If you take an economy and increase it by 2%
a year or 4%
per year,
effectively you've got an exponential growth process.
And we live on a finite planet.
And whilst most consumption is underpinned in some way by material consumption,
whether food,
whether land,
whether plastics,
whether oil and gas,
whether minerals,
etc.,
you don't have to be a genius to work out that eventually something's got to give.
Today I'm talking to Professor Tim Benton,
one of the world's leading experts in food systems and food security.
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.
This is without a doubt one of the best and most powerful conversations
I've had the privilege to host on the Deep Seat podcast yet and I promise you,
you won't regret listening to it.
This episode was made in partnership with Soul Capital.
I'm your host,
Raphael,
and this is the Deep Seat Podcast.
Hi Tim,
welcome to the Deep Seat Podcast.
Hello Raphael,
lovely to be here.
Could you maybe start by introducing yourself for the listeners,
telling us a little bit about your personal journey and what led you to become so passionate about food systems in general?
Yeah,
this is a really difficult question to answer because I'm,
in a sense,
I do a lot of things.
At heart,
I guess I'm an ecologist.
I started off as a academic ecologist working on a range of things to do with ecosystem modelling and ecosystems,
understanding why populations go up and down or different species and so on.
So long term interest in biodiversity.
And then I started working on agricultural.
biodiversity and trying to understand why some insects were going down in numbers and some were going up in numbers.
And that led me on a long detour into trying to understand what sustainable agriculture meant.
And then I came to that kind of realisation being a systems person that it's not about,
you can't define sustainable agriculture without defining the food system
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
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
at Chatham House,
the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
where I was really working on the geopolitics of issues to do with food,
land,
sustainability,
climate and so on.
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.
Great.
I want to start with a big question.
If you were given five minutes to speak in front of every single person in the UK?
The floor is yours,
you can say whatever you want.
What will you say?
I guess I would start off by saying my generation,
so I'm in my
60s, has lived a life of unrivaled prosperity and peace effectively.
And we've kind of got used to living in a world of plenty.
material wealth and consumption.
And yet,
almost everything that we rely on relies on the planet also being sustainably managed,
whether it's food,
whether it's climate,
whether it's water availability,
whatever.
And because we've kind of got used to this overabundance of stuff and expect everything to be on tap,
we're in the situation where we're making the planet
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.
The world is also getting to the point where it is sufficiently unhealthy that we've got effectively we've got ourselves
stuff that comes from the planet,
the less able the planet is to absorb those demands.
And the more likely it is that the planet won't be able to continue to...
to let us get away with it in a way.
And within that,
the food system is perhaps the biggest contributor that people often don't think of in terms of its impacts on land use,
biodiversity,
climate,
pollution around the world and therefore is a very big unsustainable body of work.
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
food system that makes quite a lot of profit
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
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
Soil degradation,
etc.
And the human costs of poor diet,
whether it is illnesses associated with obesity,
diabetes,
heart disease,
or whether it's cancers or whatever,
plus the weight of plastic packaging and the pollution from fertilizer,
pesticides,
plastic,
etc.,
will not make the world unlivable,
but will make the world much more challenging to live in.
and particularly challenging to our way of life.
And I think there has been a lot of conversation over the years about all lifestyle change,
blah,
blah.
But what worries me most at the moment,
particularly in 2025,
and over the last five years is the relationship between broadly the politics and geopolitics of sustainability,
and what that does to the way our democracies work the way our
countries relate to each other.
And you can see,
looking ahead,
if you just follow the sorts of things that have happened over the last five,
six years,
whether it is Trump or whether it is Brexit or whether it is COVID or whether it is the Ukraine war,
you can just see those sorts
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.
And why do I say that?
If you take all of our governments,
everywhere in the world wants to have a positive GDP.
So that's
2%, 3%,
4%,
8%
of your China economic growth per year.
So if you take an economy and increase it by 2%
a year or 4%
per year,
effectively you've got an exponential growth process.
And we live on a finite planet,
and whilst most consumption is underpinned in some way by material consumption,
whether food,
whether land,
whether plastics,
whether oil and gas,
whether minerals,
etc.
You don't have to be,
and Malthus first pointed this out,
didn't he?
200 and something years ago.
You don't have to be a genius to work out that eventually something's got to give.
And so for me,
the sustainability argument is not a kind of middle class nice to have.
Let's all be organic.
wear sandals and,
you know,
grow a long bushy beard and live in a commune.
It's not about that.
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.
So one of the things you said is that we can't have exponential growth on a finite planet.
Right now,
economic growth is tied to use of resources and therefore more growth,
more resources getting used.
We get to a point where that's not possible anymore.
growing the economy while reducing our material footprint.
What do you think about that?
Well,
I mean,
there's obviously some strength in the argument in the sense that
Malthus was obviously wrong at the time and Paul Ehrlich was wrong in the
60s.
But logically,
that will only get you so far.
So if...
Very technological technological advance increases the efficiency of our resource use.
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
global resources.
And,
you know,
you quote AI,
AI can be absolutely fantastic at increasing the efficiencies of things.
But it comes with a downside,
of course.
I mean,
if you think about the data centers and the heating that's required,
and the resources that go into running those computers,
let alone the technology that comes out the other end.
And if you look at our history of technological advancement,
a lot of it is based,
yes,
on increasing efficiency.
But when
you switch to another resource,
and then you switch to another resource.
And,
you know,
wild-caught fisheries are an example of that,
that you fish the common fish,
and when the common fish become less common,
you fish the uncommon fish,
and when they become less common,
you move to somewhere else and fish their fish.
And eventually,
there isn't very much place left to go where you can do that sort of thing.
