Global Food Systems and Moral Action - A Call to Act
Climate Cafe Multifaith welcomed Andrew Schwartz, Director of Sustainability and Global Affairs at Center for Earth Ethics, to talk food systems, food security, and climate change. This is a gigantic conversation bubbling up in faith communities and faithful action everywhere. Below find a video of the presentation Andrew Schwarz shared with us, as well as a taste of the conversation, links, truth-telling and hope. This post ends with lots of links at the bottom with info, ideas, and organizations to connect with.
“This globalized food system…it might be efficient, it might be profitable, but it’s having damning repercussions on the natural world.”
—Andrew Schwartz
In the run-up to the UN Food Summit preceding COP26, Andrew Schwartz led up a Center for Earth Ethics effort to widen the conversation around food, soils, farms, and hunger globally with a series of Food + Faith panels. This discussion was a tremendous effort it and of itself. All that information is still available, with the full panel videos, and series of reports following. For the Cafe, I asked Andrew to introduce us with a 101 and discussion around the moral imperative we face.
A 101 presentation from Andrew Schwartz.
Andrew Schwartz is the first to acknowledge the vastness of the subject. Everything about the conversation of food is big. The UN reports that just shy of 40% of the world’s surface is used either for cropland or grazing livestock. Food production also requires water. It takes 800 gallons of water a day to produce the food one human being needs in a single day. Food production has an enormous carbon footprint, not just in the carbon losses from soil and petrochemical fertilizers, but also from consumption. Facts from the FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) tell us that food production consumes 30% of the world’s energy, with 70% of that consumption occurring “after food leaves farms, in transportation, processing, packaging, shipping, storage, marketing…”
As we look at the sheer enormity of the effort and consumption of the earth’s resources in the food production process, the imperative of stewardship over these resources becomes even more apparent. In 2019, food waste was calculated at 930 million tons a year. In 2021, plastic produced for food production, containers and packaging was calculated at 49.8 million tons annually—included are food containers destined for landfills as well as agricultural plastics that rip and shred and become microplastics in the soil.
“There’s always supposed to be this glut of food for those who can afford it.”
—Andrew Schwartz
Photo by Markus Spiske, cropped
All this activity in the food system, and you would at least think that everyone is fed. But that isn’t the case. The UN reports that hunger has been rising for the last decade, and currently 1 in 10 people in the world are undernourished.
Our system, then, one of enormous waste and unequal access, is antithetical to stewardship and largely immoral. Says Schwartz, “I think there's a huge piece that we need to remember as we think about hunger… It's not a lack of food. We have an over abundance of food. [It’s that] we waste enough food annually to feed everyone on the planet.”
Economics and crop diversity
Our food systems have grown to provide for growing populations. Food provision isn’t just about seeds and farmland, however. Production of food is shaped by economic structures that reward efficiency, profit, and global access. Local systems now serve global interests, so that now, says Schwartz, “there is a Monopoly by a small number of companies that more or less dictate how food is moved from farm to shelf and even how that food is grown.” These monopolies exist around meat, fertilizers, transportation, and even seed production, where just “four agro seed giants…control 60% of seed production around the world.”
“We are losing our food diversity because of an orientation towards profit and convenience.”
—Andrew Schwartz
Photo by Kurt Cotoaga, cropped.
A push for efficiency and profit in a global production marketplace has not just created giant ag corporations, but the profit/consumer model has driven decisions about what types of food that is grown/produced, where it is processed, where and how it is transported, all to maximize profit at each point. Of the many challenges this approach presents, loss of crop diversity—and so nutrition—is another big one.
The quest for efficiency and production has also influenced where food is grown. There are now just a handful of conglomerates controlling food production, processing and transportation. Likewise, just a few global regions provide the bulk of food exports. Countries like the United States, China and Brazil, grow vast quantities of the world’s wheat, cereals, rice and soybeans.
“A global food system requires a certain kind of predictability but that predictability is being threatened by climate change.”
—Andrew Schwartz
Brazil, Wheat. Photo by Roberto Fioritto, 2010 BY NC ND 2.0
All of this, of course, assumes two things. First, it assumes a never-ending, unexhaustive abundance. Second, it is all predicated on a predictable, stable climate. The earth’s climate, however, is losing that stability. Increasingly, crops are damaged and yields are lost to storms, floods, hail, frost, fires, drought, and/or heat. When only one region is hit with unwelcome weather or drought, in the past other regions were able to make up the difference. But when one region, as Brazil in 2021, is hit by multiple effects, or when there are multiple breadbasket failures, that is when the truth of the unsustainability of the system really starts to show.
Moral failures
Our food system is simply not sustainable. Perhaps some of it started well, with the goal of ensuring the billions of people on earth would be fed. But this is not what it has looked like in practice. Instead we see a system that exploits land, soil, water, and labor to produce over-abundance (glut) for some, but lack of access for others. According to Schwartz, a food system based in “commodification” and “industrialization” not only cannot be maintained, but “it’s also predicated upon a sense of exploitation, an exploitation of the land and of the workers.”
