Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

by George Monbiot

Scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have found that as much as 40 per cent of the rainfall in parts of East Africa appears to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, between 4,000 and 6,000 kilometres away.

It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

We now eat far more vegetable oil, fat and protein than we did sixty years ago (though, surprisingly, not much more sugar), fewer roots and tubers, but a few more vegetables of other kinds, and a little more fruit.

Just four plants – wheat, rice, maizefn3 and soybeans – account for almost 60 per cent of the calories grown by farmers.

Yield plateaus, one study found, have already been reached in around one-third of the world’s rice and wheat farms.

Four companies – Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus – control, on one estimate,53 90 per cent of the global grain trade.

Another four companies – ChemChina, Corteva, Bayer and BASF – control 66 per cent of the world’s agricultural chemicals market,

Another four companies control 99 per cent of the global chicken-breeding market, and two supply almost all the ducks.

Today, over 70 per cent of the world’s farmland is owned or controlled by just 1 per cent of its ‘farmers’.

2050, to put it in brutal terms, the extra humans on the planet will weigh a little over 100 million tonnes, whereas, unless the current trend is disrupted, the extra farm animals will weigh 400 million tonnes.102 The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers. This escalating pressure is caused by Bennett’s Law, which states that the consumption of fat and protein rises with people’s incomes.

On average, the world’s people eat 43 kilogrammes of meat per year.

Because we eat so much meat, the UK’s diet requires nearly 24 million hectares of land.

In other words, our farmland footprint is 1.4 times the size of our agricultural area. If every nation had the same ratio of consumption to production, feeding the world would require another planet the size of Mercury.

The crops used for fuel could feed almost half the people who are chronically hungry.

Human beings die of heat stress beyond a wet-bulb temperature of roughly 35°C.

One-fifth of the world’s wheat exports and one-sixth of its maize exports pass out of the Turkish Straits, which are just a kilometre wide at their narrowest point.

Irrigation already consumes around 70 per cent of the water people withdraw from rivers, lakes and aquifers (the natural reservoirs under the ground).

Irrigation demand is one of the reasons why species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land.

It’s worth noting that while people are rightly concerned about the thirsty habits of almond and pistachio trees, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage crops, especially alfalfa, to feed livestock.

But it was snuffed out, in 2014, by a fierce lobbying campaign, which had been waged for eight years by the continent’s farming unions. It was the first legislative proposal in the EU’s history to be withdrawn.

Farmers who receive subsidies must fill in a form called the Soil Protection Review, on which they must say they are protecting their soil. The government is supposed to check that they do what they say, but only 1 per cent of farms are inspected every year, which means that the average farm can expect a visit once a century.

Two separate whistleblowers from the Environment Agency wrote to tell me they had been instructed not to enforce the law against dairy farms.

Though it had ‘investigated’ 243 incidents since new rules were introduced in 2018, it had sent just fourteen warning letters, but taken no further action. No fines had been issued, no farm subsidies withheld.

The regulators’ budgets have been cut so hard that, on average, a farm can expect a pollution inspection once every 263 years.

They discovered that 95 per cent of them were breaking the rules on storing farm waste, and 49 per cent were polluting the river or its tributaries on the days when they visited.

Already, 25,000 people a year are reckoned to die of antibiotic-resistant infections in Europe.58 They kill hundreds of thousands worldwide.59 Without antibiotics, modern medicine could scarcely function.

Greenpeace used a Freedom of Information request to obtain a report that was commissioned by the government but then suppressed.63 It warned that the sewage sludge being spread on farmland contains a remarkable cocktail of dangerous substances, including PFASs (‘forever chemicals’),64 benzo(a)pyrene (a Class 1 carcinogen), dioxins, furans, PCBs and PAHs, all of which are persistent and potentially cumulative.

Two years later, the farmer’s blood still contained twenty times the national average concentration of these cancer-causing chemicals.

Across Europe, thousands of tonnes of plastic are added to fertilizers, to prevent them from caking;77

Though soy is just one ingredient of chicken feed, there can be more of it in chicken than in tofu: one report estimates that it takes 109 grammes of soy to produce 100 grammes of chicken breast.

Only 7 per cent is turned into substitutes for meat and milk, like tofu, tempeh, soy mince and soy milk.

A famous study found that the weight of insects in German nature reserves fell by 76 per cent in twenty-seven years.

A twenty-year record of insects hit by cars on two routes across Denmark recorded declines of 80 per cent and 97 per cent.

The global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first fifty years of this century.

Altogether, roughly two-thirds of the nitrogen that farmers apply to their fields,122 and between 50 per cent123 and 80 per cent124 of the phosphorus, are wasted.

In the UK, the payment is called the Renewable Heat Incentive. Farmers who install renewable heating systems in their chicken units receive guaranteed and untaxed payments for twenty years. The handouts are so generous that their investments tend to pay off within five years:

Together, assuming they are all heated with pellets, the 590 known chicken units in the Wye Valley are likely to burn the equivalent of 600 hectares of forest a year.

The incentive scheme closed in March 2021: if your barns were up and running by then, you qualified for twenty years of public money.

One calculation suggests that if England and Wales became entirely organic, our land footprint would grow by 40 per cent.

Organic beef farms – as the animals take longer to raise and need more land – lose twice as much nitrogen per kilo of meat as conventional beef farms.

For several decades in the second half of the twentieth century, farmers were paid a subsidy for every animal they kept.

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.170 If aliens landed here, they might conclude that the dominant life form was the sheep.

If everybody ate the average New Zealander’s diet, which contains plenty of free-range lamb and beef, another planet almost the size of Earth would be needed to sustain us. If, on the other hand, we all stopped eating meat and dairy, and switched instead to entirely plant-based diets, we would reduce the amount of land used for farming by 76 per cent.