Former and current FAO officials and academics have criticised the document, seen by Climate Home News, for pro-industry bias, cherry-picking data and even “disinformation” about the environmental impacts of animal farming. 

The FAO told Climate Home that a final version of the report – part of an assessment consisting of various documents – would be launched in 2025 and that conclusions should not be drawn from the draft text at this stage. 

Estimates of livestock’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions vary, ranging from 12%-20% of the global total – mostly in the form of methane from ruminants like cows and sheep, and carbon dioxide (CO2) released when forests are cut down for pasture.  

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Methane, which is emitted in cow burps and manure, is a short-lived greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years, making it one of the few available levers to prevent climate tipping points being reached in the near term.   

In a 2024 survey of more than 200 scientists and sustainable agriculture experts, about 78% said livestock numbers should peak globally by 2025 to start bringing down emissions and help keep global warming to internationally agreed limits.   

But the FAO’s draft study offers strong support for growth of the sector, saying livestock’s contributions to food security, nutrition and raw materials for industry make it a “linchpin for human well-being and economic development”.  

It is also described as “critical” for food security, “crucial” for global economies, and “indispensable” for development in sub-Saharan Africa.  

World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions

The report will be submitted to the FAO’s agriculture committee, which has 130 member nations, although the text could change as national representatives thrash out a final version. 

Private-sector lobbyists participating as advisors in national delegations are sometimes also able to influence texts under discussion, according to a July report by the Changing Markets Foundation. 

One FAO insider, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home the draft FAO report had been “biased towards pushing livestock [with] many national interests behind it”.   

The FAO receives around a third of its budget in direct donations from member countries, and the rest in voluntary contributions from the same states and other actors, including businesses and trade associations.   

Tech fixes  

The 491-page draft report, which was overseen by a scientific advisory committee of 23 experts and peer reviewers, does not assess how diets with more plant protein could improve food security.   

One advisory committee member, Professor Frederic Leroy of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, told Climate Home a shift to entirely plant-based diets “would severely compromise the potential for food security worldwide because many of the food nutrients which are already limited in global diets are found in livestock. How much you can move (away from livestock) should be the real investigation.” 

This table from a World Bank report (Recipe for a Livable Planet), published in May 2024, shows that vegan diets are the lowest in emissions (Screenshot/World Bank)

The report’s analysis assumes rising meat production as demand surges among a growing world population with higher incomes. In this context, it proposes “expanding the (livestock) herd size”, increasing production through intensified systems, better use of genetic techniques, and improved land management.   

“Technological innovations” such as feed additives and supplements to suppress methane are another idea backed by the FAO. Those could include experimental methods such as a vaccine announced last week and funded by a $9-million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to reduce the number and activity of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach.    

Herdsman Musa takes cattle to graze along the Dodowa-Somenya road in Ghana, April 12, 2024. According to environmentalist Kwame Ansah, ‘The unchecked grazing is not only destroying crops but also eroding soil fertility exacerbating land degradation.’ (Photo: Matrix Images/Christian Thompson/via Reuters)

The report’s findings, once approved, will be fed into a three-part roadmap for bringing agricultural emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.  

The first instalment, published at the COP28 climate summit, was viewed internally by some FAO experts as a generic placeholder which largely followed an industry-friendly agenda.    

One ex-FAO official, who requested anonymity, told Climate Home the latest draft report on livestock ploughs a similar furrow and would set expectations for part two of the 1.5C roadmap.   

“The reality is that if they do a (nearly) 500-page report and put 23 experts’ names in front of it, it’s to impress you and say: ‘This is what is going to happen. We’re going to defend the sector’,” the former UN official said.  

Making the case for meat 

The expert added that the study’s panel was skewed toward intensified livestock systems and had “cherry picked” evidence to justify recommendations pointing in that direction.  

Several of the report’s advisory committee members have previously advocated for meat-based diets, and 11 of the study’s contributors work for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), including one of the paper’s committee advisors.