So the argument must be logically correct.
Malthus's argument must
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
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
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
slender-billed curlew going extinct across
Europe and
Asia and Africa,
a very common bird going extinct.
And for every common bird that might go extinct,
the number of bugs and beasties that are also going extinct and the soil microbiota,
etc.,
etc.
So everything ecologically that we rely on is at risk and it's an absolute risk,
whereas technology...
Provides a relative improvement,
but not an absolute improvement.
Right.
Do you think that staying within planetary boundaries necessarily means reducing our comfort of life?
Or is it possible to have a happy,
fulfilling,
abundant life while staying within planetary boundaries?
I don't quite understand what you mean by an abundant life,
but you can certainly have a prosperous life.
You can have a life free,
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,
etc.
Climate is causing increasing anxieties,
etc.
And,
you know,
a lot of the information shows that you need a certain amount of wealth,
but beyond a certain level,
getting richer doesn't make you happier.
And I think in this part of the
21st century,
we are increasingly recognising the value of human connectedness and local communities and the kind of...
The things that my grandparents might have seen as normal,
but in our modern world where we're rushing around constantly glued to your phones,
doing social media constantly,
never really having a proper conversation with people,
not knowing your neighbours,
etc.
doesn't help you be a happy and well-adjusted person.
And,
you know,
post-Covid in the rich world,
the...
The kind of epidemic of mental health issues,
the epidemic of health issues.
It would be a strong argument to say we must continue doing the same thing because it makes us happy,
because increasingly it's not making us happy.
Right.
Yeah.
When I mentioned abundance at the start of this question...
I guess that was what I was implying or referring to is that we think of abundance as financial abundance,
material wealth.
But it could also very much be abundance of social connection,
of pure air,
of healthy food,
of healthy gut microbiota.
I don't know,
like all of these things that make for a good life.
Exactly,
as opposed to an abundance of consumption.
Because,
you know,
I'm getting to the point where I'm sort of slowing down from a work perspective.
But I certainly recognize that just being able to go and walk on the hills at home,
watch the birds,
take the dog for a walk,
you know,
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.
Right.
half of this conversation is going to be centered more around the solutions.
But before we get there,
we have to get a bit deeper into the problems,
right?
Why do you think the food system,
the current food system is so fragile?
And what's likely to happen if we continue down this path?
Okay,
I think it's fragility as a consequence.
So let's start at the beginning.
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,
a whole range of things,
including food.
So if you start off from the assumption that economic growth is the biggest shaper of the way our societies work,
at least from a political perspective,
and this is why elections are increasingly fought on,
will it make me richer or poorer kind of thinking,
then anything that can maximise volume and minimise price maximises
assess your economic perspective.
And when it pertains to food,
getting you to eat a whole lot of stuff is a good thing.
It puts money in people's pockets and pays for farmers and pays for food system actors and so on.
And the cheaper it is,
the more money you have to spend on other things.
So our food system is kind of embedded in that thinking that from the Second World War
you know,
maximizing the availability of food and minimizing its price is good and keeps the economic wheels turning.
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.
That's not the same as food that is good for you.
That's food that makes you want to buy it.
And we have invested a lot in shaping the system,
and particularly since global liberalization of trade at the end of the
1980s.
If a country is really good at producing something,
it makes its most profit from overproducing it,
exporting it around the world and so on.
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.
uh to produce foods that more or less the whole world eats these days and you know the top eight crops account for some
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
etc sugar
So we have got this big interconnected food system,
huge amounts of resources go into making livestock feed and therefore livestock cheap within the same sort of rational global interconnected system.
And because economic growth is predicated on selling more to bigger markets.
Governments support that with research for farming intensity.
Governments support that with subsidies for growing the right sort of crops that will maximise economic income to a country.
And so we have this system which is globally interconnected,
very lacking in diversity.
really based on a few crops grown at large intensity at scale.
And the externalised costs or the costs of that system that are externalised to other systems,
health system particularly,
environmental systems,
are unaccounted for in this kind of standard economic thinking.
And if you just take the ill health costs associated with poor diets in the UK alone...
There's an estimate that goes up to 268 billion pounds,
so 300 billion euros.
And that is the direct costs of being ill.
Diabetes,
cancers,
heart disease,
etc.
The social care costs of looking after people who are not at work,
the production costs,
the UK economy of people not
of the food system externalized to health systems is about seven trillion,
about seven percent of global GDP,
something like that.
And then if you look at it from an environmental perspective,
the food system accounts for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions when you kind of tot it all up.
is probably the biggest polluting sector by some margin,
accounts for somewhere north of 50%
of global land use.
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
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
and stops trains transporting stuff around.
And as those impacts grow,
countries are becoming more worried about how they feed their populations.
Isn't enough land to go around to produce the sorts of food that demand projects into the future?
So we're in a globally interconnected system where almost every country depends on imports of fertilizer.
food,
packaging,
etc.,
in a world that's becoming more volatile because of climate change and climate change's interaction with politics and geopolitics.
And so looking ahead with a growing global population...
what you can see if you just take that line back to even 2015.
2015 pre-Brexit,
pre-Trump,
pre-Covid,
pre-shooting war in Europe etc.
If you just say well if you project that line forwards with the rise of the right
and all of the forces that are leading to countries to backtrack on climate change commitments.
The libertarian arguments that no one shall ever tell me what I should eat,
I just demand to carry on eating what I want to eat.
The inward-looking nationalism that's leading to things like Trump's trade wars.
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
about 40%
of our food is imported.
Were something to go wrong,
put yourself into a scenario where we have a third world war or something like that.
