Food in the crosshairs

Did you know that almost a third of the food produced globally gets wasted? It’s quite an unpleasant fact for people such as myself who strongly dislike waste but a fact it nevertheless appears to be, if we are to trust UN data.

But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that we are not eating right and we are not producing our food right. We need to change our eating habits and our food production habits, too. Why? To save the climate, of course. Or stop it from changing. It’s hard to keep track if the climate is good or bad on any given day.

The message that we need to change how we make food has been cropping up in the media more and more often lately. Farming appears to have become the latest target for activists and their friends in government.

It didn’t happen overnight. The attention activists and organisations with business interests in decarbonisation are paying farming has been growing steadily and mostly quietly. It only became loud recently, after momentum built up enough to make sure there won’t be too much of a backlash. Well, except in the Netherlands but the Dutch government went about it too rashly.

Here’s a fun briefing from the European Union on the topic of farming and emissions. Per that briefing, emissions from the agricultural sector in the EU have fallen substantially but the decline has recently slowed down… largely because food production has increased significantly.

Worse, at the rate things are going, Europe’s farmers won’t hit the net-zero targets that Brussels has in mind for them because they’re not being ambitious enough — the farmers, not the targets. One reason they are not being ambitious enough appears to be that it costs a pretty penny to become a net-zero farmer. But it’s the rest of the reasons that are much more interesting.

Among those reasons, the authors of the briefing list things such as “generational renewal”, meaning there are too few young people opting for farming as a career path and this, apparently, “inhibits the spread of new practices.”

Another extremely serious obstacle to the net-zeroing of farming seems to be “Farmer knowledge. A lack of awareness around GHG emission sources and their impacts among farmers is a problem. In tandem, farmers lack sufficient information, training and advisory services.”

In other words, European farmers are too old and too ignorant to be any good. On top of that, there appear to be way too many of them. This is another of the obstacles, thrown in together with low IT literacy and things like “knowledge gaps” and a “production-maximising midset”, which is something bad, apparently. Did anyone say collectivisation?