Welcome to the lecture on food system sustainability and resilience. My name is Roni Neff and I'm an associate professor in Environmental Health and Engineering and I also direct the Center for a Livable Future's program on Food System Sustainability and Public Health. Today's talk provides a broad overview of food system sustainability and resilience, as well as digging in deeper on a few areas where my work focuses in particular, including climate change, wasted food and food system resilience and what it means to have a resilient food system in context of COVID-19. The learning objectives are first, to be able to define concepts of food system sustainability and resilience and then I'm going to discuss a set of converging crises that are threatening the long term sustainability of our food systems and within that context, I'll talk about COVID-19 and then I'm going to describe the issue of wasted food. The COVID-19 crisis has brought strong attention to some dramatic failures in our food system, especially the widespread food insecurity, hunger, famine and the poor treatment of and high risks for workers. These failures aren't new and they're routes and solutions as I'll discuss, don't lie entirely within the food system and that is a topic for another lecture. But what I'll focus on here, is that the pandemic has also dramatized ways in which the food system's lack of resilience, lack of preparedness and lack of equity has made a bad situation far worse. In addition to food insecurity, the pandemic has focused our attention on ways in which our entire food supply chain is vulnerable and that there have been few backup systems. But I'm not going to give a doctor doom presentation and then walk away. There's a great deal that can be done and throughout I'll be sharing examples of all the ways that we as a food system's community, we as a society and those who are most affected as well are stepping up and building solutions and adapting existing programs and interventions and designing new solutions. There's huge energy effort and creativity going into that. There's, as I'll discuss, also, a huge greater need for more of this and more resources going in these directions. But I want to also note that bouncing back better comes both from these purposeful interventions and also from ancillary impacts of changes that are less specifically focused on these problems. Let me step back and start a bit with definitions. First, what's the difference between sustainability and resilience? Because sometimes people use these terms interchangeably and they're actually referring to pretty different concepts. With sustainability, the goal is the ability to last, to stay in a lasting equilibrium and it goes beyond environmental, it also includes social and economic sustainability. The focus, if you want to make a system more sustainable, is having a low or a positive impact. By contrast, resilience is about the ability to recover from disruptions or shocks to the system and so if a system is resilient, it's recovering to a state of functionality. The new normal may not be the old way and it may not be a better way, though we hope it will be and so with this, we're focusing on what types of interventions can build resilience. We may be thinking about preparedness activities that are directly focused on various threats, adaptive capacity, diversity, duplication and communication. I'll talk more about that in the resilience section of the lecture. While there's overlap, these are different concepts keeping on going, bouncing back and in both cases these words are also co opted by those whose purposes are not necessarily benevolent or are profit oriented and they seek to play off of the positive resonance of these words so they lose a bit of their meaning and thus, there's often a continual turn towards new language that holds that integrity but for here, I'm going to use these basic words. In the next section, we're going to dig deeper into sustainable food systems and I have here in parenthesis says who? Because as I just noted, the definition of sustainability differs depending on who you're talking to. That's really important to understand as we think through what the problem is and what we do about it. How you define the problem determines how you're going respond. As we think about the core of sustainability of our food system, a lot of it has to do with the overall production of food and the ability to produce enough food to feed the population. To start with that, we have enough food globally to feed the entire global population right now and yet at the same time in 2019, there were 820 million people chronically hungry. That reverses a decade's long decline. In 2020, it's anyone's guess. By one United Nations estimate, there could be an additional 132 million people that crossover into that category that's of chronically hungry by the end of 2020. COVID-19, as you know, is really increasing hunger and famines are either starting or are on the horizon as well. But it's important to note that hunger today is not a food problem, it's a distribution problem. Yet by 2050, we may have the global population exceeding 9 billion, we may have rising incomes, urbanization. US population itself may rise by 30 percent. The United Nations suggests we may need 60 percent more food and global meat demand may rise by 73 percent and as will be talked about later and as you've probably picked up from other talks in this course, meat demand is a key driver of resource use. All of that needs to happen at the same time that there's a lot of evidence that the increases in crop yield or how much crop comes out per amount of resources that you're putting in have leveled off. They may be reaching their limits. These were increasing continually over a period of time because of improvements in the technology and the methodology, but is that reaching it's limit? There's little available extra land for farming around the world. Climate change is advancing, as I'll discuss in detail, there is depletion, contamination of resources. I'll talk in a minute about soil, water, fossil fuels, phosphorus crises going on in many sectors of resources that we need to produce food. The issue of needing a lot more food is happening at the same time as we have a lot of very severe challenges and we often focus our attention on climate change, but it's much broader than climate change. At the same time throughout history, there have been many predictions about, we're running out of food, it's dire, we're all going to starve and many of those times the world has changed in ways that just weren't foreseen and we're seeing now just how quickly everything can change. We just don't know what will happen, but we need to keep our eyes on it. Another way to think about the challenges that we face, and I'm just going to focus a little longer on the challenges before I started turning back