We don't have enough food in the country to feed ourselves.
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
that we can have every meal instead of meat as a kind of occasional treat,
as part of a healthy diet.
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.
So just looking ahead...
I can't easily see a scenario where we don't get ourselves into a situation,
as perhaps with climate change and the energy transition,
we don't get into our situation where the world lets us get away with it for much longer without something seriously breaking.
Once it's broken,
we'll have a chance to rebuild it.
But it's not fit for purpose today.
With today's externalization of costs,
it's increasingly less fit for purpose as every year passes.
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
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
in the near future where the system breaks.
It just cannot produce anymore to feed people.
Do you think we need to unfortunately wait until that breaking point,
until it hurts so much that we have no choice but to act?
Or do we have a chance at making the right decisions today or soon to avoid the system breaking?
Well,
one would hope we can make the right decisions.
And one of the reasons I got interested in working in the science policy interface and the science politics interface was
10, 15 years ago.
I kind of had faith that if you put the evidence in front of people,
it would convince them.
But it doesn't.
There is too much incumbency,
you know,
the sorts of level of influence that the big actors have.
have,
whether politicians or whether the industry itself,
to change.
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.
has shrunk to almost non-existence.
And you can see in
UK, in Germany,
and in other places that countries that used to lead on climate change are now backtracking quite fast because they know that climate change,
dealing with climate change or food,
changing food systems is a vote loser.
And so how do they get in government?
And to a certain extent,
the institutions that run the way we live
are so slow-moving and unadaptable that they won't change until they're forced to change.
I think it was Nietzsche who said,
wasn't it,
whoever you vote for,
you get the government,
and to a certain extent,
whoever you vote for,
you get a government that's bound by an ever-tighter set of rules about what is possible,
and that doesn't allow us to tackle these things at the speed with which they need to be tackled.
And so whilst I have hope that...
The system doesn't need to break.
It probably needs to creak pretty heavily at the seams before people really start waking up and saying,
I'm more frightened of the future than I am of the change now.
I really hope you're enjoying this conversation so far.
I just need to take a few seconds of your time to tell you about the official partner of the Deep Seed podcast,
Sol Capital.
Sol Capital is a company that accelerates the transition to regenerative agriculture.
by financially rewarding farmers who improve the health of their soils.
They're a fantastic company,
I love what they're doing and I'm really proud to be partnering with them for the Deep Seed podcast.
If you'd like to learn more about them,
I will leave a link in the description of this episode.
Let's get back to the conversation.
If you had the opportunity to sort of...
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
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
The sorts of things that will tackle the majority of the problems,
so that's climate change,
nature,
pollution and all of those elements,
and healthy diets on a global basis.
to change what we eat.
So you can't get a technological solution on the supply side and leave the consumption side alone.
That won't work.
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
Eating healthily,
so more whole grains,
diversity of fruits and vegetables,
leafy greens,
less animal source foods.
Not vegetarian or vegan,
but not.
twice a day for every meal,
more or less.
If we ate the right amount to be healthy,
we would also consume less.
If we worked on waste,
we would,
you know,
a dietary change,
changing the composition of diets,
reduction of waste,
those two things alone in the rich world sort of situation,
OECD,
EU,
those sorts of places.
would save about 50%
of each person's footprint.
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
us away from some of this huge monoculture of only a small number of crops and 60%
of European land use going into cattle feed or livestock feed.
So you can imagine a system where you get away from that,
you grow a diversity of stuff.
Because of the challenges of globalisation and these long supply chains,
it would probably have to be more resilient if it was shorter supply chains.
So more regional food,
more local food,
and that brings all sorts of other socio-economic benefits.
And if you take the pressure off producing ever more,
ever more intensively,
then you can start moving into the world of agroecological farming.
techniques,
regenerative farming,
managing soils well,
using small wasps as part of biodiversity to kill aphids rather than pesticides.
You know those sorts of things,
healthy pollinators etc etc.
So that sort of vision would give you a healthy population,
it would give you a low waste system,
it would give you a sustainable land use and it wouldn't necessarily take up
more land because you're making so much saving by changing your dietary composition and reducing waste.
So there is no reason for farmers to feel threatened by that,
because it's a matter of,
at the moment,
the food system rewards unsustainable production.
That's the only way you can really make a profit,
is if you're unsustainable.
If you turn that round and say you can only make a profit if you're sustainable,
we might pay more for it.
an individual item of food,
but some items of food would become cheaper.
If we're eating less,
it doesn't necessarily mean that the household budget would go up.
So you would end up being able to redirect the rewards to farmers.
You'd still need producers,
manufacturers,
supermarkets,
etc.
So there...
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
do we um hire you as a leader of that movement to make things happen no so you you said changing our
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
uh modus are typically well how do we change agriculture or how do we change nutrition or
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
whichever way you look at it everything will have to change
as a plan,
a coordinated plan?
Otherwise,
how else do you get everything to change all at once?
Well,
there are two scenarios.
One is that the world falls apart and therefore you can't rely on trade.
So let's just run with that for a minute.
Across Europe...
For example,
a lot of the nitrogen fertilizer still comes from Russia.
And to a certain extent,
Russia,
Putin has subsidized its gas exports as nitrogen fertilizer into Europe,
undercut the European fertilizer industry.
hybrid war that we're in,
he could turn off the taps.
And that would lead Europe scrabbling around for where does its fertilizer come from?
Is there enough in the world?
Yes,
but we would be taking it away from other places that might need it.
Prices would go up,
food prices would go up,
etc.
And if we're in a shooting war,
what happens to the food trade from other parts of the world?
So you can see a kind of scenario like that,
which forces us to do things differently.
government will have to intervene as prices change to make them not entirely regressive.
