Reaping What We Sow

• Author: Nicoletta Batini
• Position: NICOLETTA BATINI is a senior economist in the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office.
• Pages: 30-33

30 FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT | December 2019

At last year’s World Economic Forum in

Davos, Switzerland, delegates spoke of a

“Great Energy Transformation” needed

to ensure a clean and secu re energy

future. No less urgent for the futu re of the planet is

what we might call a “Great Food Transformation.”

While the clim ate implications of burning fossil

fuels have received a great dea l of attention, recent

research by the UN ’s Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (I PCC) shows that what we eat,

how we produce it, and how it gets to us exerts

an even greater impact on the globa l environment

and public health. Greening food production and

managing food dem and are crucial for meeting the

UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

and the environmental pledge behind t he UN’s

Paris Agreement.

Hidden costs of food systems

For centuries, agricultu re was dominated by

family-owned farms raising diversied crops

and livestock. Today, in most Group of Twenty

advanced and emerging ma rket economies, crop

and animal a griculture has become heavily

industrializ ed and reliant on synthetic chemical

applications, genetic modication, and defor-

estation to produce growing amounts of meat,

dairy, and eggs, a s well as ber, timber, and bio-

fuels. At sea, hig h-tech techniques like sonar and

equipment like supertrawlers with mecha nized

nets make it possible to exploit deeper waters at

farther-ung locations and capture sh faster

than they ca n reproduce.

In low-income countries, poor farming and sh ing

practices, over-reliance on non-food crops, and cli-

matic extremes have put communities a nd biodiversity

at great risk. Land clearing leads to the dest ruction

of native forests, soil erosion, and poor har vests.

Local sh stocks are regula rly ransacked by global

commercial shing ves sels. Low sectoral productivity,

because of both rising temperatures and abnormal

weather events, constrain s both income and food

security, pushing many far mers and shers toward

poaching or charcoa l production to make ends meet.

As a result of all t hese transformations, the

agri-food sector now creates a quarter of huma n-

produced greenhouse ga s emissions— a share

expected to increase to a ha lf of all such emissions

by 2050—while another 8 percent of emissions

results from non-food agriculture a nd deforesta-

tion, according to the IPCC’s 2019 Special Report

on Climate Change and L and and the EAT-Lancet

Commission. (Chart 1). Cows and sheep, a major

source of meat and dair y, have an outsized impact

because they relea se methane, one of the most

potent greenhouse gases. Livestock account for

around 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases

each year, according to esti mates by the UN’s Food

and Agriculture Org anization. at roughly equals

the emissions from all the world’s cars, t rucks,

airplanes, and sh ips or, in country terms, from

China. Fires set in the A mazon rainforests and

Smart changes to how we farm and eat can have a huge impact on our planet

Nicoletta Batini

Reaping What We Sow

Sunrise over a cabbage f‌ield

near Chiang Mai, Thailand.