:49:43.455 --> 00:49:45.276
This kind of leads us also to the next part,

763
00:49:45.296 --> 00:49:46.837
which is changing the way we farm.

764
00:49:46.877 --> 00:49:49.278
Because it's not just about what we eat,

765
00:49:49.538 --> 00:49:50.879
but how it was farmed,

766
00:49:51.119 --> 00:49:52.020
how it was grown as well.

767
00:49:52.040 --> 00:49:54.281
Because I've met a lot of farmers,

768
00:49:55.102 --> 00:49:56.163
regenerative farmers,

769
00:49:56.323 --> 00:50:01.266
who use these sort of holistic grazing pattern systems in their farms.

770
00:50:01.626 --> 00:50:03.147
They're mixed farms with arable,

771
00:50:03.227 --> 00:50:05.128
with sometimes some agroforestry,

772
00:50:05.308 --> 00:50:06.129
with some livestock,

773
00:50:06.529 --> 00:50:07.490
different types of animals.

774
00:50:08.054 --> 00:50:09.655
And they really swear by it.

775
00:50:09.656 --> 00:50:13.237
And I can see with my own eyes that they're doing an amazing work,

776
00:50:14.738 --> 00:50:15.639
regenerating the land,

777
00:50:15.699 --> 00:50:16.919
bringing back biodiversity,

778
00:50:17.260 --> 00:50:18.040
bringing fertility.

779
00:50:19.101 --> 00:50:20.041
They're doing an amazing job.

780
00:50:20.061 --> 00:50:26.245
And they get very frustrated when we speak badly about animal agriculture because they say the famous phrase is,

781
00:50:26.265 --> 00:50:26.985
it's not the cow,

782
00:50:27.045 --> 00:50:27.506
it's the how.

783
00:50:28.366 --> 00:50:34.670
Because the difference between an industrial intensive weird animal

784
00:50:35.254 --> 00:50:37.860
or one that is part of this agroecological system,

785
00:50:38.502 --> 00:50:41.228
they don't have the same impact on the environment.

786
00:50:44.643 --> 00:50:45.203
Yes and no.

787
00:50:48.467 --> 00:50:54.272
There was a very good paper published in about 2017 that looked at the global food system,

788
00:50:56.634 --> 00:51:00.758
and the results of their analysis was effectively,

789
00:51:01.419 --> 00:51:03.521
if you only change a small amount,

790
00:51:04.966 --> 00:51:14.072
You will do better in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and some other aspects of sustainability if you switch from eating beef to eating chicken,

791
00:51:14.092 --> 00:51:19.015
because chicken has a smaller resource footprint per kilogram.

792
00:51:20.136 --> 00:51:29.207
of meat and that's our kind of standard small footprint meat to go from beef to chicken,

793
00:51:29.608 --> 00:51:29.908
fish,

794
00:51:31.030 --> 00:51:31.550
vegetables.

795
00:51:32.692 --> 00:51:34.313
But if everybody in the world ate...

796
00:51:34.834 --> 00:51:54.545
enough less meat the most sustainable system will be to eat not chicken but to eat beef in mixed farming enterprises where the manure can become the fertilizer so you don't need nitrogen fertilizer for

797
00:51:54.685 --> 00:52:03.289
the arable and horticulture and such small such heterogeneous landscapes

798
00:52:04.670 --> 00:52:07.031
where you've got cattle and sheep,

799
00:52:07.651 --> 00:52:10.692
where you've got horticulture growing fruit and vegetables,

800
00:52:11.232 --> 00:52:13.993
where you've got agroforestry and where you've got arable.

801
00:52:15.033 --> 00:52:17.414
It's the sort of diverse system that we need.

802
00:52:17.994 --> 00:52:22.815
It's resilient to climate change impacts because not all your eggs are in a single basket.

803
00:52:23.395 --> 00:52:25.476
The landscape is heterogeneous,

804
00:52:25.516 --> 00:52:26.436
so it's diverse.

805
00:52:26.656 --> 00:52:28.637
So there's lots of places for things to live.

806
00:52:29.137 --> 00:52:30.898
You've got some non-cropped areas.

807
00:52:32.238 --> 00:52:37.203
so the insects and weedy plants can live.

808
00:52:38.064 --> 00:52:39.245
You've got carbon storage,

809
00:52:39.545 --> 00:52:41.427
you've got proper kind of soil management.

810
00:52:41.888 --> 00:52:44.350
So the kind of ideal food system,

811
00:52:45.591 --> 00:52:47.353
as I was mentioning earlier,

812
00:52:48.014 --> 00:52:55.101
is one based on that sort of small-scale diverse agroecological approach.

813
00:52:57.086 --> 00:52:57.686
But at the moment,

814
00:52:57.687 --> 00:52:58.987
the world eats too much meat.

815
00:52:59.828 --> 00:53:03.050
And if everybody ate the same amount of meat,

816
00:53:03.831 --> 00:53:05.692
but it was grown in a regenerative way,

817
00:53:06.212 --> 00:53:11.716
we would have to chop down so much more rainforest to get that same amount of meat.

818
00:53:11.936 --> 00:53:16.001
because the amount of land that is needed to produce it is greater.

819
00:53:16.622 --> 00:53:18.604
So we're caught in the horns of a dilemma.

820
00:53:19.425 --> 00:53:26.894
What is better to do today and what would be better to do if we reinvented the food system are two things.

821
00:53:26.894 --> 00:53:28.475
to quite different things.

822
00:53:28.896 --> 00:53:33.800
And they're in the kind of debates about what is sustainable agriculture,

823
00:53:33.860 --> 00:53:34.360
land sparing,

824
00:53:34.400 --> 00:53:36.642
land sharing and those sorts of things.

825
00:53:36.643 --> 00:53:37.823
That's exactly what I was thinking.

826
00:53:37.883 --> 00:53:42.167
There's this opposition a lot of the time between different visions,

827
00:53:43.267 --> 00:53:45.669
changing what we eat or changing how we produce it.

828
00:53:46.490 --> 00:53:50.473
Also the land sparing versus land sharing.

829
00:53:50.954 --> 00:53:51.995
So that's kind of the same thing.

830
00:53:52.235 --> 00:53:53.276
Land sparing would be okay,

831
00:53:53.316 --> 00:53:54.517
we need to change what we eat

832
00:53:55.998 --> 00:54:11.264
uh for nature and then sharing will be saying we don't need to change much we just need to change the way we farm the way we mixed um biodiversity with arable land with agroforestry and all of these things um but

833
00:54:11.304 --> 00:54:22.128
it seems like what makes the most sense is a combination of both right yeah well the land sparing land sharing was originally set up without reference to

834
00:54:28.607 --> 00:54:30.148
Given a certain level of demand,

835
00:54:31.308 --> 00:54:35.490
is it better to have a small area of really intensive land,

836
00:54:35.530 --> 00:54:37.791
which effectively becomes an ecological desert,

837
00:54:38.271 --> 00:54:40.232
but is only specialised in producing food,

838
00:54:40.852 --> 00:54:45.114
or a larger area of land that is more diverse,

839
00:54:45.214 --> 00:54:46.315
more agroecological?

840
00:54:46.875 --> 00:54:50.076
Because the yields in a land-sparing situation,

841
00:54:50.177 --> 00:54:51.777
agroecological situation,

842
00:54:52.538 --> 00:54:53.338
are sometimes...

843
00:54:53.718 --> 00:54:55.340
60-70%

844
00:54:55.341 --> 00:54:57.581
of what there would be in an intensive situation.

845
00:54:58.202 --> 00:55:00.444
So you need more land to produce the same amount of food.

846
00:55:01.465 --> 00:55:06.389
The consequences of that is that particularly with people interested in intensive agriculture,

847
00:55:07.770 --> 00:55:13.275
they said oh you can't do land sparing because there isn't enough land to go round that you would chop down the rainforest etc etc.