Prices change,
people's habits change,
etc.
So that's one route.
The other route is that it needs regulatory and legal changes and changes in trade that could be driven by government.
But at the moment there are no votes in that for government.
So government won't act.
Industry won't act.
People want it to change.
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.
I see.
And so ultimately,
it's got to be led by citizens saying we want the world to be a different place,
not by politicians.
And certainly it won't be by industry.
things will break to some extent and that will give us no choice but to rebuild.
So basically what we're doing here is coming up with the blueprint for rebuilding,
right?
Well,
I have faith in you youngsters.
Yeah,
well...
No,
but
I think there is reality that,
as I said right at the start,
I have lived through a period of peace and prosperity where it's become a complete norm.
that the world is calm and it's only about making more money and getting wealthier,
and that's the route to lifelong happiness and all the rest of that.
And that's clearly not the case.
And,
you know,
I've particularly been struck recently,
and
I'm off to
Rome to speak at their
80th birthday celebration this week.
The number of things that are doing their 80th birthday this year,
not a surprise because that was the end of the Second World War where a lot of our state institutions were effectively reinvented.
And there is something I think about how our institutional ability to change gets kind of locked in,
locked into a sort of very resilient to change.
have been popular in terms of politics in the last few years.
They're always trying to catch up,
how do we deal with this problem?
Well,
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.
And I think there comes a point where we have to reform institutions.
to make them fit for purpose and maybe 80 to 100 years is about as long as we can expect.
But that doesn't mean that has to be a revolution that is bloody.
We can have reforming institutions if there is enough popular support from it democratically,
but the history of the last five years is the support for that sort of change is going backwards not going forwards.
But your generation,
you might reinvent the ability to say hey grown-ups.
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
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
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
in the
1950s there was a tv program called champion the wonder horse an american tv program and my mom always used to call
me champion when I got this job,
meaning wonder horse.
And so I hated the term.
But then by the time
I'd done it for five years,
that kind of notion that it needs changemakers to champion issues,
to create the politics and to make the change real for people on the ground,
because
why you're doing the job that you're doing.
And it's kind of why I was doing the job that I was doing,
in a sense that we see the need to change.
And it's not a matter of kind of lecturing people,
it's a matter of having the conversations and thinking more than today or tomorrow.
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?
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
so historically meat was always something of a treat on average
It was something that you had maybe
Sunday roast or something in the middle of the last century,
my kind of grandparents'
generation.
And since we've really invested in the intensification of agriculture,
grain has become so cheap that for the first time in human history,
it's become possible to feed grain not to humans but to animals.
And so,
you know,
the history of innovation has been...
if you innovate in productivity,
you grow more.
And naively,
you would think from a market perspective,
demand drives supply,
but innovation drives supply.
And then marketing makes demand catch up.
So being able to produce an excess of wheat and maize and things like that didn't stop farmers growing that excess.
It just meant that that excess has been repurposed into bioethanol
animal feed effectively.
So we can afford to feed what used to be human food to livestock now,
and so meat is very freely available or very cheap on a global basis more so than ever before.
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
And of course,
ruminant livestock is a major driver of global greenhouse gas emissions and a driver of land use change.
Chopping down rainforests and things like that make cattle ranches and grow soya for cattle feed.
So the footprint of animal agriculture on a global basis is very,
very large.
And if you project forwards and imagine a global population of,
I don't know,
10,
10 and a half,
11 billion.
If everybody eats the way that the West eats now,
there isn't enough land to go round.
And at the moment,
there's barely enough land to go round.
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
challenged by adapting to climate change.
But if you look forwards,
the global land requirements of keeping our food system doing more or less the same thing get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And in a world where the geopolitics is getting sharper and more contested,
you can see lots of situations where countries are really going to struggle to feed themselves.
And then what do you do if trade is disruptible by wars and climate change impacts?
do as a country?
Well,
if you've got power,
you use that power.
You buy land in other countries or you bully other countries to supply you preferentially or you swap something,
oil and gas for food or whatever it might be if you're a Gulf stater.
But as that gets pointier,
you can expect more conflict to arise and more contestation to arise.
And then you get this
having more climate change.
The combination of those two is making our land footprint more and more flaky,
and that's making the politics more contested.
And so,
you know,
20 years ago we had this lovely vision of a nice,
calm,
collective,
rules-based,
cooperative world where everybody traded with everybody else.
The last five years have shown that that's not going to happen.
And if you go forward...
then you get into a situation,
which is what we've had historically over the years,
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.
So there isn't enough land,
particularly if you look into the future,
to do all of the things that we expect land to do.
But if you go to any government,
you will not find a ministry of land.
Land,
like food,
is normally split up over lots and lots of different ministries.
And governments,
as with food,
have a real...
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
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
countries,
most governments and most people believe.
We're struggling for land.
We need more and more of it to keep feeding the growing population.
There's a higher,
higher demand.
Less exchange on diets.
Yeah,
that's what I wanted to get to because,
I mean,
the numbers
I read preparing for this interview was that approximately 50%
of the world's land is used for agriculture.
The rest is 1%
is human infrastructure.
So all the cities,
roads,
factories,
everything.
And then the rest is like deserts,
mountains or places where it's really hard to grow food anyway.
Or forests,
protected forests like the Amazon rainforest for example.
And from that 50%
of global land that we use for agriculture,
two thirds of that is grazing lands,
pastures for animals.
And then from the one third left,
half is for human consumption directly and the other half is for either feed.
for animals or biofuel.
So essentially the part of the total habitable land that we actually use to grow food for ourselves is actually quite small.