towards some of what we can do about it. But I think it's really important to really have a clear-eyed view of what we are facing. There's a group led by Rockstrom and others that have focused on this concept of planetary boundaries. These are nine systems in which they're a conception of we can't exceed a certain amount of problem in these systems before we're really into really deep trouble and as you can see from this slide, for several of them were already in that red area. You'll also see that the one that we talk about the most is climate change and we're not even in the red area for climate change. I also want to note that for many of these that are highlighted with the orange boxes, climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows of phosphorous and nitrogen, and ocean acidification, those all have a lot to do with food and so these planetary boundaries that we're hitting are quite food related. It's also important recognize that, as I mentioned earlier, environmental sustainability is not the only sustainability that's important. This is from Kate Raworth has written about this idea of the safe operating space for humanity, which is basically putting us between these planetary boundaries and social boundaries. We could come up with some solutions that might keep us within planetary boundaries. But if they don't also keep us in that safe operating space within these social boundaries, we've got a problem and we are not sustainable. The pathway we're looking for is safe and just. Let's talk about some of what makes a system sustainable. The United Nations has defined a sustainable food system as one that delivers food and nutrition security for all in such a way that the economic, social, and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised and let's talk a little about sustainable agriculture. It is ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just, and sustainable agriculture is sometimes referred to as agroecology. There are a lot of different words that are used for it. It's also efficient in that it recycles and reuses resources. Just like in a natural system, you're constantly recycling all of your rainfall, your organic matter, and that's what a sustainable food system does as well. It's self-sufficient. In theory, it wouldn't require a lot of inputs beyond what nature is providing. Here's an image of dryland farming which relies almost exclusively on rainwater and soil moisture. This is possible in some areas, and in some areas, a sustainable food system means sustainably harvesting inputs that are beyond what nature provides in that area at that time, but doing so in a way that doesn't deplete them for future use. A sustainable food system is diverse. Agroecology makes use of the many different species of plants and animals on the same farm, and there's a real benefit from their interactions. For example, when you have a lot of different crops growing in the same place, each pest could be specialized to a particular crop. If you have them all together, it doesn't give a lot of the pest the opportunity to take hold in the same way. It's just one example. A sustainable food system is resilient, so there is that point at which sustainability and resilience connect. A sustainable food system generally is resilient because it has within it the ability to withstand these shocks. For example, if you have well-nourished soil, then when drought comes along, that soil is able to hold a lot more water. What do we mean by Social and Economic Sustainability? First, we're talking a lot about how do we keep our farmers in our food system workers in business? They need to have good livelihoods, good worker treatment, and concern for occupants, safety and healthy. It has to be profitable and affordable enough to stay in business both in terms of prices, in terms of the affordability of farmland, in terms of the level of risk that a farmer has to assume to stay in business. We have a situation as I'm sure you'll hear about later in the class, about the extent to which the farm workforce is aging. There's a real need to attract young farmers if we want to have a sustainable food production in the United States. A socially and economically, a sustainable food system also has a level playing field where businesses and farms of all kinds have equal access to funds and are treated equally where there's not very substantial financial incentives being given to some groups and not others, and equal access to policy supports beyond funding. Finally, for farmers and food system workers, it's satisfying work. It's not too risk-intense, it preserves their mental health. Part of that is also having thriving rural communities. From the flip side, from the consumer side, a socially and economically sustainable food system is one in which good food is affordable to all because if people can't buy it, then it can't be made. It's cyclical, it all fits together. One of the questions that's often asked is how do you know if the food is sustainable? How do you know if just because somebody said it was or just put a label on it, what does that mean? There's a few different ways that sustainability is measured. One is very quantitative analysis, like life-cycle analysis, which involves essentially adding up the environmental impacts of each piece of production. Like what's the environmental impact of producing the ingredients that go into the fertilizer? What's the environmental impact of synthesizing, of transporting it, of applying any tractors? And so on for every single piece of the production until you come up with an environmental impact for a food product. Also, modeling using quantitative methods to estimate these things in the absence of data that specifically describes it. There's also benchmarks and audits where there may be firms that are providing oversight, that are looking into sustainability of products and quantifying. Sometimes there are indexes and accounting methods where these are reported and measured by both the companies themselves and by overseeing third-party organizations. Sometimes that's coupled with certification and certain sustainability labels, which I think you'll be talking about later. But the answer to the how do you know question is often you don't know. Very often we don't get to find out how sustainable a product is. If you're shopping in the store, for example, the energy use from seafood that for example, if they're trawling the bottom of the ocean to pull up that seafood, can be very substantially higher than seafood that's harvested in a more sustainable way. But if you go to that store, it's not going to be labeled trawling. There's no way to know. These products don't have good labels on them. So there's a lot more opportunity and need for communication and transparency about sustainability levels in the food that we buy so that we can make informed choices as consumers.