848
00:55:14.716 --> 00:55:17.638
But the sensible response to that argument

849
00:55:22.242 --> 00:55:23.203
and demand less,

850
00:55:23.944 --> 00:55:29.310
then the same area of agricultural land that we can't currently farm intensively could be farmed agroecologically.

851
00:55:29.750 --> 00:55:31.673
And we would accept we would produce less,

852
00:55:32.233 --> 00:55:33.194
but would want less,

853
00:55:33.374 --> 00:55:34.295
we'd want to eat less,

854
00:55:34.496 --> 00:55:35.817
we wouldn't waste so much food,

855
00:55:35.917 --> 00:55:36.057
etc,

856
00:55:36.098 --> 00:55:36.398
etc.

857
00:55:37.099 --> 00:55:41.123
But therein comes back to that question around you need the system change.

858
00:55:41.163 --> 00:55:43.506
It's not about defining.

859
00:55:44.218 --> 00:56:01.751
sustainability or sustainable food or sustainable agriculture as this recipe it's about changing the system so all of the bits fit together to deliver what we need as a society which is affordable food that is diverse that is healthy and nutrition giving and

860
00:56:01.771 --> 00:56:11.598
is sustainable and that that is the challenge in our current socio-economic system i have a very small favor to ask

861
00:56:11.882 --> 00:56:15.983
If you enjoy listening to the Deep Seat podcast and you find this interesting and meaningful,

862
00:56:16.424 --> 00:56:18.464
then please support me and my work.

863
00:56:18.484 --> 00:56:22.226
And you can actually do that in just five seconds by clicking on the like button,

864
00:56:22.906 --> 00:56:23.946
on the subscribe button,

865
00:56:24.086 --> 00:56:27.027
and maybe leave us a message in the comment section.

866
00:56:27.387 --> 00:56:31.249
It actually makes a huge difference for me and it allows me to continue doing this work.

867
00:56:31.289 --> 00:56:33.409
So thank you so much in advance.

868
00:56:33.549 --> 00:56:34.590
I really appreciate it.

869
00:56:34.770 --> 00:56:35.050
Thank you.

870
00:56:36.149 --> 00:56:43.473
You contributed to a big report that was published quite recently in collaboration with the UN Environmental Programme,

871
00:56:43.874 --> 00:56:44.074
right?

872
00:56:44.374 --> 00:56:44.494
Yep.

873
00:56:45.355 --> 00:56:48.997
In that report you identified three big lock-ins,

874
00:56:49.017 --> 00:56:52.979
so three big reasons why we were struggling to transition the food system.

875
00:56:53.419 --> 00:56:55.621
Maybe you could talk us through these three.

876
00:56:56.541 --> 00:56:56.681
Yeah,

877
00:56:56.922 --> 00:57:01.804
so the lock-ins we identified were...

878
00:57:03.365 --> 00:57:04.427
A political lock-in,

879
00:57:06.530 --> 00:57:12.880
a lock-in to do with the way the industry works and a historical lock-in.

880
00:57:13.441 --> 00:57:15.344
So the political lock-in is,

881
00:57:16.566 --> 00:57:18.088
as I was discussing earlier...

882
00:57:19.874 --> 00:57:21.155
Since the Second World War,

883
00:57:21.716 --> 00:57:28.159
the political ideology is effectively food should be cheap and freely available.

884
00:57:29.120 --> 00:57:30.808
And within that,

885
00:57:31.948 --> 00:57:36.855
it should be up to the market to make food cheap and freely available.

886
00:57:36.917 --> 00:57:41.073
And if it's up to the market to make food cheap and freely available,

887
00:57:41.839 --> 00:57:45.980
it's the market's problem to worry about.

888
00:57:48.742 --> 00:58:11.798
people not being able to afford food because it's obviously not working very well so the state doesn't have to manage it and it's down to the market to worry about things like food supply interruptions and so on and if you take that logic and we call that the cheaper food paradigm so it's a kind of overarching ideology of political ideology if

889
00:58:11.830 --> 00:58:17.064
you run that through then government's role is to invest in

890
00:58:17.358 --> 00:58:24.486
trade liberalization to drive economic growth because that's a good thing because that makes food cheaper and more freely available.

891
00:58:26.209 --> 00:58:30.513
It can do that through subsidies and it can do that by investing in the right sorts of research.

892
00:58:30.591 --> 00:58:32.435
It can do that by trade agreements.

893
00:58:33.771 --> 00:58:41.099
It's about investing in crops that have global markets so that they can be the basis of our globalized food system.

894
00:58:41.396 --> 00:58:42.568
So the big ones,

895
00:58:42.599 --> 00:58:43.818
the wheat,

896
00:58:43.912 --> 00:58:44.146
rice,

897
00:58:44.177 --> 00:58:44.537
maize,

898
00:58:44.865 --> 00:58:45.224
sugars.

899
00:58:45.586 --> 00:59:01.139
palm oils etc etc and if you follow that logic through that the primary investments of governments is around deregulation trade liberalization and intensification then

900
00:59:01.647 --> 00:59:07.084
industry responds by growing more growing more of the

901
00:59:07.558 --> 00:59:10.982
crops that are available or the products that are available for the global market.

902
00:59:11.001 --> 00:59:13.603
So you end up with this global homogenization of diets.

903
00:59:13.666 --> 00:59:16.587
Everybody's eating the same sorts of things.

904
00:59:16.626 --> 00:59:19.251
You've got more and more grown at larger and larger scale,

905
00:59:19.673 --> 00:59:21.134
but fewer and fewer products.

906
00:59:21.135 --> 00:59:26.634
So you end up with this global food system producing a relatively small number of ingredients,

907
00:59:26.962 --> 00:59:27.900
very large volumes.

908
00:59:28.290 --> 00:59:35.619
That leads to diets made from highly processed foods that have the same sorts of ingredients in.

909
00:59:37.558 --> 00:59:42.183
That leads also that cheaper food paradigm and the incentives that follow from that,

910
00:59:42.241 --> 00:59:51.269
that also leads to industry accessing global markets and consolidating to access that global markets.

911
00:59:53.292 --> 00:59:56.972
And it also leads to ignoring the externalization of costs,

912
00:59:57.081 --> 01:00:00.628
because the job of the food industry is to feed people.

913
01:00:01.269 --> 01:00:02.316
It's not to feed people well.

914
01:00:02.982 --> 01:00:05.965
is to increase consumption and make economic growth.

915
01:00:06.986 --> 01:00:12.955
And so if it's making people ill or being unsustainable,

916
01:00:13.416 --> 01:00:17.314
that's not accounted for within the cheaper food paradigm kind of ideology.

917
01:00:17.556 --> 01:00:18.478
So lock-in one,

918
01:00:18.619 --> 01:00:19.619
cheaper food paradigm.

919
01:00:20.244 --> 01:00:22.166
That leads through to global consolidation,

920
01:00:22.260 --> 01:00:23.275
which leads to lock-in two,

921
01:00:23.447 --> 01:00:29.822
which is the power of the consolidated global industry that some of the big majors,

922
01:00:29.947 --> 01:00:31.103
the ABCDs,

923
01:00:31.134 --> 01:00:32.213
the big food companies,

924
01:00:34.759 --> 01:00:35.800
are much,

925
01:00:35.841 --> 01:00:40.304
much larger than your average country in the world from an economic perspective.

926
01:00:40.726 --> 01:00:42.870
So they have incredible lobbying power.

927
01:00:43.566 --> 01:00:48.089
They have enormous economic power.

928
01:00:49.870 --> 01:00:51.933
They only have to say to a government,

929
01:00:51.980 --> 01:00:52.870
don't do that because you're...

930
01:00:52.872 --> 01:00:58.395
you'll lose jobs and then the politics reverses that kind of initial thought that we'll do things in the right place.