From a moral perspective, if we admit to the sacred worth of both land and people, then we must acknowledge also that our current system does not. Says Schwartz, “Anytime anything is objectified, it takes away that sense of agency of purpose in and of itself. And so we're seeing the land, the trees, the animals, all of these things only for what they can produce and not for what they are—and so it continues in this path … to devastate every aspect that it touches.”
Our current food production practices degrade soils, forests, stress water systems, and spread inequity. All this has a tremendous impact to human health. Our food systems deliver a double-edged sword. Because we focus on consumer profits, the food flows to affluent areas of the world. So much food flows in that direction that much of it is wasted. As a result, despite the overflowing piles of apples, lettuce, and triscuits on sale at Safeway or Kroger, hunger is a real and growing problem everywhere. Says Schwartz, “if trend lines continue at their current rate, we're going to have nearly a billion people hungry around the world—chronically hungry.”
The Consumer Market
Hunger isn’t the only problem. Another health crisis are the diseases caused or made worse by the growing production and consumption of highly processed foods. Schwartz explains, “because of the proliferation of processed and ultra processed foods of high protein, high sugar, high salt diets, there is a huge influx of diabetes and heart disease, cardiovascular disease, around the world.” Such diets are linked to diabetes and cardiovascular diseases on the rise globally.
“Because of our current food system we're battling these two things: way too much, which is causing unnecessary health problems, or way too little where people are starving to death. …how we are doing it wrong in both directions at the same time is baffling.”
—Andrew Schwartz
Photo by Mustafa Bashari, cropped.
There is a wide gap between the nutrition available in a seasonal farmers market and what you can purchase in an average grocery store in America and elsewhere. Not only are the shelves of the grocery store packed with bright packages of highly processed foods, but the fresh produce selections are often limited to a handful of plants efficient to grow, package, ship and sell. Schwartz explains, “There are over 50,000 edible plants on the planet and yet we're only really eating about 15 of them.” Then, there are the modern staples: rice, corn, wheat and soy. Soy is the fourth largest crop globally, with much of it going to feed livestock. For humans, says Schwartz, “two thirds of the food that we consume comes from rice, corn and wheat.”
Schwartz describes the narrowing of food variety as coming from a kind of selective pressure that leads to monoculture crops and the monoculture diets that result from that. Says Schwartz, “as the world demands more and more of the same thing, more and more the same thing needs to be grown.” Consumers can demand gluten free, low fat, or organic, but even these preferences are helped along with bright packaging and marketing. Explains Schwartz, “It's this vicious cycle of product that is introduced, and it's heavily advertised so more and more people want it. And that means that we need more of it.” This cycle leads to monocrops, soil depletion, and “huge swaths of deforestation.”
“The majority of the population is eating more and more the same food.”
—Andrew Schwartz
Photo by Maria Lin Kim.
So—what is going right?
The good news is a lot is going right. The concern over the narrowing of food systems is decades old. Studies over that time have raised warnings about soil health, water use, deforestation, nutrition loss and there is a wide recognition that the ecosystems of our natural environment cannot sustain production in its current form. Change must come. A sense of urgency is here.
“I felt urgency from the Food Systems Summit and I felt urgency from folks at COP 26 and from the people I’ve talked to within UN agencies...that I haven’t felt before.”
There are new ways of talking about food systems that align with planetary and human health, words like ‘agro-ecology,’ ‘bioregionally specific food production,’ ‘crop diversification,’ ‘restorative agriculture,’ ‘agro-forests,’ ‘farm clustering’ and so many more. Says Schwartz, “What we're talking about is a full scale transformation that is moving away from this corporatized industrialized project into systems of agro-ecology—which is basically this concept of farming that is beneficial and gives back to the environment more than it takes.”
It bears repeating that last line. It is fully possible to feed the world without taking more than the natural world can give. We can grow food and restore the earth and soil at the exact same time.
“There needs to be a major investment in the localization of foods and allowing communities to grow food for the global system, but also for their next-door neighbors...”
—Andrew Schwartz
Oregon fruit by Kamala Bright.
There are already people who are farming sustainably, or near to it, and have been doing this for a long time. Schwartz explains that even today “over a billion farmers get their seed harvested from their crops.” There are still small farmers connected to “indigeneity and natural organic seed processes” in Africa and India and elsewhere. And Indigenous people around the world have vibrant food cultures and cultivation methods centered around place and community. These methods have included careful seedkeeping, preserving the seeds of traditional foods through the devastation of colonialism in order to remember, reclaim, replant and renew.
Andrew Schwartz speaks to what gives him hope.
As we make these changes, Schwartz speaks to the importance of coalition building, spending time in the moment to build understanding between people and groups, taking the focus off profits, and “daylighting these huge inequities and these huge failures in our food systems.” The big goal is bringing all this together as we “imagine where we need to go.”
Food Systems Change and People of Faith
The big question underlying the sheer scope of this conversation is: what role is there for people of faith? What is the faithful response to an unsustainable food system that causes both hunger and glut? Or, as Schwartz puts it, “we can get fresh caught tuna from Japan to New York overnight” and yet with this very same system very soon “we're going to have nearly a billion people hungry around the world—chronically hungry.”