A massive part of that is for animal agriculture which,
tell me if I'm wrong,
but the numbers I found were saying that animal products were providing roughly
20% of our calories that we consume worldwide,
a bit less even,
a bit less.
While the plants we grow directly for human consumption are more than 80%
of those calories.
So it feels like just to provide a small part of our global diet,
we're actually using more than 80%
of the land.
So what does it tell you?
It tells us that our food system is designed by the market forces rather than designed by rational human beings.
So just to make this concrete,
if you remember at the start of the
Ukraine war when Russia invaded,
It blockaded Odessa and there was something like 20 million tons of grain in Odessa.
And there was a bit of a panic on global markets and all around the world grain prices went up.
And countries like Egypt couldn't get enough grain at a price they could afford and bread prices went up and so on.
And so it was a real problem and it contributed to the cost
But that same amount of grain in Odessa would have been saved if across the EU27 as was,
everybody ate one day less of pork or chicken a week.
So that's the amount - a marginal change in the European diet.
could have effectively freed up the same amount of grain that was blockaded in Odessa,
the blockade of which caused a global food crisis.
So a marginal change in the consumption of animal foods can make a huge difference to global land take.
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
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
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
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
This kind of leads us also to the next part,
which is changing the way we farm.
Because it's not just about what we eat,
but how it was farmed,
how it was grown as well.
Because I've met a lot of farmers,
regenerative farmers,
who use these sort of holistic grazing pattern systems in their farms.
They're mixed farms with arable,
with sometimes some agroforestry,
with some livestock,
different types of animals.
And they really swear by it.
And I can see with my own eyes that they're doing an amazing work,
regenerating the land,
bringing back biodiversity,
bringing fertility.
They're doing an amazing job.
And they get very frustrated when we speak badly about animal agriculture because they say the famous phrase is,
it's not the cow,
it's the how.
Because the difference between an industrial intensive weird animal
or one that is part of this agroecological system,
they don't have the same impact on the environment.
Yes and no.
There was a very good paper published in about 2017 that looked at the global food system,
and the results of their analysis was effectively,
if you only change a small amount,
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,
because chicken has a smaller resource footprint per kilogram.
of meat and that's our kind of standard small footprint meat to go from beef to chicken,
fish,
vegetables.
But if everybody in the world ate...
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
the arable and horticulture and such small such heterogeneous landscapes
where you've got cattle and sheep,
where you've got horticulture growing fruit and vegetables,
where you've got agroforestry and where you've got arable.
It's the sort of diverse system that we need.
It's resilient to climate change impacts because not all your eggs are in a single basket.
The landscape is heterogeneous,
so it's diverse.
So there's lots of places for things to live.
You've got some non-cropped areas.
so the insects and weedy plants can live.
You've got carbon storage,
you've got proper kind of soil management.
So the kind of ideal food system,
as I was mentioning earlier,
is one based on that sort of small-scale diverse agroecological approach.
But at the moment,
the world eats too much meat.
And if everybody ate the same amount of meat,
but it was grown in a regenerative way,
we would have to chop down so much more rainforest to get that same amount of meat.
because the amount of land that is needed to produce it is greater.
So we're caught in the horns of a dilemma.
What is better to do today and what would be better to do if we reinvented the food system are two things.
to quite different things.
And they're in the kind of debates about what is sustainable agriculture,
land sparing,
land sharing and those sorts of things.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
There's this opposition a lot of the time between different visions,
changing what we eat or changing how we produce it.
Also the land sparing versus land sharing.
So that's kind of the same thing.
Land sparing would be okay,
we need to change what we eat
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
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
Given a certain level of demand,
is it better to have a small area of really intensive land,
which effectively becomes an ecological desert,
but is only specialised in producing food,
or a larger area of land that is more diverse,
more agroecological?
Because the yields in a land-sparing situation,
agroecological situation,
are sometimes...
60-70%
of what there would be in an intensive situation.
So you need more land to produce the same amount of food.
The consequences of that is that particularly with people interested in intensive agriculture,
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.
But the sensible response to that argument
and demand less,
then the same area of agricultural land that we can't currently farm intensively could be farmed agroecologically.
And we would accept we would produce less,
but would want less,
we'd want to eat less,
we wouldn't waste so much food,
etc,
etc.
But therein comes back to that question around you need the system change.
It's not about defining.
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
is sustainable and that that is the challenge in our current socio-economic system i have a very small favor to ask
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Thank you.
You contributed to a big report that was published quite recently in collaboration with the UN Environmental Programme,
right?
Yep.
In that report you identified three big lock-ins,
so three big reasons why we were struggling to transition the food system.
Maybe you could talk us through these three.
Yeah,
so the lock-ins we identified were...
A political lock-in,
a lock-in to do with the way the industry works and a historical lock-in.
So the political lock-in is,
as I was discussing earlier...
Since the Second World War,
the political ideology is effectively food should be cheap and freely available.
And within that,
it should be up to the market to make food cheap and freely available.
And if it's up to the market to make food cheap and freely available,
it's the market's problem to worry about.
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
you run that through then government's role is to invest in
trade liberalization to drive economic growth because that's a good thing because that makes food cheaper and more freely available.
It can do that through subsidies and it can do that by investing in the right sorts of research.
It can do that by trade agreements.
It's about investing in crops that have global markets so that they can be the basis of our globalized food system.
So the big ones,
the wheat,
rice,
maize,
sugars.
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
industry responds by growing more growing more of the
crops that are available or the products that are available for the global market.
So you end up with this global homogenization of diets.
Everybody's eating the same sorts of things.
You've got more and more grown at larger and larger scale,
but fewer and fewer products.