931
01:00:59.220 --> 01:01:00.821
And the combination of lock-in one,

932
01:01:00.997 --> 01:01:01.997
the cheaper food paradigm,

933
01:01:02.044 --> 01:01:02.724
and lock-in two,

934
01:01:02.778 --> 01:01:04.747
the global consolidation of food,

935
01:01:05.122 --> 01:01:06.481
the industrialization of food,

936
01:01:07.286 --> 01:01:10.216
is that you end up with real path dependency,

937
01:01:10.325 --> 01:01:19.466
that we've built this system which is ever more based on growing fewer and fewer things at larger and larger scale.

938
01:01:20.322 --> 01:01:28.810
And so farmers invest in kit that lasts for 30 years and costs hundreds of thousands of euros to buy.

939
01:01:30.053 --> 01:01:38.053
Food manufacturers invest on in producing food that require these sort of ingredients that come from very long supply chains from a globalised basis.

940
01:01:38.662 --> 01:01:40.209
And if you say change that,

941
01:01:41.021 --> 01:01:41.709
it becomes really,

942
01:01:41.740 --> 01:01:42.459
really difficult.

943
01:01:42.584 --> 01:01:48.193
So the combination of the cheaper food paradigms and politically we want food to be cheap and freely available.

944
01:01:48.766 --> 01:01:56.355
Global consolidation and this historic path dependency that we've created means that changing the food system becomes economically,

945
01:01:56.574 --> 01:01:58.796
politically and socially really difficult.

946
01:01:59.398 --> 01:02:10.882
And so those three lock-ins create the system which can only tweak itself incrementally at the margins and changing it in the way that I'm talking about to,

947
01:02:11.570 --> 01:02:12.788
we say in that report,

948
01:02:12.867 --> 01:02:14.117
invert the business model,

949
01:02:14.570 --> 01:02:18.257
go from it being more profitable to being unsustainable.

950
01:02:18.469 --> 01:02:18.950
and unhealthy.

951
01:02:19.691 --> 01:02:20.592
to be more profitable,

952
01:02:20.593 --> 01:02:22.274
to be sustainable and health providing,

953
01:02:23.634 --> 01:02:24.395
becomes really,

954
01:02:24.454 --> 01:02:24.657
really,

955
01:02:24.716 --> 01:02:25.376
really difficult.

956
01:02:25.415 --> 01:02:31.059
So those lock-ins means that you can't just say it's the job of politicians to change it,

957
01:02:31.083 --> 01:02:31.762
because they'll say,

958
01:02:32.427 --> 01:02:33.286
as Jean-Claude

959
01:02:34.169 --> 01:02:36.341
Juncker once said about climate change,

960
01:02:36.653 --> 01:02:38.966
we know exactly what to do to solve the issue,

961
01:02:39.216 --> 01:02:40.856
we just won't get re-elected afterwards.

962
01:02:41.325 --> 01:02:41.575
You know,

963
01:02:42.153 --> 01:02:43.419
that's the challenge that we're in.

964
01:02:43.481 --> 01:02:45.091
It's not the job of politicians to change,

965
01:02:45.092 --> 01:02:45.372
because...

966
01:02:46.602 --> 01:02:49.365
Us as citizens aren't telling politicians to change.

967
01:02:50.125 --> 01:02:51.629
And the industry is saying,

968
01:02:51.668 --> 01:02:53.590
we're not going to change because we're making quite a lot of profit,

969
01:02:54.148 --> 01:02:54.808
as we are.

970
01:02:55.714 --> 01:02:56.855
And we will change,

971
01:02:57.011 --> 01:02:58.191
we'll signal we're changing,

972
01:02:58.613 --> 01:03:01.699
we'll invest something in changing and we'll greenwash the change.

973
01:03:02.160 --> 01:03:06.527
But we won't really change because the politicians aren't telling us to change.

974
01:03:06.840 --> 01:03:09.605
And citizens certainly aren't ignoring us in the supermarkets.

975
01:03:09.621 --> 01:03:11.433
They're going to the supermarkets and buying the same stuff.

976
01:03:11.902 --> 01:03:15.871
So these lock-ins contribute to this absolute...

977
01:03:17.706 --> 01:03:35.147
locked in state of the system that means it's not a matter of just saying it would be better if we farm regeneratively and expect farmers to take the hit on profits at a very large scale or whatever it might be that's that's impinging on their inability to change it

978
01:03:35.178 --> 01:03:43.147
has to be systemic we come back to that yeah we're in a situation where well corporations role really is to maximize profit.

979
01:03:44.100 --> 01:03:46.350
The politician's role is to

980
01:03:46.814 --> 01:04:02.875
get re-elected or to to be popular and the consumers they want what's best for them personally not what's best for the entire planet or for for the entire society they want cheap food they want access to to

981
01:04:03.032 --> 01:04:12.766
nice products comfort of life and so on so where does the change come from if it needs to come from every part at the same time but it's no one's true incentive to do so

982
01:04:14.806 --> 01:04:14.966
Yeah,

983
01:04:15.006 --> 01:04:20.091
I think I'd slightly nuance your characterisation of consumers.

984
01:04:20.173 --> 01:04:20.372
Yes,

985
01:04:20.954 --> 01:04:22.095
consumers often do that.

986
01:04:22.096 --> 01:04:23.212
They go into a supermarket,

987
01:04:23.438 --> 01:04:25.360
they buy what they're used to buying,

988
01:04:25.595 --> 01:04:30.485
they buy what they can reach on the shelf or the things they know the kids will like or whatever.

989
01:04:31.157 --> 01:04:33.657
But if you talk to them as citizens,

990
01:04:34.485 --> 01:04:40.095
their values are often different to those expressed in their food basket.

991
01:04:41.048 --> 01:04:41.954
And when you try and...

992
01:04:44.123 --> 01:04:48.327
understand that gap between their aspirations to have nutritious food,

993
01:04:48.405 --> 01:04:48.527
etc.

994
01:04:48.890 --> 01:04:49.327
They say,

995
01:04:49.890 --> 01:04:50.749
I can't afford it,

996
01:04:51.007 --> 01:04:51.171
or

997
01:04:51.734 --> 01:04:53.234
I can't buy that sort of food.

998
01:04:54.671 --> 01:04:55.655
It's too complicated.

999
01:04:55.694 --> 01:04:56.937
I don't have time to prepare it.

1000
01:04:57.852 --> 01:05:13.730
whatever but i would love to have nutritious healthy food that's sustainably produced or even worse i trust the supermarkets to sell me food that is only nutritious healthy and sustainable so there is a gap but when you talk to most people they

1001
01:05:13.770 --> 01:05:20.270
would rather that the system was different but whilst you're trapped in the system there's very little agency of change so

1002
01:05:21.394 --> 01:05:30.611
The change that can come from people is not really as consumers because your choices are often so constrained by circumstances,

1003
01:05:31.509 --> 01:05:35.056
but your power comes from the politics.

1004
01:05:35.978 --> 01:05:42.204
And what we've really not done is collectively try to drive the politics.

1005
01:05:42.766 --> 01:05:45.907
We have tried to convince consumers to buy differently,

1006
01:05:46.391 --> 01:05:48.509
convince industry to behave differently,

1007
01:05:49.032 --> 01:05:54.462
tell politicians that we need regulations at a time where everybody's...

1008
01:05:55.386 --> 01:05:58.751
The zeitgeist is that we must remove regulations,

1009
01:05:59.352 --> 01:06:00.872
or we've lectured farmers and said,

1010
01:06:01.032 --> 01:06:01.852
you're unsustainable,

1011
01:06:01.853 --> 01:06:02.934
you should be doing it differently.

1012
01:06:03.493 --> 01:06:04.337
So everybody,

1013
01:06:04.477 --> 01:06:06.274
industry feels that they're the bad ones,

1014
01:06:06.696 --> 01:06:07.977
politicians know they're not.

1015
01:06:09.776 --> 01:06:11.417
doing what they should be doing in the long term,

1016
01:06:11.456 --> 01:06:13.339
but they're doing it for short term gain.

1017
01:06:13.698 --> 01:06:16.062
Consumers end up buying the wrong sorts of things,

1018
01:06:16.120 --> 01:06:17.886
because that's all they've got access to,

1019
01:06:17.980 --> 01:06:18.925
or all they can afford.

