Factors including drought, soil erosion, salinity and climate change all contribute to food scarcity, but a report by the UK government’s Foresight thinktank (The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability) suggests another important cause may be insufficient agricultural research. In most countries, research into agriculture and fisheries remains a low priority and two decades of this lack of interest has caused a slow-down in productivity gains. The report emphasises the need for a significant increase in new agricultural research to support a radical change to the food system in order to meet the urgency of food scarcity. Investment in research is one of the report’s ‘key priorities’ and it suggests new models of research funding are needed in which public, private and third sector funders coordinate their efforts and incentives are provided for research into solutions to benefit low-income countries.

That was the question posed by an evening lecture at the Zoological Society of London on Tuesday, held as part of the ‘Communicating Science’ series. A panel of four speakers, including Prof. Charles Godfray, current President of the BES, considered whether, and how, ecologists and conservation scientists should assist industry in identifying areas of land ‘best’ to develop.

Prof. Godfray began by outlining the major challenge which ensuring food security will pose to global conservation. As chair of last year’s Foresight report on the Future of Food and Farming, Prof. Godfray was well-placed to reflect on the volatility likely to hit food prices as water scarcity and climate change become increasing concerns, and the impact that this might have on biodiversity. Prof. Godfray argued for ’sustainable intensification’, using existing and investing in new, knowledge in areas such as soil science and agronomy. Society must support a vigorous, efficient, globalised food supply, with greater access to markets for the poorest. In many senses, food security isn’t about a huge increase in food supply, but about minimising waste and ensuring the adequate distribution of produce. On the relationship between food and biodiversity, Prof. Godfray was clear that ‘if we fail on food, we fail on everything’; if global food prices rise to a great extent due to shortages, any gains in biodiversity will be wiped out by rampant land-grabbing to provide areas for food production.

Dr Christopher Stewart, Associate Director of Proforest, examined the benefits offered by certification schemes, allowing consumer choice and driving Corporate Socal Responsibility. The Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was highlighted in particular. He argued that palm oil actually represents an efficient, highly productive crop, with a large yield from a single plant; arguing for the replacement of palm oil with other, lower yielding plants requiring greater areas for production may not therefore make sense. Instead, conservationists and consumers, and Governments, should be working with RSPO to encourage producers to adopt sustainability standards and avoid deforesting the most biodiverse areas of Indonesia, Malaysia and, latterly, Africa and Amazonia, where palm oil cultivation is beginning.

Prof. Kathy Willis from Oxford University demonstrated how a very interesting tool, the Local Ecological Footprint Tool (LEFT) can be used to help developers and producers do just that; targetting where their developments can be placed to minimise ecological damage. At a resolution of 300m2 for vegetation cover, the tool draws on various readily available global datasets to create a composite picture of a particular site under consideration. For example, the FRAGSTATS programme allows the extent of habitat fragmentation in the target area to be examined, whilst GBIF has 2 million species records globally which can be interrogated. Comparison with ground-truth data in Honduras and Madagascar reveals that LEFT has a tendency to overestimate the number of threatened species in an area, never underestimate. Prof. Willis expressed real concern that the Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) run at the sites examined by LEFT hadn’t picked up the diversity of species and ecological damage which would have been caused were damage to go ahead, indicating that traditional EIA methods are insufficient at present to inform developers about precisely where will do least ecological harm.

And what to do if impacts are unavoidable? Kerry ten Kate, the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (BBOP) discussed the merits of ‘biodiversity offsetting’; measureable conservation outcomes resulting from measures to compensate for the loss of biodiversity once damage to biodiversity has been ameliorated as far as possible. The BBOP consortium, which includes ZSL and Defra, along with banks, is aiming to create an international standard for biodiversity offsets, which will be shortly be available for consultation. Kerry ten Kate argued that there is a clear business case for corporates to engage with offsetting, as to not compensate for their negative impacts on biodiversity will damage their reputation, their bottom line and ultimately their license to operate. Interestingly, Kerry ten Kate said that the loan conditions for project finance have recently changed, obliging ‘no net loss’ and a postive gain for biodiversity.These have been endorsed by banks which provide 90% of major project finance. However, the conservation and ecological science communities will be required to assist the banks in assessing whether these obligations have been met, as banks do not have the specialist expertise to do so.