So you end up with this global food system producing a relatively small number of ingredients,
very large volumes.
That leads to diets made from highly processed foods that have the same sorts of ingredients in.
That leads also that cheaper food paradigm and the incentives that follow from that,
that also leads to industry accessing global markets and consolidating to access that global markets.
And it also leads to ignoring the externalization of costs,
because the job of the food industry is to feed people.
It's not to feed people well.
is to increase consumption and make economic growth.
And so if it's making people ill or being unsustainable,
that's not accounted for within the cheaper food paradigm kind of ideology.
So lock-in one,
cheaper food paradigm.
That leads through to global consolidation,
which leads to lock-in two,
which is the power of the consolidated global industry that some of the big majors,
the ABCDs,
the big food companies,
are much,
much larger than your average country in the world from an economic perspective.
So they have incredible lobbying power.
They have enormous economic power.
They only have to say to a government,
don't do that because you're...
you'll lose jobs and then the politics reverses that kind of initial thought that we'll do things in the right place.
And the combination of lock-in one,
the cheaper food paradigm,
and lock-in two,
the global consolidation of food,
the industrialization of food,
is that you end up with real path dependency,
that we've built this system which is ever more based on growing fewer and fewer things at larger and larger scale.
And so farmers invest in kit that lasts for 30 years and costs hundreds of thousands of euros to buy.
Food manufacturers invest on in producing food that require these sort of ingredients that come from very long supply chains from a globalised basis.
And if you say change that,
it becomes really,
really difficult.
So the combination of the cheaper food paradigms and politically we want food to be cheap and freely available.
Global consolidation and this historic path dependency that we've created means that changing the food system becomes economically,
politically and socially really difficult.
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,
we say in that report,
invert the business model,
go from it being more profitable to being unsustainable.
and unhealthy.
to be more profitable,
to be sustainable and health providing,
becomes really,
really,
really difficult.
So those lock-ins means that you can't just say it's the job of politicians to change it,
because they'll say,
as Jean-Claude
Juncker once said about climate change,
we know exactly what to do to solve the issue,
we just won't get re-elected afterwards.
You know,
that's the challenge that we're in.
It's not the job of politicians to change,
because...
Us as citizens aren't telling politicians to change.
And the industry is saying,
we're not going to change because we're making quite a lot of profit,
as we are.
And we will change,
we'll signal we're changing,
we'll invest something in changing and we'll greenwash the change.
But we won't really change because the politicians aren't telling us to change.
And citizens certainly aren't ignoring us in the supermarkets.
They're going to the supermarkets and buying the same stuff.
So these lock-ins contribute to this absolute...
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
has to be systemic we come back to that yeah we're in a situation where well corporations role really is to maximize profit.
The politician's role is to
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
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
Yeah,
I think I'd slightly nuance your characterisation of consumers.
Yes,
consumers often do that.
They go into a supermarket,
they buy what they're used to buying,
they buy what they can reach on the shelf or the things they know the kids will like or whatever.
But if you talk to them as citizens,
their values are often different to those expressed in their food basket.
And when you try and...
understand that gap between their aspirations to have nutritious food,
etc.
They say,
I can't afford it,
or
I can't buy that sort of food.
It's too complicated.
I don't have time to prepare it.
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
would rather that the system was different but whilst you're trapped in the system there's very little agency of change so
The change that can come from people is not really as consumers because your choices are often so constrained by circumstances,
but your power comes from the politics.
And what we've really not done is collectively try to drive the politics.
We have tried to convince consumers to buy differently,
convince industry to behave differently,
tell politicians that we need regulations at a time where everybody's...
The zeitgeist is that we must remove regulations,
or we've lectured farmers and said,
you're unsustainable,
you should be doing it differently.
So everybody,
industry feels that they're the bad ones,
politicians know they're not.
doing what they should be doing in the long term,
but they're doing it for short term gain.
Consumers end up buying the wrong sorts of things,
because that's all they've got access to,
or all they can afford.
And everybody's unhappy.
But no one is kind of driving the change.
So that's why I think the politics
With a small P,
not a kind of big P.
I'm not suggesting everybody kind of goes out on the streets,
but instead of just voting people in based on one or two issues,
but primarily whether or not the next government is going to make me richer,
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'
time or 20 years'
time or our children's lives.
So it's a change in mindset,
but ultimately the system will not change unless it's a kind of doom and gloom war situation.
The system will not change unless people drive for the change.
I hear a lot,
it's a big part of your work that we need to think systemically,
right?
We need to kind of break down silos.
You mentioned it earlier.
We have an energy system,
a food system,
an education system and so on,
and they kind of work separately.
And that's something I hear a lot within the food system conferences and talks and stuff like that,
that we need a more systemic approach.
We need to break down the silos and work together and so on.
um
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.
And I'm talking about capitalism being the sort of the software that we use for society today.
I guess my question is,
can we achieve this change within capitalism?
I don't think so.
Short answer.
no the the point of the markets
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
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
The more we produce more,
the cheaper what we produce becomes.
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.
So that's a well-functioning market is to drive up demand and drive up consumption.
But
Again,
on a finite planet,
that doesn't work.
So for me,
it's not about throwing out capitalism,
but it's about building more public goods safeguards into capitalism.
Because at the moment,
the way markets work is that they reward the profits.
And the history of the last 20 or 30 years is the rich have got richer and richer and richer,
mind-wateringly richer.
whilst the global poor have stayed more or less the same.
So capitalism is driving a further inequality between people,
between the rich and the poor,
and it's driving the undermining of public goods,
undermining of public health,
undermining of climate change,
etc.