1020
01:06:19.183 --> 01:06:20.183
And everybody's unhappy.

1021
01:06:20.987 --> 01:06:22.667
But no one is kind of driving the change.

1022
01:06:22.691 --> 01:06:25.511
So that's why I think the politics

1023
01:06:26.939 --> 01:06:27.539
With a small P,

1024
01:06:27.739 --> 01:06:28.740
not a kind of big P.

1025
01:06:28.760 --> 01:06:31.584
I'm not suggesting everybody kind of goes out on the streets,

1026
01:06:31.662 --> 01:06:37.291
but instead of just voting people in based on one or two issues,

1027
01:06:37.369 --> 01:06:40.994
but primarily whether or not the next government is going to make me richer,

1028
01:06:41.893 --> 01:06:52.760
we ought to be thinking about the quality of our lives and what chasing being ever richer will mean for the quality of our lives in 10 years'

1029
01:06:52.791 --> 01:06:53.541
time or 20 years'

1030
01:06:53.542 --> 01:06:54.729
time or our children's lives.

1031
01:06:56.498 --> 01:06:58.279
So it's a change in mindset,

1032
01:06:58.359 --> 01:07:05.824
but ultimately the system will not change unless it's a kind of doom and gloom war situation.

1033
01:07:06.606 --> 01:07:09.973
The system will not change unless people drive for the change.

1034
01:07:13.229 --> 01:07:14.550
I hear a lot,

1035
01:07:15.231 --> 01:07:17.935
it's a big part of your work that we need to think systemically,

1036
01:07:18.274 --> 01:07:18.513
right?

1037
01:07:18.634 --> 01:07:20.935
We need to kind of break down silos.

1038
01:07:21.677 --> 01:07:22.497
You mentioned it earlier.

1039
01:07:23.060 --> 01:07:24.599
We have an energy system,

1040
01:07:24.622 --> 01:07:25.442
a food system,

1041
01:07:25.481 --> 01:07:27.442
an education system and so on,

1042
01:07:27.481 --> 01:07:28.646
and they kind of work separately.

1043
01:07:29.450 --> 01:07:35.669
And that's something I hear a lot within the food system conferences and talks and stuff like that,

1044
01:07:35.872 --> 01:07:38.028
that we need a more systemic approach.

1045
01:07:38.029 --> 01:07:41.091
We need to break down the silos and work together and so on.

1046
01:07:41.560 --> 01:07:42.372
um

1047
01:07:43.938 --> 01:07:51.248
But I can't help thinking that sometimes we're not really talking about taking a step back even more and looking at what is the whole system and what is driving this whole system.

1048
01:07:51.826 --> 01:07:57.092
And I'm talking about capitalism being the sort of the software that we use for society today.

1049
01:07:57.795 --> 01:07:58.615
I guess my question is,

1050
01:07:58.912 --> 01:08:03.201
can we achieve this change within capitalism?

1051
01:08:03.779 --> 01:08:05.514
I don't think so.

1052
01:08:05.561 --> 01:08:05.998
Short answer.

1053
01:08:07.264 --> 01:08:10.967
no the the point of the markets

1054
01:08:12.729 --> 01:08:27.943
is a to make as much profit as possible and b to expand in a sense so a naive thinking that all the x billion people on the planet uh if

1055
01:08:27.967 --> 01:08:41.935
any would produce enough food there will be a supply and demand balance equilibrium and the rest of the land would be good and emissions won't increase is highly naive because the more we innovate on the supply side

1056
01:08:42.341 --> 01:08:44.263
The more we produce more,

1057
01:08:45.404 --> 01:08:48.745
the cheaper what we produce becomes.

1058
01:08:49.249 --> 01:09:00.214
And both of those then drive demand because any excess you can find in the useful bioplastics or bioethanol or cattle feed in the case of grey and so on.

1059
01:09:00.917 --> 01:09:07.323
So that's a well-functioning market is to drive up demand and drive up consumption.

1060
01:09:07.980 --> 01:09:08.152
But

1061
01:09:08.753 --> 01:09:09.093
Again,

1062
01:09:09.314 --> 01:09:10.255
on a finite planet,

1063
01:09:10.275 --> 01:09:10.896
that doesn't work.

1064
01:09:11.015 --> 01:09:12.277
So for me,

1065
01:09:12.456 --> 01:09:14.179
it's not about throwing out capitalism,

1066
01:09:14.980 --> 01:09:21.507
but it's about building more public goods safeguards into capitalism.

1067
01:09:21.508 --> 01:09:22.663
Because at the moment,

1068
01:09:23.031 --> 01:09:27.890
the way markets work is that they reward the profits.

1069
01:09:28.218 --> 01:09:33.031
And the history of the last 20 or 30 years is the rich have got richer and richer and richer,

1070
01:09:33.562 --> 01:09:35.015
mind-wateringly richer.

1071
01:09:35.765 --> 01:09:38.487
whilst the global poor have stayed more or less the same.

1072
01:09:38.929 --> 01:09:43.970
So capitalism is driving a further inequality between people,

1073
01:09:44.017 --> 01:09:45.071
between the rich and the poor,

1074
01:09:47.735 --> 01:09:52.227
and it's driving the undermining of public goods,

1075
01:09:52.603 --> 01:09:53.790
undermining of public health,

1076
01:09:53.791 --> 01:09:55.181
undermining of climate change,

1077
01:09:55.227 --> 01:09:55.337
etc.

1078
01:09:56.368 --> 01:09:57.993
And the consequence of all that,

1079
01:09:58.165 --> 01:10:00.353
again we're going back to my doom and gloom,

1080
01:10:01.165 --> 01:10:01.571
is that

1081
01:10:02.369 --> 01:10:21.106
polarization in society is increasing not decreasing and if you couple that with what we were talking about earlier that the fragility of the system is getting bigger in terms of our global interconnectedness and climate change bank coming along and banging the system that polarization means

1082
01:10:21.184 --> 01:10:29.590
that the system is becoming rifer and rifer for the poor and marginalized to become much more politically reactionary.

1083
01:10:30.137 --> 01:10:31.434
So what you're looking at from a...

1084
01:10:32.501 --> 01:10:36.409
Consequences of capitalism perspective,

1085
01:10:36.448 --> 01:10:38.491
or if you're looking at it from a food system perspective,

1086
01:10:38.492 --> 01:10:40.053
or a sustainability perspective,

1087
01:10:41.073 --> 01:10:44.018
our current system is just driving us ineluctably.

1088
01:10:45.653 --> 01:10:50.596
Down a hill faster and at the bottom of the hill there's a cliff and we're just putting our foot to the accelerator.

1089
01:10:51.174 --> 01:10:55.975
So we can think about building the public goods back into capitalism,

1090
01:10:56.373 --> 01:10:59.959
constraining it so the rich don't get richer at the expense of the poor,

1091
01:11:00.373 --> 01:11:08.725
making them more vulnerable to to come it impacts but again the people who benefit most from capitalism are the incumbents

1092
01:11:09.409 --> 01:11:10.490
The rich people,

1093
01:11:10.491 --> 01:11:11.291
the powerful people,

1094
01:11:11.292 --> 01:11:12.292
the captains of industry,

1095
01:11:12.952 --> 01:11:13.974
major politicians,

1096
01:11:14.212 --> 01:11:14.595
media,

1097
01:11:14.755 --> 01:11:14.895
etc.

1098
01:11:15.813 --> 01:11:17.876
They have the interest in maintaining the status quo.

1099
01:11:18.696 --> 01:11:21.743
So we've got that sort of lock-in again,

1100
01:11:21.821 --> 01:11:22.821
as with the food system,

1101
01:11:23.540 --> 01:11:27.220
that as capitalism creaks and creaks and creaks,

1102
01:11:28.907 --> 01:11:31.673
they don't want to change until they're forced to change.

1103
01:11:32.095 --> 01:11:33.235
And we're not at that point yet.

1104
01:11:34.665 --> 01:11:35.785
Thanks for that answer.