According to the ex-FAO official, ILRI “has been pushing intensified livestock all its life. It’s their identity. It’s what they do.”

The institute co-founded an agribusiness-backed initiative – Pathways to Dairy Net Zero (P2DNZ) – which de-emphasised livestock emissions, framing them as just one of several problems for the industry to tackle.

ILRI did not respond to a request for comment.

IPCC’s input into key UN climate review at risk as countries clash over timeline

Shelby C. McClelland, of New York University’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, told Climate Home she was shocked by a repeated claim in the draft FAO report of “a lack of consensus among scientists regarding the contribution of livestock to global greenhouse gas emissions”.  

“This downplays and outright ignores overwhelming scientific evidence from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], high-profile papers, and other recent studies,” McClelland said. “A statement like this in a supposedly scientific and evidenced-based review by the UN FAO is alarming given their influence on agenda-setting for global climate action.”

Advisory committee member Leroy countered that it was “dangerous” to talk about a scientific consensus when the metrics used to measure methane compared to other greenhouse gases are constantly evolving.  

“This should be part of an open and transparent debate,” he added. “I don’t think we have reached consensus on the way we interpret the effects of livestock agriculture on climate change, the degree of it, how we can measure it and how we can deal with it.” 

Scientists at the FAO first alerted the world to the meat industry’s climate footprint when they attributed 18% of global emissions to livestock farming in the seminal 2006 study, Livestock’s Long Shadow. This analysis found that, far from enhancing food security, “livestock actually detract more from total food supply than they provide.”  

However, the paper sparked a backlash felt by key experts in the agency’s Rome headquarters, as the FAO hierarchy, industry lobbyists and state donors to its biannual $1-billion budget exerted pressure for a change of direction.      

By the time of last December’s COP28, the FAO’s stance had shifted so far that two experts cited in another livestock emissions study called publicly for its retraction. They argued it had distorted their work and underestimated the emissions reduction potential from farming less livestock by a factor of between 6 and 40. 

A deforested and burnt area is seen in an indigenous area used as cattle pasture in Areoes, Mato Grosso state, Brazil, September 4, 2019. (Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Landau)

No ‘carte blanche’ 

Guy Pe’er, a conservation ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, accused the FAO of turning a blind eye to widespread “hyper-intensive grazing practices” and land use change caused by the world’s growing number of mega-farms.

“We’re currently using more land to feed livestock than humans, and that is causing rapid deforestation in Brazil. Ignoring that is outrageous. When an official organisation is producing disinformation like this, I find it extremely irresponsible,” he said.  

Leroy told Climate Home that different types of livestock farming should not be conflated. “If you have over-grazing and the pollution of water sources, that’s clearly wrong, but other types of animal agriculture are also net-positive [for the environment],” he said.  

If the advisory committee “sees advantages in having livestock agriculture as part of the food system, I think there’s a sound scientific basis to assume that,” he added. “It doesn’t mean that it’s carte blanche or ‘anything goes’ at all.” 

(Reporting by Arthur Neslen; editing by Megan Rowling and Joe Lo)

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And while Beijing strengthens its influence at the top of international institutions, president Xi Jinping’s promise to green China’s belt and road initiative (BRI) – its ambitious campaign of foreign investments – is being tested.

Will China walk the talk, or is Beijing’s increased participation in global forums an attempt to neutralise its critics?

Reflecting its growing economic clout, China has become the second largest UN donor after the US and the largest contributor of troops for peacekeeping operations among permanent members of the Security Council. In recent years, it has played an ever bigger role in environmental and development agencies.

The inauguration last week of Qu Dongyu as the first Chinese director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – the UN’s largest technical agency – is the latest example of that. The outgoing Chinese vice-minister of agriculture and rural affairs, who worked on the BRI’s agriculture policy, Qu was elected in a secret ballot for a four-year mandate, with the possibility of running for a second term.

This could see him oversee the organisation in the critical period to 2030 – the deadline to achieve the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).

