Radical food system overhaul would raise costs but deliver $10tn a year benefit, report says

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A radical overhaul of the global food system to address climate change, biodiversity and health would raise agricultural commodity prices by about a third by 2050 but would be outweighed by up to $10tn a year worth of benefits, a group of leading academics and scientists has estimated.

The environmental cost of existing food systems stood at $3tn a year and the additional costs to health were at least $11tn, the research from the Food System Economics Commission estimated.

But a shift to take into account healthier diets and biodiversity would result in between $5tn and $10tn a year in benefits even after the additional costs of transforming production and consumption were factored in, it said.

The report comes at a time when farmers in the EU are protesting over proposed subsidy cuts that would raise the cost of polluting diesel fuel. This is despite the agricultural sector struggling to cope with the consequences of climate change on crops and livestock.

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute and principal of the FSEC, said the necessary transformation would involve a move from monoculture production, ditching common practices such as ploughing, reforming the use of fertilisers and avoiding “expansion into intact nature”.

It would also require a shift to “more healthy diets”, such as eating more fruit, vegetables and pulses, while cutting down on consumption of animal products in industrialised nations.

The study forecast that agricultural commodity prices would increase by about 30 per cent by 2050 which could significantly increase the price of food, arguing governments would have to be prepared to help low-income families.

It also acknowledged that many low and middle-income countries, where budgets are already stretched after Covid-19, would struggle to finance such a transition, and suggested multilateral development banks would have to play a big role.

“Consumers have no choice but to recognise that food is valuable and that to produce food in a sustainable way requires much more effort than the large-scale planet destroying food production we have today,” Rockström said.

The researchers said the report, which draws on existing scientific literature while also modelling the current and future impact of global food systems, was the most ambitious study of food systems economics to date

The commission behind the report is funded by groups including Wellcome, Rockefeller and Ikea foundations, a Norwegian forestry initiative, and Quadrature foundation, backed by hedge fund founders Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya.

The four-year investigation looked at two pathways: a business-as-usual scenario and another dubbed the food system transformation, which included big changes in how we produce and consume foods.

The research said food systems could become net carbon sinks by 2040, helping to limit global warming in the process, while protecting an additional 1.4bn hectares of land and reversing biodiversity loss.

Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University who was not involved in the report, said it “acknowledges the unsustainability of the current food system” but did not go far enough in highlighting the importance of cutting back meat and dairy production and consumption.

“The science tells us very clearly that whether you care about climate, food security or biodiversity, the biggest and technically simplest lever is to reduce global production and consumption of animal products.”