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  • What's the worst thing we've ever done to the planet?

  • The answer is tough to hear

  • and many people recoil from it

  • because it conflicts with some of our most cherished beliefs.

  • Farming.

  • Farming is the greatest cause of habitat destruction,

  • the greatest cause of wildlife loss,

  • the world's greatest cause of extinction.

  • It's caused roughly 80 percent of the deforestation this century.

  • Only 29 percent of the weight of birds on Earth

  • consists of wild species.

  • And the rest are poultry.

  • Just four percent of mammals, by weight, are wild.

  • 36 percent is accounted for by humans,

  • and farmed animals make up the remaining 60 percent.

  • Yes, look, we all need food and we all need farming.

  • But that shouldn't blind us to the fact

  • that it's also among the world's foremost causes of climate breakdown,

  • of water pollution, of air pollution.

  • But, perhaps most importantly,

  • it's the foremost cause of land use.

  • Now I've come to see land

  • as perhaps the most important of all environmental questions.

  • Every acre of land that we use for our own purposes

  • is an acre that can't support wild ecosystems,

  • such as forests and wetlands and savannahs,

  • on which the great majority of the world's species depend.

  • It's our use of land which, above all,

  • is driving the sixth great extinction of species.

  • Now, there are some thrilling and world-changing solutions

  • to these great crises,

  • and I'll be coming to those in just a minute.

  • I mean, some of them are mind-blowing

  • and have the potential to solve several problems at the same time.

  • But in order to understand them and the need for them,

  • first, we need to understand the scope and direction

  • of the global food system.

  • We rail against urban sprawl, and rightly so.

  • But all our homes and businesses and infrastructure

  • occupy just one percent of the planet's land.

  • Agricultural sprawl is a far greater ecological threat.

  • Farming occupies 38 percent of the planet's land.

  • Most of the rest, incidentally, is protected areas,

  • forests, deserts, ice and mountains.

  • So we have this vast amount of land being occupied.

  • A lot of people complain about intensive farming

  • and the harm that it does to us and our world,

  • and this harm is real.

  • But so is the harm caused by extensive farming,

  • which means using more land to produce a given amount of food.

  • Now, I know some of you will find this a shocking statement,

  • but the most damaging of all farm products is pasture-fed meat,

  • and that's because of the agricultural sprawl it causes.

  • You remember that 38 percent of land used by farming?

  • Well, only 12 percent of the land is covered by crops.

  • The remaining 26 percent is used for pasture,

  • mostly for cattle, sheep and goats.

  • Our environmental crisis is not driven by intensive farming

  • or by extensive farming,

  • but by a disastrous combination of the two.

  • The problem is not the adjective --

  • it's the noun.

  • Farming itself is threatened

  • by the environmental harm that it's contributed to,

  • such as climate breakdown and soil depletion

  • and the exhaustion of water supplies.

  • But there could be an even greater threat to our food supplies.

  • It's possible to see the biggest threat that the global food system faces

  • as the global food system.

  • It's beginning to look a bit like the global financial system

  • in the approach to 2008.

  • Now for a long time, we thought we were beating hunger.

  • Between the 1960s and 2014, hunger was declining fairly steadily.

  • But then, in 2015, the trend began to turn,

  • and the number of chronically malnourished people began rising

  • and has continued to rise ever since.

  • Astoundingly, that rise began just as world food prices were falling.

  • So what's going on?

  • Well, the world food system, like global finance,

  • is a complex system,

  • and complex systems behave in counterintuitive ways.

  • They're resilient under certain conditions,

  • because there's weird self-organizing dynamics [to] stabilize them.

  • But if they're pushed by an extreme amount of stress,

  • then those same self-organizing dynamics

  • can start transmitting shocks across the network.

  • And beyond a certain point,

  • they can tip the whole network past its critical threshold,

  • whereupon the system collapses, suddenly and unstoppably.

  • Now over the past few years,

  • the crucial elements of systemic resilience

  • that we call redundancy, modularity, circuit breakers and backup systems

  • have been stripped out by corporate strategies.

  • On one estimate, just four companies now control

  • 90 percent of the global grain trade.

  • Only four crops, which are wheat, rice, corn and soy,

  • account for almost 60 percent of the calories that farmers produce.

  • And the production for export of those crops

  • has become highly concentrated in a handful of nations,

  • including Russia and Ukraine.

  • Nations have polarized into superexporters and superimporters,

  • and much of this trade passes through vulnerable choke points,

  • such as the Turkish Straits

  • and the Suez and Panama Canals.

  • Had the blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 --

  • by that giant container ship, you remember that --

  • had that coincided with the closure of the Turkish Straits in 2022

  • by the war in Ukraine,

  • then the food chain for hundreds of millions of people

  • might have snapped.

  • The reason why hunger is rising seems to be that,

  • as the food system has lost its resilience,

  • more and more contagious shocks are being transmitted across it.

  • Now, we in the rich nations,

  • we scarcely noticed the shocks being caused by speculative surges

  • and export bans and bottlenecking and other issues like that,

  • until 2020, when COVID began to make us more aware

  • of some of the issues we were facing.

  • But those shocks, for years, have been hitting the poorer nations

  • with weak currencies,

  • which stand at the end of the queue.

  • And what they saw is that local food prices can surge

  • even as global prices remain low.

  • Now, these problems are likely only to become worse

  • as the system becomes less stable

  • and is possibly approaching a critical threshold.

  • Governments prevented the banks from collapsing

  • by bailing them out with future money.

  • But you can't bail out the food system with future food.

  • So we face two enormous issues here.

  • One, the environmental harm caused by the food system,

  • and secondly, the possibility that the system itself could collapse.

  • Might there be a solution,

  • a solution to both these problems?

  • Can we find a way of feeding the world without devouring the planet?

  • Well, there are some fascinating new techniques for growing crops

  • being developed by farmers and scientists.

  • I'm especially interested in the potential of perennial grain crops,

  • which are being developed in particular by The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.

  • If we can grow grain on plants that stay in the soil from year to year,

  • we can greatly reduce the damage to the soil caused by plowing

  • and the amount of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers,

  • irrigation required to establish new crops.

  • Other farmers are finding really amazing ways

  • of boosting their yields without using either fertilizers or manure.

  • Crucial as all these developments are,

  • they can only be partial solutions to the issues we face.

  • Because perhaps our most urgent task

  • is replacing the protein-rich and fat-rich foods

  • that we currently obtain from animals

  • and from crops like soy and oil palm.

  • If the biggest problem that farming is causing

  • is the amount of land it uses,

  • then perhaps the biggest environmental solution

  • is shifting food production off the land and into the factory.

  • Now, I realize that's another shocking statement.

  • Many people hate the idea of food being produced in factories,

  • forgetting, somewhat, that almost all the food we eat

  • passes through a factory at some point in its production.

  • In fact, the great majority of the animals we eat are factory farmed.

  • Well, in Helsinki, Finland, I visited a company called Solar Foods,

  • which is using a technique called precision fermentation

  • to create a protein-rich flour

  • from a soil bacterium that eats hydrogen.

  • It requires no farm products at all.

  • I was the first person outside the lab to eat a pancake made from this flour.

  • A small flip for man.

  • (Laughter)

  • Amazingly, this pancake tasted just like a pancake.

  • Rich and mellow and filling.

  • But this isn't just about making pancakes.

  • These flours, which have a protein content of about 65 percent,

  • could form the basis of much better alternatives --

  • cheaper alternatives, healthier alternatives -- to the animal products