1105
01:11:36.405 --> 01:11:36.525
Yeah,

1106
01:11:37.145 --> 01:11:40.986
there's a few key topics that I want to discuss with you still.

1107
01:11:42.764 --> 01:11:45.467
The next one is the topic of food security.

1108
01:11:45.748 --> 01:11:49.311
It's a term that I hear a lot that I understand very little about.

1109
01:11:49.545 --> 01:11:51.686
And I'm hoping that you can enlighten me on this.

1110
01:11:53.170 --> 01:11:53.873
Okay,

1111
01:11:54.029 --> 01:12:00.264
so the term food security effectively was defined at the end of the

1112
01:12:00.811 --> 01:12:04.045
90s in terms of people having

1113
01:12:04.773 --> 01:12:08.376
access to food that's affordable,

1114
01:12:09.558 --> 01:12:10.097
available,

1115
01:12:10.558 --> 01:12:11.198
nutritious.

1116
01:12:13.293 --> 01:12:14.795
for all people at all times,

1117
01:12:14.995 --> 01:12:19.299
which I take to mean it's sustainably produced,

1118
01:12:19.378 --> 01:12:21.522
so all people includes future generations.

1119
01:12:22.702 --> 01:12:22.905
Now,

1120
01:12:23.663 --> 01:12:28.045
that term is used in at least three different contexts,

1121
01:12:29.069 --> 01:12:31.655
one of which is particularly becoming prominent.

1122
01:12:32.374 --> 01:12:36.858
The first one is food security in the sense of a famine situation.

1123
01:12:37.561 --> 01:12:41.858
Do people have enough food to be able to fuel themselves to live from day to day?

1124
01:12:42.485 --> 01:12:48.170
So think of a famine in a developing country or something like food security means we've got to get food in Gaza.

1125
01:12:48.893 --> 01:12:49.393
At the moment,

1126
01:12:49.432 --> 01:12:51.073
we've got to get food in because people are starving.

1127
01:12:53.158 --> 01:12:57.119
From an industrial agricultural perspective and a global trade perspective,

1128
01:12:57.799 --> 01:13:02.901
food security is much more interpreted in that discourse as,

1129
01:13:03.323 --> 01:13:09.588
are we producing enough food to keep supermarkets full so people can go and buy the food that they want to buy?

1130
01:13:10.257 --> 01:13:11.679
irrespective of whether it's healthy,

1131
01:13:11.779 --> 01:13:12.820
irrespective of whatever.

1132
01:13:13.240 --> 01:13:17.945
So a politician's view of food security most of the time is,

1133
01:13:19.644 --> 01:13:22.449
can people go to a supermarket and are the shelves full?

1134
01:13:23.988 --> 01:13:28.581
The third discourse on food security is the food security sensu stricto,

1135
01:13:28.769 --> 01:13:30.363
which is sustainably produced,

1136
01:13:30.394 --> 01:13:31.613
nutritious and healthy.

1137
01:13:32.285 --> 01:13:37.019
And that's largely an academic discourse rather than a real discourse.

1138
01:13:38.153 --> 01:13:40.455
Because of the sorts of things that we've been talking about,

1139
01:13:40.456 --> 01:13:42.818
the locked-in food system and unwillingness to change.

1140
01:13:44.240 --> 01:13:46.064
But in 2025,

1141
01:13:46.221 --> 01:13:47.799
following the invasion of

1142
01:13:49.642 --> 01:13:51.783
Ukraine and COVID,

1143
01:13:52.908 --> 01:13:54.095
and in the UK Brexit,

1144
01:13:54.252 --> 01:13:55.424
the disruptions caused by that,

1145
01:13:56.127 --> 01:14:04.736
food security is also taking on a much more kind of potent discourse around,

1146
01:14:05.205 --> 01:14:06.095
can a government...

1147
01:14:06.865 --> 01:14:11.670
ensure that there's enough food to feed its people in terms of crisis,

1148
01:14:11.932 --> 01:14:12.830
in times of crisis.

1149
01:14:13.631 --> 01:14:13.893
And,

1150
01:14:15.174 --> 01:14:15.416
you know,

1151
01:14:15.471 --> 01:14:15.674
with

1152
01:14:16.072 --> 01:14:17.939
COVID, with

1153
01:14:18.377 --> 01:14:20.080
Ukraine, with

1154
01:14:20.838 --> 01:14:21.439
Middle East.

1155
01:14:21.673 --> 01:14:37.965
uh instability with climate change impacts uh you know you can imagine a situation if china moved on taiwan and trump escalated his trade wars and putin pressed the wrong sort of button very few countries would

1156
01:14:37.966 --> 01:14:49.715
be food secure tomorrow um and so post ukraine post covid that issue of national food security as part of national security

1157
01:14:51.525 --> 01:15:09.041
is becoming much more worried about in governments because of our reliance on having a globally traded trading system that works and our experiences in the last few years that it is that it is quite fragile and might not work so

1158
01:15:09.384 --> 01:15:21.337
this definition of food security relates very much to all of our conversation above about your food system because if you're importing half your food and some things

1159
01:15:21.649 --> 01:15:36.466
stops those imports you're food insecure and so our food security on a country by country level is based on global trade and that in this day and age is quite a risk to

1160
01:15:36.505 --> 01:15:51.115
worry about so then what does a country like the uk do about it or how should it think about it and if you look back at our history and it's true in practically all european countries as well when i was a boy uh

1161
01:15:51.714 --> 01:16:00.751
Most big towns had quite an area of horticulture around market gardening that produced carrots and potatoes and stuff for the local markets.

1162
01:16:01.251 --> 01:16:06.400
We had apple orchards and pear orchards and top fruit of various kinds.

1163
01:16:07.376 --> 01:16:07.735
And then.

1164
01:16:08.533 --> 01:16:11.136
post-trade liberalisation and even before.

1165
01:16:12.136 --> 01:16:12.757
French apples,

1166
01:16:12.816 --> 01:16:13.718
New Zealand apples,

1167
01:16:13.738 --> 01:16:18.581
South African apples came in at a price that undercut our market,

1168
01:16:18.582 --> 01:16:23.386
so we got rid of all our apple orchards and we have concentrated in the UK broadly.

1169
01:16:23.423 --> 01:16:25.266
broadly on a small number of things,

1170
01:16:25.506 --> 01:16:28.071
principally wheat and livestock products.

1171
01:16:28.692 --> 01:16:29.914
And we grow those well,

1172
01:16:29.973 --> 01:16:30.676
we export them,

1173
01:16:30.677 --> 01:16:31.961
and then we buy everything else in.

1174
01:16:32.539 --> 01:16:36.024
But when you're worried about trade and the flakiness of trade,

1175
01:16:36.383 --> 01:16:37.430
that doesn't make any sense.

1176
01:16:37.445 --> 01:16:38.352
So at least...

1177
01:16:38.441 --> 01:16:54.333
one of the kind of strands of thinking is in a country like the uk how can we change our agricultural support to encourage farmers put the incentives in the right place etc or encourage consumers to buy stuff so that farmers can diversify away so

1178
01:16:54.685 --> 01:17:06.872
if we have a crisis um channel ports blocked by some mega storm that knocks out knocks out um the crane infrastructure or whatever it might be.

1179
01:17:09.519 --> 01:17:11.740
if something like that happens or some sort of war,

1180
01:17:12.361 --> 01:17:15.728
we have got more fresh fruit and vegetables in the country than we do.

1181
01:17:15.822 --> 01:17:16.564
Because at the moment,

1182
01:17:17.588 --> 01:17:18.064
on average,

1183
01:17:18.065 --> 01:17:20.549
we have something like three days fruit and vegetables in the country.

1184
01:17:21.892 --> 01:17:25.916
The rest is coming through the southeast coast ports.

1185
01:17:26.609 --> 01:17:27.190
And effectively,

1186
01:17:27.270 --> 01:17:31.375
our just-in-time food system means that as people buy it in the supermarket,

1187
01:17:31.996 --> 01:17:39.422
the next container comes up and the next container comes through the channel tunnel and it gets sold at the rate that it comes into the country.