China: Multiple coal deals emerge from ‘green’ investment summit

The FAO also has an important role to play in climate action. The publication of a major UN scientific report this week is expected to highlight tensions between growing food and preserving land and forests as carbon sinks.

“I’m very grateful to my motherland. Without 40 years of successful reform and open-door policy I would not have been who I am,” Qu told the FAO in his acceptance speech.

Elsewhere, the city of Fuzhou on the country’s eastern coast is to host next year’s session of Unesco’s World Heritage Committee meeting.

And the southern city of Kunming will be the stage for the 2020 UN biodiversity talks – a meeting which is expected to deliver a global framework for plant and wildlife protection beyond next year.

“China actually competed down to the wire to host [the biodiversity meeting] in 2020,” said Li Shuo, climate and energy policy officer at Greenpeace China.

This aligns with Beijing’s broader diplomatic move away from the “hide your power, bide your time” approach, which has long dictated China’s foreign policy, Li told CHN.

Analysis: Nine solutions to the food-forests-fuel trilemma

The Kunming summit is anticipated to be one of the most important events in China next year, said Jinfeng Zhou, secretary-general of the Beijing-based China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation.

In an email to CHN, Zhou said the “era of ecological civilization” – one of president Xi’s signature slogans – was “an imperative for humanity” and one of the reasons for China’s willingness to host the meeting.

The term appeared in an article penned by President Xi in a state-owned magazine earlier this year, in which he set out his vision for China to “deeply participate in global environmental governance, enhance China’s voice and influence in the global environmental governance system, [and] actively guide the direction of international order change.”

China is pushing for this concept of “ecological civilization” to be adopted at the international level, Sam Geall, executive director of China Dialogue and an associate fellow at Chatham House, told CHN.

“Putting [its] mark on the international system is a goal in itself and goes with the idea of Chinese rejuvenation,” he added. “China wants a commensurate voice to go alongside its economic power but it has a long way to go in that respect.”

China scrubs its coal projects from ‘world heritage in danger’ decision

Beijing’s increasing clout in UN spaces largely seeks to legitimise its BRI, an umbrella phrase for its diplomatic, trade and investments push abroad.

It includes carbon-intensive infrastructure projects, such as coal-fired power plants, which are coming under increasing scrutiny for their environmental impact.

On the whole, it is “not very green”, said Scott Morris, senior fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development. “Chinese officials have not yet confronted that reality.”

The UN provides an important forum for China to discuss what the greening of the BRI means, said Alvin Lin, climate and energy policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s China Programme.

The BRI has been “one the key areas of focus for that cooperation between China and the UN”, he said, ensuring the initiative is in line with both the Paris Agreement on climate change and the SDGs.

That “is a positive thing,” he added, “because more attention is being paid to this issue”.

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Beijing is “particularly keen to get positive references to the BRI into UN resolutions and meetings”, said Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group and an expert on UN governance. So far, its efforts have been countered by the US and India, he added.

But the UN machine has thrown its support behind China’s development strategy.

In 2016, the UN Development Programme signed an agreement with China for the BRI to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs. Last year, China signed a strategic cooperation agreement with UN Environment to strengthen South-South cooperation and build the capacities of developing countries to address environmental issues.

This collaboration “makes it seems as though the BRI is about multilateralism and only about development”, said Jonathan Hillman, director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ Reconnecting Asia Project. In his view, it is more about lucrative bilateral deals.

“This is part of the political campaign to define the BRI on China’s own terms.”

How China’s influence and leadership in the UN arena will play out remains to be seen. Gowan warned that UN senior Chinese appointees must “demonstrate they are impartial international civil servants, and not primarily loyal to Beijing as many diplomats suspect”.

For Hillman, Chinese officials “are saying all the right things” about green development, but “the jury is very much out” on whether they will put them into practice.

Qu’s election at the top of the FAO was “a wake-up call” for the US, he said. “These multilateral institutions are going to be run in a different way for someone else’s interests if we are not paying attention.”