All speakers agreed that conservationists and ecologists had a duty to engage with businesses at an early stage of project planning, acknowledging that this could sometimes be uncomfortable but that pragmatism was necessary. The ‘elephant in the room’, suggested Kerry ten Kate, was however whether governments would have the political will to reconcile the competing agendas of biodiversity conservation, development and food security. Without this, a degree of market regulation, and without strategic approaches to land-use planning, the choice over what we can ‘afford’ to destroy will no longer be open to us.

The 2008 Climate Change Act commits the UK to 80% statutory greenhouse gases emissions (GHG) reduction by 2050. The agricultural industry is responsible for approximately 25%, 50%, and 80% of global anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) respectively. In the UK farming and land use are accountable for 7.4% of total UK emissions and therefore represent a good opportunity to make progress toward GHG reduction targets.

Reducing GHG emissions within the agricultural sector however faces significant obstacles driven by the growth of the human population. As human population numbers rise, more people need feeding, and as the wealth of nations increase so does the demand for meat with the ‘westernisation’ of diets putting pressure on the agricultural industry to produce more food. Furthermore, the dwindling availability of land suitable for farming limits expansion of the industry. As a result, agriculture must as increase productivity by 70-100% by 2050 in order to avoid future food security crisis.

The combination of increasing food production on limited land while reducing GHG emissions consequently presents a unique scientific challenge. To address this, a meeting attended by the BES was held at the Royal Society in London this week to discuss the options for ‘Reducing green house gas emissions from agriculture’.

Expert speakers gave presentations on how to create ‘climate smart agriculture’ and discussed potential solutions and opportunities including:

• Improving land management through intensification of agricultural practices to avoid further carbon dioxide release from expansion into remaining suitable land such as tropical forests.
• Improving soil management to conserve stocks of nitrogen and enhance carbon capture/sequestration.
• Reducing unnecessary over use of nitrogen fertilizers responsible for carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions.
• Replacing fossil fuel use with bioenergy feedstocks.
• Exploring genetic modification of rice cultivars and cattle to reduce methane production.
• Altering rice cultivation management practice and cattle diet to reduce methane production.
• Improving manure management to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions.
• Decreasing food wastage and changing western dietary behaviours by encouraging people to decrease meat consumption to reduce demand.

The meeting highlighted that reducing emissions across the agricultural industry provides a significant opportunity to help achieve the UK emissions reduction targets. Speakers additionally drew attention to the fact that the agricultural industry has until present, not been a central part of climate change talks, and suggested that the future inclusion of agriculture as a central part of the climate change agenda would be beneficial. Speakers further noted that subsequent policy should consider all demands on land, provide incentives for implementation of more environmentally friendly practice across farming, and include raising awareness to encourage decreased meat consumption in western society.

Today scientists warned that rising pressures on global resources threaten the future security of the planets food, after the results of the most comprehensive investigation into food security ever were published this morning.

Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir John Beddington emphasised the need for urgent action in response to increasing demands for food today, as the current system is failing. By 2050 the human population is predicted to reach 9 billion individuals, which when combined with climate change and the decreasing availability of land, will seriously increase the pressure on food production.

Over the next 20 years government officials need to work alongside the agricultural industry to increase the efficiency of food production and deliver approximately 40% more food, and 30% more fresh water to meet demands, and ensure future food security.

Governments now face the huge challenge of increasing production efficiency, and reducing pressures such as climate change in order to protect food security for the next generation. Failing to do so however, will mean that many more people are likely to go hungry in the future.

Can GM technology cure the world’s growing pains? On Thursday, 21 January, the BES attended an evening meeting at the British Library at which members of the public, academics, industry representatives and food producers gathered together to discuss this question, considering the contribution which GM crops might make to securing the world’s food supplies. The ‘cafe scientifique’ style event, the latest in the ‘Talk Science’ series organised by the Library’s science, technology and medicine division, was led by Prof. Rosie Hails, CEH and Chair of the Natural Capital Initiative.

Prof. Hails’ main point, in an opening talk which focused on the relationship between agriculture and the environment, was that assessments of the costs and benefits of GM crops have focused too rigidly on biodiversity as an indicator of environmental impact, at the expense of considering other parameters. In assessing these crops, a more holistic viewpoint should be adopted, with consideration of a whole suite of ecosystem services.