1188
01:17:39.484 --> 01:17:41.164
And if anything interdicts that flow,

1189
01:17:42.125 --> 01:17:42.883
we're a bit stuck.

1190
01:17:43.008 --> 01:17:44.851
So this new world,

1191
01:17:45.133 --> 01:17:46.648
the unstable and volatile world,

1192
01:17:46.773 --> 01:17:51.180
is creating different sorts of conversations about food security.

1193
01:17:53.213 --> 01:17:54.175
apart from the ones,

1194
01:17:54.474 --> 01:17:55.757
the traditional ones of,

1195
01:17:57.397 --> 01:18:04.448
can the major industrialized food countries and companies provide food to the global markets?

1196
01:18:05.026 --> 01:18:08.089
And can we prevent famine in developing countries?

1197
01:18:08.448 --> 01:18:08.667
Okay.

1198
01:18:10.323 --> 01:18:14.776
So there's an over-reliance on international trade for what we call food security today,

1199
01:18:16.182 --> 01:18:18.464
not enough on sort of self-sufficiency?

1200
01:18:18.465 --> 01:18:19.917
Is that a term?

1201
01:18:20.526 --> 01:18:20.714
Well,

1202
01:18:20.745 --> 01:18:20.854
it...

1203
01:18:21.494 --> 01:18:24.011
because of all of the stuff that we've talked about

1204
01:18:27.921 --> 01:18:29.784
For a country's food system,

1205
01:18:31.065 --> 01:18:34.608
it's not just about who produces the food and where it's produced.

1206
01:18:35.206 --> 01:18:36.706
It's who produces the fertilizer,

1207
01:18:36.768 --> 01:18:38.370
who produces the pesticides,

1208
01:18:39.112 --> 01:18:40.432
who produces the packaging,

1209
01:18:40.995 --> 01:18:42.456
who manufactures the food.

1210
01:18:43.034 --> 01:18:43.284
And

1211
01:18:43.956 --> 01:18:47.846
I sometimes say this in our farming ministry,

1212
01:18:47.940 --> 01:18:48.299
DEFRA.

1213
01:18:50.706 --> 01:18:54.440
There is a bit of a complacency in the UK that something like 70%

1214
01:18:54.752 --> 01:18:56.252
of our food is grown locally.

1215
01:18:57.597 --> 01:18:57.897
70%

1216
01:18:58.178 --> 01:18:58.659
of our food.

1217
01:18:59.581 --> 01:19:00.721
And when you analyse it,

1218
01:19:01.706 --> 01:19:04.089
what that means is that if you take a biscuit,

1219
01:19:05.171 --> 01:19:06.069
if you take a biscuit,

1220
01:19:07.311 --> 01:19:08.436
it might have 70%

1221
01:19:08.757 --> 01:19:10.155
of the ingredients grown locally.

1222
01:19:10.960 --> 01:19:11.421
The wheat.

1223
01:19:12.812 --> 01:19:14.714
But all the other ingredients come from overseas.

1224
01:19:15.195 --> 01:19:16.515
So it's having 70%

1225
01:19:16.794 --> 01:19:18.119
of the ingredients grown locally.

1226
01:19:18.779 --> 01:19:21.240
Does that make you biscuit secure?

1227
01:19:21.724 --> 01:19:22.420
And the answer is no.

1228
01:19:23.138 --> 01:19:25.982
So it's not just about the food.

1229
01:19:26.146 --> 01:19:27.584
It's all of the biscuits.

1230
01:19:27.682 --> 01:19:28.443
bits that go in,

1231
01:19:29.184 --> 01:19:30.123
the various chemicals,

1232
01:19:30.164 --> 01:19:31.106
the stabiliser,

1233
01:19:31.586 --> 01:19:32.205
the gums,

1234
01:19:33.467 --> 01:19:34.709
the pH buffers,

1235
01:19:35.127 --> 01:19:35.291
etc.

1236
01:19:35.830 --> 01:19:36.768
It's about the packaging.

1237
01:19:37.448 --> 01:19:38.729
It's about the machines.

1238
01:19:39.471 --> 01:19:42.760
It's about the fertilisers and inputs.

1239
01:19:43.080 --> 01:19:43.338
You know,

1240
01:19:43.401 --> 01:19:44.573
all of those things matter.

1241
01:19:44.682 --> 01:19:48.416
So the UK could never be self-sufficient or...

1242
01:19:50.068 --> 01:19:50.549
If it would,

1243
01:19:50.669 --> 01:19:54.171
it would be very consequential for it to be self-sufficient,

1244
01:19:54.272 --> 01:19:59.940
but it could increase the degree of food production for local consumption,

1245
01:20:00.542 --> 01:20:06.510
which would act as a buffer against a large-scale problem on the global markets.

1246
01:20:07.260 --> 01:20:07.526
I see.

1247
01:20:08.479 --> 01:20:11.823
You also mentioned in the lock-ins earlier the problem of power concentration.

1248
01:20:11.824 --> 01:20:13.386
I'm sure it displays a role here as well,

1249
01:20:13.839 --> 01:20:15.651
if we have thousands of different companies.

1250
01:20:15.848 --> 01:20:19.236
competing for producing different products,

1251
01:20:19.316 --> 01:20:20.160
different fertilizer,

1252
01:20:20.199 --> 01:20:22.124
different inputs of foods.

1253
01:20:22.687 --> 01:20:24.831
If one source gets blocked,

1254
01:20:25.613 --> 01:20:25.816
there's

1255
01:20:26.238 --> 01:20:27.816
999.

1256
01:20:28.172 --> 01:20:45.735
more to to trade with so the fact that we have a huge power concentration in the food system i guess is also an issue because then there's more chance of one of the main sources of food trade gets blocked there's very much throughout the

1257
01:20:45.766 --> 01:20:56.094
food system diversity no throughout all systems diversity in a sense underlies resilience for the reasons that you're saying but the

1258
01:20:56.836 --> 01:21:02.183
Consolidation of industry is also a political problem,

1259
01:21:02.503 --> 01:21:03.624
as I mentioned earlier,

1260
01:21:04.222 --> 01:21:12.390
because once you get the companies being economically of a similar size or bigger to governments,

1261
01:21:13.108 --> 01:21:15.437
then the power that they hold.

1262
01:21:16.704 --> 01:21:19.266
can act as a brake on doing things differently.

1263
01:21:19.868 --> 01:21:20.147
And so,

1264
01:21:20.647 --> 01:21:20.889
you know,

1265
01:21:20.909 --> 01:21:24.272
a few years ago there was a big debate in Europe about TTIP,

1266
01:21:24.995 --> 01:21:25.792
the trans...

1267
01:21:25.815 --> 01:21:27.932
I can't remember what it was,

1268
01:21:28.034 --> 01:21:28.292
you know,

1269
01:21:28.293 --> 01:21:34.338
the big international trade relationship with the

1270
01:21:35.479 --> 01:21:36.323
United States.

1271
01:21:37.344 --> 01:21:37.945
amongst others.

1272
01:21:39.025 --> 01:21:40.607
And effectively,

1273
01:21:40.767 --> 01:21:47.791
one of the debates around that was that the corporate power of the companies allowed

1274
01:21:51.196 --> 01:22:06.411
industry to take governments to court if governments changed their revenue streams by creating a new regulation or something like that and so the power of the incumbents when

1275
01:22:06.450 --> 01:22:14.692
there's a hugely consolidated means that it acts as a real break on

1276
01:22:15.824 --> 01:22:17.504
sovereign government's ability to change.

1277
01:22:17.624 --> 01:22:19.925
And as the UK has found post-Brexit,

1278
01:22:21.304 --> 01:22:23.187
in a globally interconnected world,

1279
01:22:23.910 --> 01:22:25.144
with global economics,

1280
01:22:25.949 --> 01:22:34.503
the sovereignty that a country has to change things is very small relative to how it might want to change things,

1281
01:22:34.894 --> 01:22:41.128
because of the power that's vested in other countries and big industry.