Our food system is morally bankrupt by the measure of every faith tradition.
“[People of faith] can help in these larger globalized conversations by always pushing towards the moral and the ethical, inviting people into a space they are not familiar with and then helping be a bridge to some better conversation.”
—Andrew Schwartz
In the photo, a woman holds a modak sweet, a traditional food during the Hindu celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi. Photo by Prachi Palwe
During the Climate Cafe, as we grappled with the enormity and complexity of the system, an understanding bubbled up. Of course faith communities can support family farms, restorative practices, and global equity. But even more than that, we recognized that as people of faith we deal with complexity all the time. Faith in community is complicated, yet the depths of our wisdom traditions are complex as well. We grapple with ancient languages while navigating the nursery and hospice, weddings and sudden loss. Folks, we can do this. We can be truth seekers, model kindness to our neighbor, gentleness to ourselves, forgiveness of past wrongs, restoration of relationship, and new paths forward.
When it comes to moral action and leadership, people of faith can navigate complexity and invite dialogue.
Andrew Schwartz offered this perspective on the wide role that people of faith can play to help solve the complex problems we face, “faith can do incredible work by partnering with other groups outside of the faith world, to advocate, to grow and educate, and to ask better questions. [We can do this] simply by phrasing the question differently and demanding a different answer.” For example, in advancing dialogue, what if we seat “somebody with the World Economic Forum next to an indigenous woman, letting them discuss what a commodity is and the dangers of commodification. This conversation in and of itself would have rippling impacts as people are forced to think other than they normally would.”
People of faith have a role in practices of change, also.
One of those efforts addresses the inequity of food access in black and POC neighborhoods. This inequity shows up not only in what can be purchased, but also the quality of food supplied. Ensuring access to fresh, delicious and nutritious foods like fresh eggs from happy hens is one goal of the Baltimore based Black Church Food Security Network. The brainchild of Rev. Herber Brown III, the endeavor holds together the complexity of food and racial justice in community.
Also addressing hunger and food equity from the Jewish tradition is Mazon, an organization that recognizes both that hungry people need access to food today, and that the system itself must change to ensure equity for tomorrow. Likewise Church World Service sponsors the Crop Walk annually to raise funds to address hunger from poverty as well as from displacement and disaster.
Photo by Charles Edward Miller.
Churches and faith communities are stepping up to be part of the solution from farm to table. This article, The Movement to turn Church Land into Farm Land, lists farms and organizations, including Plainsong Farm, FaithLands, Good Lands, and the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative. As American churches work to reconnect with the earth and its abundance, they return to the roots of the faith community.
Globally, food production, food ceremony, food distribution and faith have long been inseparable. For example, farming practices in India have been in place for centuries. Recent changes to agricultural laws in India prompted a backlash, and Sikh farmers in California were among those speaking out.
For Jews and Muslims, faith practice is part of how food is raised, slaughtered, handled and prepared to ensure that it is Kosher or Halal. There are Halal farms in a number of US states, including Georgia, Ohio, and Texas.
Indigenous people are at the center of restoration efforts globally. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the Swinomish people have led to restore shellfish cultivation at Kukutali. Across the US the Alliance of Native Seedkeepers actively preserves, restores and cultivates heirloom and traditional seeds to return traditional foods and harvest methods to a world awash in monocrops vulnerable to climate change.
The benefits of all of this is the amount we are learning, the skills we are developing, and the voices we are bringing to the urgent need to address the climate crisis, hunger, and an unsustainable global food system, all at the same time.
Essential Links
PDF report, Sustainable, Equitable, Resilient: An Ethical Approach to Global Food Systems, authored by Andrew Schwartz, Director of Sustainability and Global Affairs, Center for Earth Ethics.
Food + Faith Dialogues from Center for Earth Ethics.
AIM for Climate. A 4 billion dollar investment fund to address climate and agriculture.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
World Health Organization, including a spike in world hunger this last year.
Billions Spent on Farm Subsidies Don’t Lower Food Prices or Reduce Hunger from EWG.
The Swinomish restore 4,000 shellfish cultivation at Kukutali.
US Corn Production is Booming, from National Geographic.
See many more links in the article above.
Contributors and co-voices for the Food + Faith effort include Andrew Schwartz, Center for Earth Ethics; Chris Elisara, World Evangelical Alliance, Duke Ormond Center ; Gopal Patel, Bhumi Global ; Joshua Basofin, Parliament of the World’s Religions ; Kelly Moltzen, Interfaith Public Health Network ; Marium Husain, Islamic Medical Association of North America and Steve Chiu, Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation.
Cover photo of the greenhouse and farm at the Methodist Theological Seminary in Ohio by Richenda Fairhurst.
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst is here for the friendship and conversations about climate, community, and connection. She organizes the Climate Cafe Multifaith as a co-leader of Faiths4Future. Find her in real life in Southern Oregon, working as Steward of Climate with the nonprofit Circle Faith Future.