Prof. Hails outlined the results of farmscale evaluations, set up in the UK to assess the impact of GM crops on biodiversity. The trials had shown that growing herbicide resistant GM crops did have an impact on biodiversity, as competing weeds were removed. However, if other ecosystem services are taken into consideration, on balance it might be worth adopting these crops and mitigating the impacts on biodiversity in some way – through the introduction of diverse field margins for example. Herbicide resistant crops might be more compatible with low tillage systems and the consequent benefits of these systems for soil structure, nutrient, water and carbon retention may mean that these crops have an overall environmental benefit compared to standard methods of growing crops. Greater data is needed on the environmental impact of GM crops, taking this more holistic view.

Prof. Hails made another important point, not often raised in debates around GM: that GM crops are introduced into variable economic and social conditions. For example, evidence supports the conclusion that those who grow Bt cotton in China (engineered to express a protein toxic to the cotton borer) spray less insecticide. However, it is also possible that because Bt cotton seed is more expensive than non-GM seed, some farmers may adopt a highly protective attitude to their crop and spray it regardless. Prof. Hails stated that ACRE (Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment) has developed a matrix which assesses a suite of costs and benefits, including social factors, in more detail.

During the course of the ‘Question Time’ style discussion which followed Prof. Hails’ presentation a number of points were put to an audience member representing Monsanto. It was clear that protectionism and monopoly of GM technology by a few large agrochemical companies was a point of contention and source of unease for many. The point was made that EU regulations, currently very strict, should be relaxed to allow small and medium sized businesses to capitalise on GM technology and develop competing products.

Speaking at the Oxford Farming Conference yesterday the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor John Beddington, made clear the Government’s view that using the latest advances in science, such as GM and nanotechnology, is vital to make sure that the world can produce enough to feed a growing population by 2030. The world will need to produce 50% more food in the next twenty years. Prof. Beddington said that more crops will need to be produced on less land, and that GM offers a way to achieve this.

Speaking to farmers at the conference Prof. Beddington said “we need a greener revolution, improving production and efficiency through the food chain within environmental and other constraints”. He stated that action to improve crop yields is necessary now, due to time lags in developing and implementing new technologies, and that GM is critical in meeting economic, environmental and social goals.

Prof. Beddington’s speech attracted criticism from some, including in the Guardian’s editorial yesterday. The Guardian calls for Ministers to themselves be more explicit about the Government’s belief that GM is vital to ensure food security, communicating this directly to the public rather than relying on the Government CSA to make such speeches. The newspaper also questioned whether the evidence base really does support GM technology as ‘vital’ to food security, as outlined by Prof. Beddington, alluding to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAAST), led by Professor Bob Watson, Defra’s Chief Scientist. The report found that GM technology was unlikely to have more than a limited role in tackling hunger and that global hunger is as much to do with power and control over food supply as with growing enough to eat.

See more: Daily Telegraph, 7 January 2010

As part of its 350th anniversary celebrations, the Royal Society has invited leading scientists to contribute to a special issue of their journal Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B: Environment and Evolution with their personal analysis of areas of high current relevance and interest. The wide ranging topics include gene function and neural processing, stem cell research, social cognition and ageing.

In line with the growing concern over environmental sustainability and food security (see Defra’s Food 2030 report published yesterday), almost a third of the articles deal with this theme, analysing the current challenges from ecological, social and economic perspectives. In his article, the Government Chief Scientific Advisor Professor John Beddington analyses the factors threatening our capacity to feed the future world population, and echoes the Royal Society ‘Reaping the Benefits’ report published at the end of last year in calling for increased scientific input to tackle these problems. Lord Robert May focuses on the increasing pressure humanity is placing on the natural environment, measured in terms of its ‘ecological footprint’, and its effect on biodiversity, while the Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta highlights the need for increased recognition of the role of intact ecosystems in providing vital ‘natural capital’ if these areas are to be given the protection they deserve.

The full articles are available free to download from the Royal Society’s website.

The Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn MP, and Shadow Environment Secretary, Nick Herbert MP, will both address the Oxford Farming Conference today, setting out their respective parties’ policies with regard to food and farming.