1282
01:22:44.217 --> 01:22:48.579
I came here today understanding that the food system was very complex and really,

1283
01:22:48.618 --> 01:22:50.438
really hard to tackle these big questions.

1284
01:22:50.439 --> 01:22:50.957
And I feel like

1285
01:22:51.840 --> 01:22:55.219
I've gained an appreciation for how much more complex it is than

1286
01:22:55.657 --> 01:22:56.500
I originally thought.

1287
01:22:58.641 --> 01:22:58.782
Yeah,

1288
01:22:59.102 --> 01:23:01.133
I don't want you to take that message away.

1289
01:23:04.461 --> 01:23:04.649
Well,

1290
01:23:04.961 --> 01:23:05.165
yes,

1291
01:23:05.243 --> 01:23:06.727
I do want you to take that message away.

1292
01:23:08.383 --> 01:23:10.868
But there has been in our area...

1293
01:23:11.405 --> 01:23:25.743
a lot of naivety in thinking that either it's a matter of proving that something is better or it's a matter of convincing people that something is better and then hey presto the

1294
01:23:27.176 --> 01:23:29.077
the system will evolve to be better.

1295
01:23:29.999 --> 01:23:30.919
And what I'm really,

1296
01:23:31.278 --> 01:23:32.302
at the end of my career,

1297
01:23:33.263 --> 01:23:42.114
after having gone from worrying about biodiversity in a field to thinking about the geopolitics of resource provisioning on a global basis,

1298
01:23:43.052 --> 01:23:46.817
what I've come to realise is that food is...

1299
01:23:48.109 --> 01:23:52.298
a kind of poster boy because we all consume it and we all care about it.

1300
01:23:52.837 --> 01:24:00.228
It's a poster boy for our globalised interconnected systems and if we want those systems to do better,

1301
01:24:00.314 --> 01:24:02.236
if we want to tackle climate change,

1302
01:24:03.236 --> 01:24:08.087
that's got to be driven by us as citizens asking our politicians to tackle climate change.

1303
01:24:08.877 --> 01:24:10.178
and tackle sustainability.

1304
01:24:10.898 --> 01:24:20.168
And if we just leave all of that to some techno wizard to come along and invent a new widget or artificial proteins or whatever it might be,

1305
01:24:21.089 --> 01:24:28.089
the system will just continue to drive on sustainability until something happens that makes the system break and then we'll all suffer.

1306
01:24:28.652 --> 01:24:29.933
So in a sense,

1307
01:24:29.980 --> 01:24:34.215
this is a refocusing from saying it's not about technology.

1308
01:24:35.183 --> 01:24:37.183
It's not about a new innovation.

1309
01:24:37.781 --> 01:24:41.323
It's not about a marginal change in your diets in the supermarket.

1310
01:24:41.541 --> 01:24:51.203
It is about making the issue embedded politically to change the system because agriculture and food are interrelated,

1311
01:24:51.500 --> 01:24:56.985
but they're interrelated to global trade and they're interrelated to the way our economies work.

1312
01:24:57.532 --> 01:24:58.969
And to make those different,

1313
01:24:59.719 --> 01:25:03.125
we have to make it possible for politicians to change this.

1314
01:25:05.317 --> 01:25:07.378
Maybe before we conclude this conversation,

1315
01:25:07.437 --> 01:25:09.757
then we could turn to hope a little bit.

1316
01:25:14.261 --> 01:25:16.261
What gives you the most hope about the future?

1317
01:25:17.378 --> 01:25:17.503
Well,

1318
01:25:17.558 --> 01:25:18.136
people like you.

1319
01:25:19.300 --> 01:25:19.417
No,

1320
01:25:19.503 --> 01:25:19.761
I mean,

1321
01:25:20.183 --> 01:25:20.659
seriously.

1322
01:25:23.441 --> 01:25:24.800
When I was doing my PhD.

1323
01:25:26.433 --> 01:25:31.196
Climate change was just starting to kind of make ructions.

1324
01:25:32.813 --> 01:25:34.579
The world seemed a very big place.

1325
01:25:36.493 --> 01:25:47.235
We expected a whole lot of things that haven't come to pass in terms of peace,

1326
01:25:47.454 --> 01:25:48.001
stability,

1327
01:25:48.891 --> 01:25:49.079
etc.

1328
01:25:51.863 --> 01:25:52.622
And that made us,

1329
01:25:53.202 --> 01:25:53.904
in a sense,

1330
01:25:54.365 --> 01:25:55.066
complacent.

1331
01:25:55.784 --> 01:26:00.691
And we took my generation and older,

1332
01:26:00.808 --> 01:26:02.550
but I think my generation particularly,

1333
01:26:03.277 --> 01:26:05.394
we kind of took our eyes off the ball.

1334
01:26:06.534 --> 01:26:08.245
And now your generation,

1335
01:26:08.261 --> 01:26:08.902
a bit younger than me,

1336
01:26:10.761 --> 01:26:12.120
we know about climate change.

1337
01:26:12.667 --> 01:26:14.323
We know about biodiversity loss.

1338
01:26:15.120 --> 01:26:18.808
we have the knowledge that if we don't change

1339
01:26:20.389 --> 01:26:21.932
The future is going to be difficult,

1340
01:26:22.593 --> 01:26:24.517
but we have the knowledge of what to change.

1341
01:26:24.919 --> 01:26:26.782
We have a vision for how to change.

1342
01:26:27.821 --> 01:26:28.681
A lot of people,

1343
01:26:29.282 --> 01:26:30.485
particularly youngsters,

1344
01:26:31.329 --> 01:26:31.446
i.e.

1345
01:26:31.587 --> 01:26:34.477
people under 35,

1346
01:26:34.478 --> 01:26:34.673
you know,

1347
01:26:34.712 --> 01:26:36.134
worry about inequality,

1348
01:26:36.360 --> 01:26:39.063
worry about a whole range of things that...

1349
01:26:40.433 --> 01:26:57.174
uh perhaps a more touchy-feely than the hard-nosed thatcherite reaganite 80s in which you know i went to university and all the rest of that we we know what we need to do it's really a matter now of as

1350
01:26:57.205 --> 01:27:04.471
i keep saying creating the political movement to make change happen and

1351
01:27:06.026 --> 01:27:13.666
As my generation gets older and the incumbent power that's vested in my generation starts coming to the end,

1352
01:27:14.229 --> 01:27:17.065
and as our institutions reach these 80,

1353
01:27:17.127 --> 01:27:19.448
100 years of fossilisation,

1354
01:27:20.268 --> 01:27:23.455
there will open up opportunities for change.

1355
01:27:24.487 --> 01:27:34.705
Some of it will be driven by nasty things and some of it will be driven by positive visions and it needs focus and it needs people like yourself.

1356
01:27:35.450 --> 01:27:40.534
with the youth and enthusiasm and ambition to drive that change,

1357
01:27:41.237 --> 01:27:42.416
to step up to the plate.

1358
01:27:42.538 --> 01:27:42.659
And,

1359
01:27:42.756 --> 01:27:42.979
you know,

1360
01:27:43.018 --> 01:27:49.061
there's a whole lot of people in my generation not being sufficiently politically engaged,

1361
01:27:49.827 --> 01:27:51.225
following people a bit older than me,

1362
01:27:51.772 --> 01:27:53.350
being very politically engaged in the,

1363
01:27:53.647 --> 01:27:54.069
following the

1364
01:27:54.631 --> 01:27:55.944
Second World War and so on.

1365
01:27:56.678 --> 01:27:56.866
And

1366
01:27:57.319 --> 01:28:01.631
I think the time is rife for change to happen.

1367
01:28:02.638 --> 01:28:05.663
And it's felt like the last five years we've gone the wrong way.

1368
01:28:06.967 --> 01:28:07.768
But in a sense,

1369
01:28:07.948 --> 01:28:08.647
it's a pendulum.