We’ve changed our rules on republication. Please read them here

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(Pic: Flickr/Katia de la Luz)

By Ed King

Crops and livestock that Vanuatu’s citizens rely on for their livelihoods have been almost entirely wiped out by Cyclone Pam, which hit the South Pacific island nation last weekend.

A government assessment sent to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that the banana crop has been “almost entirely destroyed” as have coconut, cabbage and leaf vegetable crops.

“Root crops, which are an important local food source, have been uprooted and flooded in most areas, while the majority of fruit trees have been stripped and chickens and pigs have been killed,” says the FAO.

Small-scale agriculture provides a living for over 60% of the population. Fishing and tourism are the other main sources of income.

“The initial assessments also indicate destruction of fishing boats and gear,” the FAO says, warning these losses will make it much harder for Vanuatu to rebuild its economy.

Scientists warn that “large increases in damage” from tropical cyclones are likely over time, as greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet.

Long term impact

Existing seed and food stores were wiped out in the storm, with wind speeds of up to 300 kilometres an hour battering the tiny islands in one of the most destructive storms to ever hit the region.

With most of the household stocks and garden production lost, farmers will be without locally produced food until at least mid-June when the first harvest from replanted fast-growing food crops could be available, the FAO said.

Many water pipes were also destroyed, with the BBC reporting some islanders had resorted to drinking sea water.

The government says it needs at least US$2 million in aid to allow it to buy and ship supplies to remote islands.

Approx. 625 damaged buildings in Eastern #Tanna, #Vanuatu. http://t.co/7UI5MexT4h #TCPam @OCHAAsiaPac @UNOCHA_ROP pic.twitter.com/A3WTmJk7pU

— UNOSAT (@UNOSAT) March 20, 2015

A huge aid operation is already underway, with the US, UK, India and Australia among those sending ships and planes, but the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says many people remain unaccounted for.

Better adaptation plans against extreme weather will be needed in the future, with the islands like to face more extreme events, FAO director-general José Graziano da Silva in a statement.

The FAO would offer long term “emergency agricultural assistance,” he said. An estimated 99% of Vanuatu’s outer-island citizens rely on agriculture for food and their livelihoods.

Floods, droughts and tropical storms account for 25% of damage to the agricultural sector, a separate FAO study said this week.

The impacts are especially severe on countries where more than 60% of the labour force is employed in farming, such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

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Pic: Alex Green/Flickr

By Sophie Yeo

Governments should adjust national policies to reflect the benefits that forests provide to the health and livelihoods of billions of people, according to the UN.

Forests provide essential services in reducing poverty, providing energy and ensuring food security across the world, yet government policies fail to harness these benefits, said the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

“It is time for forestry to shift perspective from trees to people,” said the biennial report, State of the World’s Forests 2014, launched today in Rome.

There is a “disconnect” in policy between the focus on the formal forestry sector and the billions of people that rely informally on the forest every day for food, energy and shelter, it said.

Most countries continue to operate on the “technical paradigm of forest management”, rather than a people-oriented approach.

“It is impressive to see how forests contribute to basic needs and rural livelihoods. They are also a carbon sink, and preserve biodiversity,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.

“Let me say this clearly: we cannot ensure food security or sustainable development without preserving and using forest resources responsibly.”

The UN recognises the preservation of forests as a method of reducing global warming, with a programme in place allowing rich countries to pay poor forest nations to keep their forests intact. Deforestation accounts for nearly 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Data

Relatively few countries specifically address poverty or rural employment when updating their forest policies, it says in the report, despite the forest sector employing 13.2 million people across the world, and at least another 41 million people informally.

Only 58% of national forest management policies updated since 2007 link sustainable forest management to poverty reduction goals.

Traditional knowledge and practises related to forests are also important to indigenous groups and beyond, but this is reflected by only a few countries, mainly through improved tenure rights and access to natural resources.

Virtually every country with significant forest resources has a national forestry programme, but growth in populations and the middle class, along with increasing urbanisation, means that these should be updated to reflect the changing pressures on the world’s forests, the report said.