Nick Herbert is due to announce that a Conservative government would establish a supermarket ombudsman to protect the interests of farmers against any abuse of power by large food retailers. The ombudsman would be created as a unit inside the Office of Fair traiding and would be funded by a levy on big supermarkets. Nick Herbert will say that the ombudsman will “curb abuses of power which undermine our farmers and act against the long-term interests of consumers… failure to do so could result in reduced investment by suppliers, lower product quality and less product choice, with potentially higher prices in the long run.”

Hilary Benn will launch the government’s ‘Food 2030′ report, setting out the government’s food strategy for the next 20 years. Mr Benn will use his speech to the conference to call for Britain to grown more food in different ways, to reduce the environmental impact of food production and farming and to provide food for the world’s growing population. Mr Benn will say that society “know(s) that the consequences of the way we produce and consume food are unsustainable to our planet and to ourselves” and that a consumer revolution can bring about change. “People power can bring about a revolution in the way food is produced and sold…(farming will) follow consumer demand for food that is local, healthy and has been produced with a smaller environmental footprint.”

In his foreword to the report, Prime Minister Gordon Brown says that Britain “need(s) to produce more food without damaging the natural resources – air, soil, water and marine resources, biodiversity and climate – that we all depend on.” Plans within the report include making it easier for people to lease land to grow their own fruit and vegetables, reducing long waiting lists for city allotments, and a ‘land bank’ to ensure that plots of land do not go empty.

Original sources: BBC News: Parties to unveil plans for supermarkets and food, Guardian: Britain must grow more sustainable food, says Benn and Guardian: Conservatives to create supermarket ombudsman to protect farmers

Following the Parliamentary and Technology Committee’s meeting this week, focusing on GM technology in crop production, I took the time to read the Royal Society’s recent report; “Reaping the benefits: science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture“, which was heavily cited at the evening event. The report provides an extremely interesting overview of a very complex topic, characterised by Prof. John Beddington as the ‘perfect storm’; how to feed more people, on less land, using less water and energy, in the context of climate change and in a way which doesn’t damage the evironment? The Royal Society steering group conclude that ’sustainable intensification’ is needed to achieve the 50 – 100% increase in crop production needed to feed a population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050.

The report touches upon the gains made during the ‘green revolution’ of the 1960’s, with huge growth in food production in Asia (280%); particularly China, which saw agricultural productivity increase fivefold. A 70% increase in growth was achieved in Europe. The benefits of the revolution were not evenly distributed however; Africa saw a 140% increase, yet food production then fell from the 1970s, only re-gaining 1960 levels in 2005. There have been calls for a ‘greener revolution’, building on the original gains made in the latter half of the 20th century, but investment in research into agriculture has declined in recent years, due to complacency over food prices and availability, the Society concludes.

In expanding food production into the future, the global community faces an important choice: expand the area of agricultural land to increase gross production, or increase yields on existing land. The report concludes that expanding the land area available for agriculture is untenable: to keep pace with current per capita consumption would require a doubling of land used for crops, which would result in undesirable environmental and social consequences and increased greenhouse gases through ploughing. Instead, the report concludes that sustainable intensification on existing sites, coupled with habitat restoration, should be the way forward.

Any system is unsustainable, the report suggests, if it depeneds on non-renewable inputs; it cannot consistently and predictably deliver desired outputs; and it can only deliver these outputs by requiring the cultivation of more land and/ or causes adverse and irreversible environmental impacts which threaten ecological functions. To ensure sustainable intensification, the report concludes, greater investment is needed in crop genetics (both advanced biotechnology, such as GM, and conventional plant breeding) and in crop management practices (such as integrated pest management and planting seed mixtures). Both public and private investment is needed to advance research in these areas: public, to fund those areas which will not yield long-term returns for private companies, such as crop management techniques (likely to have no particular product or intellectual property for commercialisation associated with them); private to transfer the benefits from publicly funded research to markets.

