Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

by George Monbiot

fungi are, in effect, farming their hosts, shifting food from one plant to another, to ensure that all those on which they depend remain alive.

Another four companies – ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF – control 66 per cent of the world’s agricultural chemicals market,55, 56 while a similar cluster (with BASF replaced by LimaGrain) owns 53 per cent of the global seed market.

Because we eat so much meat, the UK’s diet requires nearly 24 million hectares of land.109 But we farm only 17.5 million hectares here.

But just as energy efficiency tends to increase energy use,fn8 so water efficiency tends to increase water use, an effect known as the Irrigation Paradox.171

Of the twenty-seven classes of antibiotics used in livestock farming, twenty are also used in human medicine.56 Among them are some of the most valuable remaining drugs, described by doctors as ‘the last line of defence’. The spread of antibiotic resistance through the food chain, according to one scientific paper, ‘may even be greater than hospital transmission’.

In the UK, a highly urbanized nation, humans occupy 7 per cent of the land,169 while livestock, their pastures and rough grazing lands occupy 51 per cent.

But the expansion of grazing land remains the world’s greatest cause of habitat loss. It’s responsible for 40 per cent of the deforestation caused by the food industry, making it almost three times more destructive than palm oil.

that even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100, food production alone would bust the entire carbon budget two or three times over, if we want to avoid more than 1.5°C of global heating.

four kilogrammes of beef, if the current and capital accounts can be directly compared, has a carbon impact more or less equivalent to one passenger flying from London to New York and back.

When organic material is incorporated into the soil, this raises its carbon content. But if the material has been imported from ghost acres elsewhere – in the form of manure or animal feed or green waste – the farm is robbing Peter to pay Paul: moving carbon from one place to another.32, 33

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.