And the consequence of all that,
again we're going back to my doom and gloom,
is that
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
that the system is becoming rifer and rifer for the poor and marginalized to become much more politically reactionary.
So what you're looking at from a...
Consequences of capitalism perspective,
or if you're looking at it from a food system perspective,
or a sustainability perspective,
our current system is just driving us ineluctably.
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.
So we can think about building the public goods back into capitalism,
constraining it so the rich don't get richer at the expense of the poor,
making them more vulnerable to to come it impacts but again the people who benefit most from capitalism are the incumbents
The rich people,
the powerful people,
the captains of industry,
major politicians,
media,
etc.
They have the interest in maintaining the status quo.
So we've got that sort of lock-in again,
as with the food system,
that as capitalism creaks and creaks and creaks,
they don't want to change until they're forced to change.
And we're not at that point yet.
Thanks for that answer.
Yeah,
there's a few key topics that I want to discuss with you still.
The next one is the topic of food security.
It's a term that I hear a lot that I understand very little about.
And I'm hoping that you can enlighten me on this.
Okay,
so the term food security effectively was defined at the end of the
90s in terms of people having
access to food that's affordable,
available,
nutritious.
for all people at all times,
which I take to mean it's sustainably produced,
so all people includes future generations.
Now,
that term is used in at least three different contexts,
one of which is particularly becoming prominent.
The first one is food security in the sense of a famine situation.
Do people have enough food to be able to fuel themselves to live from day to day?
So think of a famine in a developing country or something like food security means we've got to get food in Gaza.
At the moment,
we've got to get food in because people are starving.
From an industrial agricultural perspective and a global trade perspective,
food security is much more interpreted in that discourse as,
are we producing enough food to keep supermarkets full so people can go and buy the food that they want to buy?
irrespective of whether it's healthy,
irrespective of whatever.
So a politician's view of food security most of the time is,
can people go to a supermarket and are the shelves full?
The third discourse on food security is the food security sensu stricto,
which is sustainably produced,
nutritious and healthy.
And that's largely an academic discourse rather than a real discourse.
Because of the sorts of things that we've been talking about,
the locked-in food system and unwillingness to change.
But in 2025,
following the invasion of
Ukraine and COVID,
and in the UK Brexit,
the disruptions caused by that,
food security is also taking on a much more kind of potent discourse around,
can a government...
ensure that there's enough food to feed its people in terms of crisis,
in times of crisis.
And,
you know,
with
COVID, with
Ukraine, with
Middle East.
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
be food secure tomorrow um and so post ukraine post covid that issue of national food security as part of national security
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
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
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
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
Most big towns had quite an area of horticulture around market gardening that produced carrots and potatoes and stuff for the local markets.
We had apple orchards and pear orchards and top fruit of various kinds.
And then.
post-trade liberalisation and even before.
French apples,
New Zealand apples,
South African apples came in at a price that undercut our market,
so we got rid of all our apple orchards and we have concentrated in the UK broadly.
broadly on a small number of things,
principally wheat and livestock products.
And we grow those well,
we export them,
and then we buy everything else in.
But when you're worried about trade and the flakiness of trade,
that doesn't make any sense.
So at least...
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
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.
if something like that happens or some sort of war,
we have got more fresh fruit and vegetables in the country than we do.
Because at the moment,
on average,
we have something like three days fruit and vegetables in the country.
The rest is coming through the southeast coast ports.
And effectively,
our just-in-time food system means that as people buy it in the supermarket,
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.
And if anything interdicts that flow,
we're a bit stuck.
So this new world,
the unstable and volatile world,
is creating different sorts of conversations about food security.
apart from the ones,
the traditional ones of,
can the major industrialized food countries and companies provide food to the global markets?
And can we prevent famine in developing countries?
Okay.
So there's an over-reliance on international trade for what we call food security today,
not enough on sort of self-sufficiency?
Is that a term?
Well,
it...
because of all of the stuff that we've talked about
For a country's food system,
it's not just about who produces the food and where it's produced.
It's who produces the fertilizer,
who produces the pesticides,
who produces the packaging,
who manufactures the food.
And
I sometimes say this in our farming ministry,
DEFRA.
There is a bit of a complacency in the UK that something like 70%
of our food is grown locally.
70%
of our food.
And when you analyse it,
what that means is that if you take a biscuit,
if you take a biscuit,
it might have 70%
of the ingredients grown locally.
The wheat.
But all the other ingredients come from overseas.
So it's having 70%
of the ingredients grown locally.
Does that make you biscuit secure?
And the answer is no.
So it's not just about the food.
It's all of the biscuits.
bits that go in,
the various chemicals,
the stabiliser,
the gums,
the pH buffers,
etc.
It's about the packaging.
It's about the machines.
It's about the fertilisers and inputs.
You know,
all of those things matter.
So the UK could never be self-sufficient or...
If it would,
it would be very consequential for it to be self-sufficient,
but it could increase the degree of food production for local consumption,
which would act as a buffer against a large-scale problem on the global markets.
I see.
You also mentioned in the lock-ins earlier the problem of power concentration.
I'm sure it displays a role here as well,
if we have thousands of different companies.
competing for producing different products,
different fertilizer,
different inputs of foods.
If one source gets blocked,
there's
999.
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
food system diversity no throughout all systems diversity in a sense underlies resilience for the reasons that you're saying but the
Consolidation of industry is also a political problem,
as I mentioned earlier,
because once you get the companies being economically of a similar size or bigger to governments,
then the power that they hold.
can act as a brake on doing things differently.
And so,
you know,
a few years ago there was a big debate in Europe about TTIP,
the trans...