1370
01:28:09.932 --> 01:28:16.041
And once people recognise the consequences of what's going on now...

1371
01:28:17.750 --> 01:28:19.813
and the kind of elderly,

1372
01:28:20.553 --> 01:28:21.033
grown-up,

1373
01:28:21.676 --> 01:28:21.793
50s,

1374
01:28:22.176 --> 01:28:23.375
60s leadership level,

1375
01:28:24.617 --> 01:28:34.824
I think there'll be a big window of opportunity that will open up for people like yourself and people of your generation to step forward and say,

1376
01:28:35.184 --> 01:28:36.528
we need to do things differently.

1377
01:28:37.090 --> 01:28:37.856
We know what to do.

1378
01:28:38.356 --> 01:28:43.512
Let's do it.

1379
01:28:45.342 --> 01:28:48.646
I traveled for nine days recording nine different episodes.

1380
01:28:49.105 --> 01:28:54.193
I thought it would be fun to ask every single one of my guests to come up with a question for the next one.

1381
01:28:54.912 --> 01:28:57.115
My guest last week was Adele Jones.

1382
01:28:57.232 --> 01:28:59.553
And here is a question she came up with for Tim.

1383
01:29:00.600 --> 01:29:01.600
Hmm.

1384
01:29:02.584 --> 01:29:02.834
Yes.

1385
01:29:03.162 --> 01:29:04.974
Lots of questions always for Tim.

1386
01:29:05.068 --> 01:29:05.350
He's a...

1387
01:29:05.670 --> 01:29:22.014
he's a great mind um and often perhaps uh with the views of the sustainable food trust we haven't always aligned on on the way forward but i think that's healthy um so i think my question to him is do you think farming in

1388
01:29:22.015 --> 01:29:33.092
the future will continue to rely on nature and natural processes to thrive or do you think we are going down a route of ever more intensification

1389
01:29:34.502 --> 01:29:35.083
technology,

1390
01:29:35.703 --> 01:29:36.144
AI,

1391
01:29:37.045 --> 01:29:42.969
and perhaps less and less we will rely on nature to grow our food.

1392
01:29:43.172 --> 01:29:44.328
It's not the way I hope we go,

1393
01:29:44.555 --> 01:29:47.672
but I'm interested in his views,

1394
01:29:47.734 --> 01:29:48.156
your views,

1395
01:29:48.195 --> 01:29:48.414
Tim,

1396
01:29:49.578 --> 01:29:54.469
on whether you think nature or technology will drive us going forward.

1397
01:29:55.641 --> 01:29:55.891
Yes.

1398
01:29:57.000 --> 01:29:57.344
Do both.

1399
01:29:58.453 --> 01:29:58.563
No,

1400
01:29:59.250 --> 01:30:00.891
it depends on how the future works out.

1401
01:30:01.110 --> 01:30:01.234
So,

1402
01:30:01.235 --> 01:30:02.266
um...

1403
01:30:03.606 --> 01:30:05.887
As we have discussed throughout this podcast,

1404
01:30:07.251 --> 01:30:11.594
if you're trying to tackle all of the problems that are facing us,

1405
01:30:12.954 --> 01:30:14.735
and if you're living in a volatile world,

1406
01:30:15.376 --> 01:30:22.805
a lot of the solution space involves making more of nature to manage farming and diverse,

1407
01:30:23.852 --> 01:30:25.790
could be technologically intensive,

1408
01:30:26.493 --> 01:30:29.024
but diverse agroecological farming.

1409
01:30:30.346 --> 01:30:32.188
If we stick with business as usual,

1410
01:30:32.768 --> 01:30:36.413
the forces of the market will drive more intensification.

1411
01:30:37.452 --> 01:30:41.741
And one of the debates in the last few years has been,

1412
01:30:42.295 --> 01:30:47.624
can you intensify in a sustainable way or a more sustainable way?

1413
01:30:48.358 --> 01:30:54.655
And the way that that has worked out in practice is that that has increased the efficiency of farming.

1414
01:30:55.327 --> 01:30:56.686
so farmers are putting

1415
01:30:57.126 --> 01:30:59.487
down the right amount of nitrogen fertilizer,

1416
01:30:59.548 --> 01:31:04.534
not losing so much to the atmosphere and to soils and to water.

1417
01:31:05.413 --> 01:31:06.734
And that improves their bottom line,

1418
01:31:06.735 --> 01:31:07.718
so they make more profit.

1419
01:31:08.155 --> 01:31:10.476
So that form of sustainable,

1420
01:31:10.477 --> 01:31:11.257
in inverted commas,

1421
01:31:11.382 --> 01:31:14.999
intensification is good business as usual practice.

1422
01:31:15.124 --> 01:31:18.905
And if markets are allowed and the world is calm enough,

1423
01:31:19.530 --> 01:31:21.046
if markets are allowed to get their way,

1424
01:31:21.405 --> 01:31:24.093
that will be the predominant direction of travel.

1425
01:31:24.734 --> 01:31:25.390
But if we

1426
01:31:25.762 --> 01:31:42.720
manage to transform the food system and if we have sufficient disruption or the wrong sorts of disruption from the kind of global basis we are more likely to reinvent our system and if we reinvent our system agroecological processes and

1427
01:31:42.751 --> 01:31:53.736
more diverse smaller scale farming for resilience and for climate adaptation makes more sense so both are possible if you look ahead

1428
01:31:54.345 --> 01:31:55.189
Um

1429
01:31:55.650 --> 01:32:02.764
And I know intrinsically I would prefer us to move towards the more sustainable and not sustainable intensification because

1430
01:32:03.244 --> 01:32:11.651
I think the market drivers around sustainable intensification are really intensification with a bit more efficiency,

1431
01:32:12.385 --> 01:32:14.463
which is not really sustainable in the round.

1432
01:32:15.178 --> 01:32:15.338
Okay,

1433
01:32:15.619 --> 01:32:17.580
yeah.

1434
01:32:17.581 --> 01:32:18.301
And finally then,

1435
01:32:18.963 --> 01:32:23.248
tomorrow I'm going to record an interview with Andrew Voisey from Soil Capital,

1436
01:32:23.365 --> 01:32:25.068
the impact manager at Soil Capital.

1437
01:32:27.193 --> 01:32:28.389
Any question you would like to ask him?

1438
01:32:29.670 --> 01:32:29.990
Yes,

1439
01:32:30.896 --> 01:32:39.560
the extent to which he truly believes that marketization of sustainability will work.

1440
01:32:41.201 --> 01:32:42.186
Carbon markets.

1441
01:32:43.162 --> 01:32:45.326
Don't seem to be making a huge difference,

1442
01:32:46.648 --> 01:32:50.476
even though we've been talking about it for cop after cop after cop.

1443
01:32:52.195 --> 01:32:58.226
Does it really make sense to use markets and investment patterns to drive sustainability?

1444
01:32:59.007 --> 01:33:02.421
Or would it be better to tackle it from a more systemic perspective?

1445
01:33:02.958 --> 01:33:03.419
Fantastic.

1446
01:33:03.619 --> 01:33:04.239
It's a great question.

1447
01:33:05.461 --> 01:33:05.580
Well,

1448
01:33:05.581 --> 01:33:07.061
I'm going to close the conversation here.

1449
01:33:07.123 --> 01:33:08.002
Thank you so much.

1450
01:33:08.283 --> 01:33:09.123
It's been a pleasure.

1451
01:33:09.506 --> 01:33:10.447
Thank you so much for your time.

1452
01:33:10.627 --> 01:33:10.986
My pleasure.

1453
01:33:10.987 --> 01:33:14.690
And share your incredible knowledge and expertise with the listeners of the Deep Seat podcast.

1454
01:33:14.713 --> 01:33:14.971
Thank you.

1455
01:33:15.330 --> 01:33:15.588
Thank you,

1456
01:33:15.627 --> 01:33:15.768
sir.

1457
01:33:16.190 --> 01:33:16.588
Been fun.