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The past decade has seen little progress in improving diets, especially in low-income countries. Diets everywhere continue to lack enough fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and whole grains, and include too much – and, in some regions, rising amounts – of red and processed meat and sugary drinks.
Nov 4, 2016 · Human history is littered with fads over what we do – and don’t – eat. What will the future hold?
- A Five-Course Menu of Solutions For A Sustainable Food Future
- First Course: Reduce Growth in Demand For Food and Other Agricultural Products
- Course 2: Increase Food Production Without Expanding Agricultural Land
- Course 4: Increase Fish Supply
- Course 5: Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Agricultural Production
- Moving Toward A Sustainable Food Future
There is no silver bullet to close the food, land and GHG mitigation gaps. WRI researchon how to create a sustainable food future has identified 22 solutions that need to be simultaneously applied to close these gaps. The relative importance of each solution varies from country to country. The solutions are organized into a five-course menu: (1) re...
1. Reduce food loss and waste.
Approximately one-quarter of food produced for human consumption goes uneaten. Loss and waste occurs all along the food chain, from field to fork. Reducing food loss and waste by 25 percent by 2050 would close the food gap by 12 percent, the land gap by 27 percent and the GHG mitigation gap by 15 percent. Actions to take include measuring food waste, setting reduction targets, improving food storage in developing countries and streamlining expiration labels.
2. Shift to healthier, more sustainable diets.
Consumption of ruminant meat (beef, lamb and goat) is projected to rise 88 percent between 2010 and 2050. Beef, the most commonly consumed ruminant meat, is resource-intensive to produce, requiring 20 times more land and emitting 20 times more GHGs per gram of edible protein than common plant proteins, such as beans, peas and lentils. Limiting ruminant meat consumption to 52 calories per person per day by 2050—about 1.5 hamburgers per week—would reduce the GHG mitigation gap by half and nearl...
3. Avoid competition from bioenergy for food crops and land.
If bioenergy competes with food production by using food or energy crops or dedicated land, it widens the food, land and GHG mitigation gaps. Biomass is also an inefficient energy source: Using all the harvested biomass on Earth in the year 2000—including crops, crop residues, grass eaten by livestock and wood—would only provide about 20 percent of global energy needs in 2050. Phasing out existing biofuel production on agricultural lands would reduce the food gap from 56 to 49 percent. Action...
5. Increase livestock and pasture productivity.
Livestock production per hectare varies significantly from country to country and is lowest in the tropics. Given that demand for animal-based foods is projected to grow by 70 percent by 2050 and that pastureland accounts for two thirds of agricultural land use, boosting pasture productivity is an important solution. A 25 percent faster increase in the output of meat and milk per hectare of pasture between 2010 and 2050 could close the land gap by 20 percent and the GHG mitigation gap by 11 p...
6. Improve crop breeding.
Future yield growth is essential to keep up with demand. Conventional breeding, the selection of best-performing crops based on genetic traits, accounted for around half of historical crop yield gains. New advances in molecular biology offer great promise for additional yield gains by making it cheaper and faster to map genetic codes of plants, test for desired DNA traits, purify crop strains, and turn genes on and off. Actions to take include significantly increasing public and private crop-...
7. Improve soil and water management.
Degraded soils, especially in Africa’s drylands, may affect one quarter of the world’s cropland. Farmers can boost crop yields in degraded soils—particularly drylands and areas with low carbon—by improving soil and water management practices. For example, agroforestry, or incorporating trees on farms and pastures, can help regenerate degraded land and boost yields. Trial sites in Zambia integrating Faidherbia albidatrees yielded 88–190 percent more maize than sites without trees. A 20 percent...
14. Improve wild fisheries management.
One third of marine stocks were overfished in 2015, with another 60 percent fished at maximum sustainable levels. Catches need to be reduced today to allow wild fisheries to recover enough just to maintain the 2010 fish-catch level in 2050. This would avoid the need to convert 5 million hectares of land to supply the equivalent amount of fish from aquaculture. Actions to take include implementing catch shares and community-based management systems, and removing perverse subsidies that support...
15. Improve productivity and environmental performance of aquaculture.
As wild fish catches decline, aquaculture production needs to more than double to meet a projected 58 percent increase in fish consumption between 2010 and 2050. This doubling requires improving aquaculture productivity and addressing fish farms’ current environmental challenges, including conversion of wetlands, use of wild-caught fish in feeds, high freshwater demand and water pollution. Actions to take include selective breeding to improve growth rates of fish, improving feeds and disease...
GHG emissions from agricultural production arise from livestock farming, application of nitrogen fertilizers, rice cultivation and energy use. They’re projected to rise from 7 to 9 gigatons per year or more by 2050 (in addition to 6 gigatons per year or more from land-use change, not shown in the chart below). This course addresses each of these ma...
The challenge of feeding 10 billion people sustainably by 2050 is much harder than people realize. These menu items are not optional—the world must implement all 22 of them to close the food, land and GHG mitigation gaps. The good news is that all five coursescanclose the gaps, while delivering co-benefits for farmers, society and human health. It ...
- Janet Ranganathan, Richard Waite, Tim Searchinger, Craig Hanson
- 2018
- Choose more sustainable ingredients. There’s no ingredient that is universally sustainable or unsustainable—it all depends on how and where it is farmed or fished.
- Eat balanced and better. One way to improve your environmental impact is to balance the amount of fruit and vegetables with the amount of meat, fish, eggs and dairy you eat.
- Diversify your diet. Your mother may have said there can be too much of a good thing. This is true for what we eat for our health and the planet! Our bodies need a variety of nutrients, and the planet benefits from crop diversity.
- Eat minimally processed, nutritious foods. The more processed a food is, generally the greater its environmental impact will be because more energy is used during its creation.
Nov 23, 2020 · Eat nutritious plant-rich diets. Currently, the average meat intake for someone living in a high-income country is 200-250g a day – far higher than the 80-90g recommended by the United Nations, and ten-fold that of lower-income countries. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, is a leading cause of tropical forest clearing ...
Dec 1, 2021 · As the world’s population continues to rise and more people start to eat like Westerners do, the production of meat, dairy and eggs will need to rise by about 44% by 2050, according to the UN...
People also ask
Is it possible to feed 10 billion people healthily?
Are we getting a good picture of diets around the world?
Can a healthy diet make the planet inhospitable to humans?
What if the world ate a more plant-based diet?
In this chapter, we highlight the importance of diet as cause and solution of the global burden of malnutrition. To do so, we explore new and emerging data on the state of diets around the world.