I can't remember what it was,
you know,
the big international trade relationship with the
United States.
amongst others.
And effectively,
one of the debates around that was that the corporate power of the companies allowed
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
there's a hugely consolidated means that it acts as a real break on
sovereign government's ability to change.
And as the UK has found post-Brexit,
in a globally interconnected world,
with global economics,
the sovereignty that a country has to change things is very small relative to how it might want to change things,
because of the power that's vested in other countries and big industry.
I came here today understanding that the food system was very complex and really,
really hard to tackle these big questions.
And I feel like
I've gained an appreciation for how much more complex it is than
I originally thought.
Yeah,
I don't want you to take that message away.
Well,
yes,
I do want you to take that message away.
But there has been in our area...
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
the system will evolve to be better.
And what I'm really,
at the end of my career,
after having gone from worrying about biodiversity in a field to thinking about the geopolitics of resource provisioning on a global basis,
what I've come to realise is that food is...
a kind of poster boy because we all consume it and we all care about it.
It's a poster boy for our globalised interconnected systems and if we want those systems to do better,
if we want to tackle climate change,
that's got to be driven by us as citizens asking our politicians to tackle climate change.
and tackle sustainability.
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,
the system will just continue to drive on sustainability until something happens that makes the system break and then we'll all suffer.
So in a sense,
this is a refocusing from saying it's not about technology.
It's not about a new innovation.
It's not about a marginal change in your diets in the supermarket.
It is about making the issue embedded politically to change the system because agriculture and food are interrelated,
but they're interrelated to global trade and they're interrelated to the way our economies work.
And to make those different,
we have to make it possible for politicians to change this.
Maybe before we conclude this conversation,
then we could turn to hope a little bit.
What gives you the most hope about the future?
Well,
people like you.
No,
I mean,
seriously.
When I was doing my PhD.
Climate change was just starting to kind of make ructions.
The world seemed a very big place.
We expected a whole lot of things that haven't come to pass in terms of peace,
stability,
etc.
And that made us,
in a sense,
complacent.
And we took my generation and older,
but I think my generation particularly,
we kind of took our eyes off the ball.
And now your generation,
a bit younger than me,
we know about climate change.
We know about biodiversity loss.
we have the knowledge that if we don't change
The future is going to be difficult,
but we have the knowledge of what to change.
We have a vision for how to change.
A lot of people,
particularly youngsters,
i.e.
people under 35,
you know,
worry about inequality,
worry about a whole range of things that...
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
i keep saying creating the political movement to make change happen and
As my generation gets older and the incumbent power that's vested in my generation starts coming to the end,
and as our institutions reach these 80,
100 years of fossilisation,
there will open up opportunities for change.
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.
with the youth and enthusiasm and ambition to drive that change,
to step up to the plate.
And,
you know,
there's a whole lot of people in my generation not being sufficiently politically engaged,
following people a bit older than me,
being very politically engaged in the,
following the
Second World War and so on.
And
I think the time is rife for change to happen.
And it's felt like the last five years we've gone the wrong way.
But in a sense,
it's a pendulum.
And once people recognise the consequences of what's going on now...
and the kind of elderly,
grown-up,
50s,
60s leadership level,
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,
we need to do things differently.
We know what to do.
Let's do it.
I traveled for nine days recording nine different episodes.
I thought it would be fun to ask every single one of my guests to come up with a question for the next one.
My guest last week was Adele Jones.
And here is a question she came up with for Tim.
Hmm.
Yes.
Lots of questions always for Tim.
He's a...
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
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
technology,
AI,
and perhaps less and less we will rely on nature to grow our food.
It's not the way I hope we go,
but I'm interested in his views,
your views,
Tim,
on whether you think nature or technology will drive us going forward.
Yes.
Do both.
No,
it depends on how the future works out.
So,
um...
As we have discussed throughout this podcast,
if you're trying to tackle all of the problems that are facing us,
and if you're living in a volatile world,
a lot of the solution space involves making more of nature to manage farming and diverse,
could be technologically intensive,
but diverse agroecological farming.
If we stick with business as usual,
the forces of the market will drive more intensification.
And one of the debates in the last few years has been,
can you intensify in a sustainable way or a more sustainable way?
And the way that that has worked out in practice is that that has increased the efficiency of farming.
so farmers are putting
down the right amount of nitrogen fertilizer,
not losing so much to the atmosphere and to soils and to water.
And that improves their bottom line,
so they make more profit.
So that form of sustainable,
in inverted commas,
intensification is good business as usual practice.
And if markets are allowed and the world is calm enough,
if markets are allowed to get their way,
that will be the predominant direction of travel.
But if we
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
more diverse smaller scale farming for resilience and for climate adaptation makes more sense so both are possible if you look ahead
Um
And I know intrinsically I would prefer us to move towards the more sustainable and not sustainable intensification because
I think the market drivers around sustainable intensification are really intensification with a bit more efficiency,
which is not really sustainable in the round.
Okay,
yeah.
And finally then,
tomorrow I'm going to record an interview with Andrew Voisey from Soil Capital,
the impact manager at Soil Capital.
Any question you would like to ask him?
Yes,
the extent to which he truly believes that marketization of sustainability will work.
Carbon markets.
Don't seem to be making a huge difference,
even though we've been talking about it for cop after cop after cop.
Does it really make sense to use markets and investment patterns to drive sustainability?
Or would it be better to tackle it from a more systemic perspective?
Fantastic.
It's a great question.
Well,
I'm going to close the conversation here.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time.
My pleasure.
And share your incredible knowledge and expertise with the listeners of the Deep Seat podcast.
Thank you.
Thank you,
sir.
Been fun.