Better policies could be supported by better data collection, it added, with more robust statistics on the extent to which communities depend on forests.

“With the exception of formal employment figures, forestry administrations have little information on how many people benefit from forests,” said the report.

Such a shift could help secure the financial aid needed to manage the world’s forests sustainably, said Eduardo Rojas-Briales, FAO Assistant Director-General for Forests.

“A new, holistic concept of forests will make them more attractive to donors and investors and ensure that they benefit all people, especially those most in need.”

The post UN: Forest policy must focus on human benefits appeared first on Climate Home News.

Oxfam has chosen a climate resilient variety of rice seeds to distribute (Source: Oxfam International)

By Sophie Yeo

A 40kg sack of seeds is hardly a glamorous Christmas present, but for the Filipino farmers hit by Typhoon Haiyan last month, it could a life-saving delivery.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has started to provide the first wave of emergency seeds supplies to residents living in some of the hardest hit rural communities across the Philippines.

These, along with 50kg bags of fertiliser, tools and small irrigation water pumps, will allow farmers to nurture another crop of rice and corn, ready to be harvested in March next year.

When the storm hit the islands in November, it was the beginning of the planting season. This meant that the 2014 harvest was decimated. Having lost family members and possessions to the typhoon, farmers are now confronting the fact that their livelihoods have also been destroyed.

“Nothing could be more beneficial than the seeds we so desperately need to make sure we can plant in time for this planting season,” said Merlyn Fagtanac, a farmer from Dumalag, whose farm and house were destroyed by the typhoon. “We lost everything but at least now we can look forward to the coming rice harvest.”

Her two-hectare rice paddy field has already been cleared and cleaned for planting. She is just one of the 1040 farmers from the Visayas region who will benefit from the seeds.

Analysis: can UN deliver on COP19 loss and damage agreement?

Yeb Sano, the Climate Commissioner in the Philippines, told RTCC that, in an area so heavily dependent upon agriculture, providing the capital to enable people to rebuild their farms was the best deployment of financial aid.

“Being in the part of the year where we do not expect any major storms, this came at a time where the harvest have been affected profoundly,” he said.

In two regions of the Visayas, where the first stock of seeds is being distributed, 74% of farmers reported losing their standing crops, while another region lost up to 63,234 hectares of its rice crop.

“Without FAO support these farmers would have been unable to plant rice by January, and would have had no harvest in March/April. This means they would have been unable to harvest rice for almost a year – until October or November 2014,” said Rodrigue Vinet, FAO’s Acting Country Representative in the Philippines.

Oxfam International is also distributing 400 tonnes of rice seeds across six municipalities south of Tacloban this week. They have chosen a ‘climate-proof’ variety, purchased in Luzon island, that are suitable for the low lying area and are not dependent upon large amounts of artificial fertiliser or pesticides.

A new harvest

Seed donations have come in from Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, Norway, the UK, and the general public. The UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund and the FAO have also contributed.

Altogether, this is enough to allow almost 55,000ha to be sown with rice over the December/January planting season, with a further 8,332ha to be planted around the beginning of February.

“Because we are able to get farmers the seeds and inputs they need in time, they will be able to produce at least 2 tonnes of rice in the March/April harvest, enough rice to feed a family of five for a year, and generate vital income from surplus,” Hiroyuki Konuma, Regional Representative of FAO for the Asia-Pacific Region.

Rebuilding livelihoods is a vital part of the reconstruction process throughout the Philippines. Without this, rural areas face long term challenges even after the debris has been cleared, Sven Harmeling, a climate change expert at CARE International, told RTCC.

“They’re losing their harvest in addition to losing a wealth of material belongings, and that’s a situation which can run such areas into more permanent poverty.”

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(Pic: Flickr/Sporkist)

The global carbon footprint of food waste is more than twice the size of the greenhouse gas emissions from the US transport sector, says the UN.

A new report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates food waste accounts for 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e).

It also highlights the staggering levels of water used in the production of cereals, meat and other foodstuffs on an annual basis, equal to the flow of Russia’s Volga River.