In examining GM particularly, the working group concludes that there is no reason to expect any adverse impacts on health through the consumption of crops including transgenes, and that this technology, although not offering a panacea, can make an important contribution to increasing yields. Over the long term, advances which could be seen include the modification of crops’ metabolism to more efficient convert solar energy to carbohydrate or for the fixation of nitrogen. There could be a shift from annual to perennial crops – there are no perennial crops at present – enhancing carbon storage and reducing greenhouse gases from annual tillage of the soil. The asexual reproduction of seed by high-yielding varieties could be engineered, avoiding costly and lengthy procedures – least accessible to those in developing countries – to produce high yielding varieties breeding cycle after breeding cycle.

The report is wide-ranging in its scope and there is certainly far too much to cover here. One recommendation which the BES could consider taking forward is in relation to the training and development of crop scientists. The working group suggests that attention should be paid to enhancing the plant science component of biology A’levels, as a way to encourage young people to study subjects allied to farming and agriculture at university. The working group also conclude however that, alongside the trend for many universities to close down or reduce their teaching in agriculture and crop science, take up of those courses which do exist is low. For the UK to take a leading role in research contributing to global food security, as the report calls for, there is a need, clearly amongst a disparate range of other measures, for universities to re-examine their courses to make them more attractive to potential research scientists of the future.

The BES Policy Team last night attended a meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee exploring GM technology. Entitled, ‘Come back GM, all is forgiven?’, the Chair, Ian Taylor MP, made it clear that the question mark was there for a reason; by the end of the event it was clear that further meetings of the Committee are needed to allow members to explore these issues in greater depth. Opinions from the floor were aligned along two polar opposites and there was not the time available to allow sufficient debate to begin to bring these two sides together.

Presentations from Professor Peter Shewry and Professor Howard Atkinson introduced the topic to those present and set the scene for later discussion. Professor Shewry showed a slide illustrating the global scale of growth of GM crops; these are now cultivated in 25 countries worldwide, across 70 million acres of land and have now been grown for 14 years. In this time, Professor Shewry said, no ill effects to health or the environment have been recorded. In outlining the case for growing GM crops Prof. Shewry said that society needs them for three reasons: to improve the quality of crops (i.e. to reduce diet-related disease); to increase sustainability (through less intensive inputs), and to increase productivity (contributing to food security).

Prof. Shewry’s research is concerned with the health benefits of GM crops, particularly wheat. By modifying wheat crops to express genes for the production of fish oils (long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids), the human dietary intake of fish oils can be increased without recourse to intensification of fish farming. In giving reasons why GM had not been adopted in the UK, at the end of his talk, Prof. Shewry suggested that prejudice, misinformation and elitism in Western nations was responsible, with it reducing opportunities from those in developing countries, with limited access to food, to benefit from this technology.

This was a theme returned to in discussion with Chris Kirk, Chief Executive of the Biochemical Society firmly making the point that those in the West get extremely incensed about the use of GM technology to produce food, yet are content to use pharmaceutical products maunfactured in a similar way. Again, he reiterated the point that concerns in affluent countries are damaging the prospects of less developed countries to benefit from this technology.

Concerns were raised by some present about the potential health impacts of GM crops – one example given was that the effects of exposure to asbestos are felt only 25 years later, so 14 years may be too short a timescale of testing to declare GM foods ’safe’- and the problem of secondary pest emergence in GM cotton (Bt cotton), leading to increased pesticide spraying once more. One audience member raised the important point that many people are genuinely concerned about GM technology and that these concerns cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. He and others called for greater engagement from the scientific community in the debate, communicating with the public and providing syntheses of the scientific evidence for policy-makers.

Jim Paice, MP for South West Cambridgeshire made the point that it was very hard for politicians to find their way through the morass of ’sweeping statements’ made by NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace; without engagement from the scientific community, such negative, and poorly evidenced, statements would dominate debate. Chris Kirk urged policy-makers and Committee members to read the Royal Society’s recent report: “Reaping the Benefits: science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture” as an authoritative digest of current scientific evidence regardiing GM technology.

Finally, Lord Rooker mentioned the ‘GM Dialogue‘ which the Food Standards Agency has been asked to lead on behalf of the Government. This public engagement project is expected to last for around 12 months and steering group members have recently been announced. With this, a potential further Parliamentary and Scientific Committee meeting on this topic and a Talk Science event at the British Library in January, it seems that GM food may once more be rising up the agenda.