“There is a lot of talk about climate change, but the loss of biodiversity is as serious or more serious and, when looking at the causes, we see that the main culprit is the agroindustrial food production system because it causes deforestation of the land, pollution, overfishing and contributes to aggravating the climate crisis.” The professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona Marta Tafalla issued this warning in a seminar entitled How can the world be fed without exceeding the limits of the planet?, organized by the Social Observatory of the Fundació la Caixa.
What is known as the sixth mass extinction of species only increases the complexity of the challenge of feeding the nearly 8 billion mouths in the world. “The species that are becoming extinct have as much right to be on the planet as we do. At the same time, all of these species are those that perform the ecological functions that make it possible for ecosystems and the biosphere to function. So if we put them at risk, we also put our own health and survival at risk,” warns Tafalla.
The expert points out that “the problem is the animal-based diet” because “we are replacing wild animals with livestock.” The solution proposed: the implementation of a mostly plant-based diet and promoting what is known as rewilding, which consists of “letting wildlife manage itself in some very large territories,” in the words of the professor of the UAB. “If all human beings switched to a vegan diet, the amount of land we would need to use to produce food would be reduced by 75% and all this land we would save could be returned to wildlife,” says Tafalla.
“We know more or less what to do, but it is complicated because we have to solve more and more problems,” acknowledges Juan Carlos García-Cebolla, former director of the Right to Food team at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Agriculture (FAO), who also participated in the seminar of the Social Observatory of the Fundació la Caixa. One of the main problems to be solved that García-Cebolla refers to is “sharing a limited planet in an equitable way and ensuring minimum standards for everyone.” To achieve this, the expert calls for a “universal pact of economic, social and cultural rights, which includes the right to adequate food.” Among the measures of the pact, the former FAO director calls for the need to “improve the legal security of small farmers in poor countries,” whose lands are often expropriated or contaminated.
Gustavo Duch, writer, popularizer and member of the editing team of the magazine Soberanía Alimentaria, Biodiversidad y Culturas, rules out that the solution to the challenge of feeding the world without exceeding the limits of the planet is to produce more food. “It will not end hunger in the world and will only serve to feed the markets and capitalism,” assures the third of the seminar speakers. Duch proposes to “reinvent the way we inhabit the world” and “ruralize the planet, once again valuing the figure of the farmer, the rancher and the shepherd and applying agroecological techniques, which simply mimic what already works in nature.”