Increased land degradation, the loss of biodiversity and growing hunger levels are also consequences of inefficient food production practices, which waste 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year.

“All of us – farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments and individual consumers  must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement.

“We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”

According to the FAO, 54% of the world’s food wastage occurs “upstream” during production, post-harvest handling and storage.

Around 46% of it happens “downstream,” at the processing, distribution and consumption stages.

The data suggests developing countries tend to suffer greater food losses during agricultural production, while richer nations waste more food at the retail and consumption end.

According to the UN, the average carbon footprint of food wastage is about 500 kg CO2 eq. per capita.

Wastage of cereals in Asia is a significant problem, specifically rice, which is linked to high methane emissions.

The meat sector generates a substantial impact on the environment in terms of land occupation and carbon footprint, especially in high-income countries and Latin America.

Fruit wastage contributes significantly to water waste in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

The post UN: global food waste emissions greater than US transport sector appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) believes one-third of all food produced, worth around US$1 trillion, is lost or wasted in food production and consumption systems.

The Think, Eat, Save, Reduce Your Foodprint campaign is an initiative from the UN Environment Programme and FAO aimed at raising awareness of food waste around the world.

“In a world of seven billion people, set to grow to nine billion by 2050, wasting food makes no sense – economically, environmentally and ethically,” said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

“Aside from the cost implications, all the land, water, fertilizers and labour needed to grow that food is wasted – not to mention the generation of greenhouse gas emissions produced by food decomposing on landfill and the transport of food that is ultimately thrown away,” he added.

“To bring about the vision of a truly sustainable world, we need a transformation in the way we produce and consume our natural resources.”

Per-capita waste by consumers is 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America compared to 6-11 kg in Asia and Africa (FAO)

Food waste levels have huge implications for the environment and efforts to address climate change.

Agriculture and land use changes such as deforestation contribute to more than 30% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, while globally, the agri-food system accounts for nearly 30% of energy consumption.

Last week a report from  the UK’s Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) has found that 30-50%, or 1.2-2 billion tonnes of produced food is wasted by poor storage, bad distribution and exacting quality standards in the developed world.

In the developing world the FAO says 95% of food loss occurs at the start of the food supply chain due to limited harvesting, storage and packaging capabilities.

In contrast much of the food in the developed world is discarded at the user end, either by supermarkets or consumers.

According to waste campaigners WRAP, the average UK family could save £680 per year (US$1,090) and the UK hospitality sector could save £724 million (US$1.2 billion) per year by tackling food waste.

“Together, we can reverse this unacceptable trend and improve lives. In industrialized regions, almost half of the total food squandered, around 300 million tonnes annually, occurs because producers, retailers and consumers discard food that is still fit for consumption,” said José Graziano da Silva, FAO Director-General.

“This is more than the total net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa, and would be sufficient to feed the estimated 870 million people hungry in the world.”

“If we can help food producers to reduce losses through better harvesting, processing, storage, transport and marketing methods, and combine this with profound and lasting changes in the way people consume food, then we can have a healthier and hunger-free world,” Graziano da Silva added.

Top tips:

• Shop Smart: Plan meals, use shopping lists, avoid impulse buys and don’t succumb to marketing tricks that lead you to buy more food than you need.
• Buy Funny Fruit: Many fruits and vegetables are thrown out because their size, shape, or colour are deemed not “right”. Buying these perfectly good fruit, at the farmer’s market or elsewhere, utilizes food that might otherwise go to waste.
• Understand Expiry Dates: “Best-before” dates are generally manufacturer suggestions for peak quality. Most foods can be safely consumed well after these dates. The important date is “use by” – eat food by that date or check if you can freeze it.
• Zero Down Your Fridge: Websites such as WRAP’s www.lovefoodhatewaste.com can help consumers get creative with recipes to use up anything that might go bad soon.
• Plus: Freezing food; following storage guidance to keep food at its best, requesting smaller portions at restaurants; eating leftovers – whether home-cooked, from restaurants or takeaway; composting food; and donating spare food to local food banks, soup kitchens, pantries, and shelters.

