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This report outlines the true cost of food, which includes the impacts on our health, the environment, biodiversity, livelihoods, and much more. With this new analysis, governments, advocates, corporations, and individuals are better equipped to catalyze the change needed to develop a truly nourishing, equitable, and sustainable food system in the United States.
The United States spends $1.1 trillion a year on food. But when the impacts of the food system on different parts of our society — including rising health care costs, climate change and biodiversity loss — are factored in, the bill is around three times that, according to a report by the Rockefeller Foundation, a private charity that funds medical and agricultural research.
As drought, heatwaves, and hurricanes ramp up for the summer, and the United Nations’ Food Systems Summit draws near, a group of scientists and policy experts hope to send a clear message about just how big a role food plays in warming the planet.
Emissions from food production, already considered one of the biggest contributors to climate change, have been underestimated for decades, potentially skewing the pledges that countries have made under the Paris climate agreement to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research.
The fact that there are serious issues with the food supply is no longer a secret. There is evidence that toxicity levels in the food supply are rising, and that conventional agriculture has become a leading cause of environmental pollution and destruction.
There are proven and profitable agricultural practices that have the power to draw excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
But, before agriculture can be a climate change solution, it has to deal with its own greenhouse gas pollution.
Synthetic fertilizers and factory farms must be phased out, while regenerative organic practices that sequester carbon are ramped up.
There’s certainly a lot of potential, especially on grasslands where ruminant animals can forage for the entirety of their lives instead of being fattened on synthetic-fertilizer-grown grains in greenhouse-gas-polluting factory farm feedlots.
We can get grazing animals off grain and phase out of factory farms by increasing on-farm and farmer-owned processing capacity, so that farmers can act independently of the meat and grain monopolies.
Brazil is pledging to play a critical role, going as far as promising to end illegal deforestation by 2030. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, wants the international community to pledge billions of dollars to pay for the conservation initiatives. but Brazil under the Bolsonaro administration has been busy doing the opposite of conservation.
The global, industrialized food system faces increasing scrutiny for its environmental impact, given its voracious appetite for land is linked to mass deforestation, water pollution and a sizable chunk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Tech billionaire Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, may seem a strange fit for the role of America’s top farmer. But he’s been quietly amassing massive tracts of U.S. land under the cover of investment firm Cascade Investment LLC, and now owns a minimum of 242,000 acres of U.S. farmland.
Sustainable, local, organic food grown on small farms has a tremendous amount to offer. Unlike chemical-intensive industrial-scale agriculture, it regenerates rural communities; it doesn’t pollute rivers and groundwater or create dead zones; it can save coral reefs; it doesn’t encroach on rainforests; it preserves soil and it can restore the climate (IAASTD, 2009). Why do all governments not promote it?