The post UN launches campaign to cut 1.3 billion tonnes of global food waste appeared first on Climate Home News.

The US Department of Agriculture has warned that food prices in 2013 could increase at nearly twice the rate of inflation due the severity of the drought currently gripping 31 of the country’s states.

Price rises are also expected globally next year, as other big exporters hold onto their own supplies, further decreasing availability in the market. Among the worst affected are the most vulnerable countries that are heavily reliant on imports.

The global ‘futures’ market means that crops are often sold before they are even picked – affecting prices for years to come. For instance, in 2010 a Russian drought sent prices of wheat and barley soaring the following year.

This hybrid corn crop in Kenya has been bred to resist drought. (Source: Flickr/CIMMYT)

The weather affecting crops is nothing new – a famous example is the series of droughts in the 1930s that left parts of America and Canada resembling a ‘dust bowl’.

But these severe types of weather event are predicted to occur with increasing frequency, if last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the ‘Risks of Extreme Events’ is to be believed. And given the way the world economy is interconnected – an impact on one continent will reverberate around the globe for years to come.

Some, including the US Department of Defense, the Maplecroft consultancy and IISS researcher Jeffrey Mazo have even suggested that climate-induced food shortages played a role in the Arab Spring.

Cash crops like coffee and cocoa, which are grown across relatively small areas can be severely affected. Starbucks has sought to protect its own supply by helping its growers “climate proof” their crops.

The challenges facing farmers have been described as the “perfect storm”, so what are the big issues and what can be done to limit the reverberations?

Many of the tools and technologies required to reduce the impact of erratic weather are available now. A great many more are under development or waiting for the right policies to catalyse them.

A number of factors contributed to wheat prices jumping from $700 on the 25 June 2012 to $940 in late July. (Source: Forex)

Population

“The current world population of 7 billion is projected to reach 9.3 billion by 2050,” explains Dr Darren Hughes, head of communications at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research centre in the UK.

“Coupled with other factors, particularly people moving from rural livelihoods to cities, rising global temperatures and extreme weather events becoming more frequent, an enormous stress will be placed on our natural resources and therefore our ability to provide adequate nutritious food and to safeguard our environment through clean air, soil and water.”

Population is clearly a huge challenge facing food security, but there is an argument that the fault lies not with the earth’s future inhabitants, instead the problem is with how we, the current population, produce inefficiently and consume so wastefully.

Waste

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a global research partnership focusing on food security.

A report by its Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change in March 2012 makes a painful read. A stand-out stat is that while in 2008 1.5 billion adults were overweight, in 2010, 925 million people were undernourished.

Here’s another one: the UK wastes 22% of its food (the global average is estimated at 33% by the FAO).

VIDEO: Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change – How to feed the world in 2050

Behaviour

Diet changes and cuts in waste at home, at the farm and along the supply chain can make a huge difference.

One of the major contributors to the strain on agricultural supplies is the growing volume of meat consumed. According to Cornell University, the grain used to feed livestock in the US could feed 800 million.

Some campaign groups – notably the US Department of Agriculture – have called for a “Meatless Monday” as a way for the west to cut its protein input.

Cutting meat intake in emerging economies could be even more crucial however as China’s total annual meat consumption is now double that of the US, although the latter is still way out in front in the per capita stakes.

Making the supply chain smarter and enabling farmers to make better decisions could have a big impact too. Improving storage throughout the chain, cutting superficial quality control standards and upgrading processing facilities in developing countries could cut masses of waste before the food hits the shelf.

Land degradation

It’s not just waste we should be concerned about – poor land management also contributes to the problem. Writing for RTCC, the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Luc Gnacadja, said that every year land degradation removes an area of agricultural land capable of growing 20 billion tons of grain.

Desertification is not an unstoppable process. Land can and has been restored to agricultural standards.

The Great Green Wall project in Africa will see a 4300 mile long and 9 mile wide line of trees planted to cut soil erosion by the wind, reduce dust storms and create rural economies. South Korea is undergoing a huge project in Mongolia to limit the effect of wind-blown dust from its degraded lands.

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Information

Information for all farmers, no matter how small, is a key weapon.

“In the short term we are looking at how better climate information can help farmers plan for the upcoming season,” says Vanessa Meadu, communications manager at CGIAR. “Information could be delivered by mobile phone, community radio or through local information centres.”

Gallup suggests 57% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa has a mobile phone providing a widescale platform for data to help farmers adapt. In many cases, longer term adaption is needed, and this requires finance.

A number of development banks including the European Investment Bank, NGOs and even enterprising entrepreneurs are helping support small scale agriculture. Micro insurance schemes can ensure that if a farmer suffers a bad harvest, it needn’t be their last.

Technology

Technology also has a role to play but implementation is again tied to policy.

“Crops can be adapted to future conditions through breeding,” says Meadu. “Researchers are working on identifying important genetic traits, including drought tolerance and pest resistance, which will be critical for helping farmers adapt to new growing conditions. However, much more investment and policy support is needed for this kind of research.”

Hughes agrees adding that the nature of the problem requires policy from health, environment, agriculture, food and energy departments. These decisions however, must be well informed.

“There is increasing concern within the science and farming community that policy decisions, notably in the EU, are based on pure politics and not sound science,” says Hughes.

Biofuels

We really want to keep burning corn in our gas tanks, even as drought withers supply? fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2012/…

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) July 30, 2012

Biofuels policies have also been handled poorly in many countries with food unnecessarily displaced in the pursuit of alternative fuels.

“Right now, the US is suffering from extreme drought, making corn crop yields uncertain. The diversion of land that could be used to grow corn for food versus corn for fuel plays a more important role when certain areas of the US are having difficulty harvesting due to the drought,” ActionAid USA told RTCC in a written statement.

Population is clearly the greatest challenge facing food security, but the fault is not with the future inhabitants that could number nine billion by 2050, the problem is with how we, the current population, produce inefficiently and consume so wastefully.

Business as usual

The UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser has said: “The challenge for global agriculture is to grow more food on not much more land, using less water, fertiliser and pesticides than we have historically done.”

The challenges are clearly numerous, but so are the available solutions. Doing nothing is not one of them.

What do you think? What are the biggest threats to food security and what should we be doing (if anything) about trying to deal with it? Is it high enough up the political agenda? Tweet us via @RTCCnewswire or email the author.

The post The price of climate change: How to temper volatile food prices appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tea growers are looking for the best solution to protect the future of the much-loved cup of tea (Source: Wiki/Ultratomio)

Tea has become the latest crop threatened by climate change to warrant attention from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The latest FAO Conference on Tea, held in Colombo, has begun to draw up plans for the negotiations on how best to protect the crop.

The main producers in India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, China and Turkey are seeking to find agreement on a strategy that accounts for the fragmented nature of the industry.

In Sri Lanka, where Tea accounts for 15% of GDP, more than two-thirds of production is done by small-scale farms, which are harder to pull together and to encourage to invest in climate adaptation strategies

The country’s Plantation Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told the conference that the country was keen to boost its production. He confirmed that Sri Lanka had started experimenting with new varieties of Tea, better able to withstand drought, disease and pests, but further investment would be required.

“A lot of resources had to be diverted towards sustainable development to protect territorial integrity. However, despite the slight downturn in the globe economic environment the country is maintaining eight percent growth,” Minister Samarasinghe was quoted as saying by a local newspaper.

The Minister also said that importers were imposing new ethical standards on growers and they should “realise that this is a two-way street”.

The climate threat to a number of other cash crops including cocoa and coffee have previously hit the headlines with Starbucks taking action to protect its supply of the latter.

RELATED VIDEO: Rodney Cooke from the International Fund for Agricultural Development explains the ways climate change can affect crops.

Rodney Cooke, Director, International Fund for Agricultural Development from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

The post Tea crops next in the firing line for climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.