A Global Food System Worth Fighting For

Last month, the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable and just food systems (EAT-Lancet 2.0) claimed that, even if the world succeeds in phasing out fossil fuels, our food systems alone will push the planet beyond the 1.5 °C Paris limit.

Our food systems are driving environmental decline

The scale, scope and urgency of the challenge takes my breath away. But, you would be forgiven if this is the first time you have heard it. It just did not break through, despite the urgency. Maybe it is crisis fatigue, perhaps it is the sheer complexity of the issue. It could be because that the debate around food and food systems, especially animal production, has become so polarised. The production of food, and the maintenance of current food systems, working or not working, has become a cultural flashpoint, and a deeply political topic. Whatever the reason, our food systems face substantial current and future challenges.

The implications of food production and consumption must transcend the desires of industry, and cultural and political norms. Our food systems now exceeds five of the nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity. Agricultural production is driving many of them through deforestation, biodiversity loss, freshwater pollution, and the nitrogen and phosphorus overloads that acidify our oceans and pollute our rivers. Many of our (higher-income) diets drive substantial health burdens; causing around 15 million avoidable adult deaths each year, nearly a third of global mortality. There is huge imbalance within the global food system as a whole; over one billion people are obese, while another 2.3 billion go hungry.

EAT-Lancet 2.0 explores these extraordinarily complex challenges. In this article, I want to try and unpick some of them, from a justice perspective.

Why focus on animal-sourced foods?

Animal-sourced food products (AFSP) are at the root of many of our food system challenges; they have nutritional benefits, but also massive trade-offs.

About 30% of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and much of that from ruminant livestock (cows and sheep) through methane, manure, and fertiliser use. Nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from feed and pasture drive water and air pollution, while livestock expansion remains the leading cause of deforestation.

There are also substantial health trade-offs related to overconsumption. Diets rich in red and processed meats are linked to heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Expansion of agricultural lands are linked to zoonotic disease, and overuse of antibiotics in livestock production accelerates antimicrobial resistance. It seems pretty clear that there is a multifaceted sustainability crisis within our global food system.

But, that is not to say that AFSP do not have a place within the global food system. In moderation, they make an important dietary contribution. They are vital in parts of the world where malnutrition remains widespread. For many low-income populations, modest increases in meat, dairy, or eggs can improve growth, cognition, and livelihoods. The issue is not that there is AFSP, it is that there is too much in the wrong place, being produced and consumed in unsustainable, unhealthy ways.

Calories in, calories out

For this article, I wanted to examine where some of our main food systems products end up and their interactions. To do this, I used the FAO’s Food Balance Sheets to generate and map global calorie flows (I converted tonnes to averaged calorie values for cereal, meat and milk). From Figure 1, we can see that meat an milk make up a pretty small share. While there is diversion of calories from cereals to losses and other uses (bio-energy etc.), the really large diversion (36%) is to animal feed. The total calories from meat and milk combined are only about a third of cereals diverted to animal feed. Animals are not fed on cereals alone of course, but the figure does a pretty good job of highlighting the inefficiency within the system.

Besides inefficiency, the next issue is distribution. We know that AFSP will have the most positive impact where there are food and nutrition security issues. However, only about 7 % of milk and 4 % of meat calories reach lower-income, food-deficient (LIFD) countries. LIFDs represent about one billion people, who would likely benefit most from access to AFSP. Industry representatives, and some affiliated research, are quick to point out the global needs around nutrition, as justification for current, or even increased, production levels, but less likely to highlight health risks associated with overconsumption. They claim that a reduction in AFSP would ensure that already food insecure countries suffer. But, the issue is that those regions do not have access now. Increasing the supply, without rebalancing distribution will only entrench all of the issues we currently face.

Distribution of AFSP is only one of the injustices faced by lower-income countries. EAT-Lancet 2.0 points out that the diets of the richest 30% of the global population drives 70% of the environmental burden. In general, lower-income countries have less access to the benefits of AFSP, but conversely, they receive a disproportionate amount of the environmental impacts.

I remember reading in the Dublin Declaration, an industry supported statement that was was drafted and signed by academics and others defending livestock practices and vilifying those who called for a reduction in livestock production, a rebuttal to criticism that absolutely disgusted me.

“A steak that is not eaten in the Global North does not turn into eggs that are therefore more available to stunted children in Africa.”

The sheer dismissiveness of it is staggering. But more than that, it fundamentally misses the point. We have a limited emission space for the production of food, and the emissions that it took to produce that steak has an opportunity forgone. With a limited emission space, each steak produced, where it is produced in excess, has a cost, which means less space for eggs, or whatever else could have been produced in another region that has a deficiency.

Further, embodied in that steak are the additional environmental burdens that will be felt most in more vulnerable, less resilient, places like Africa. Embodied in that steak are the calories from cereal production that it took to feed that animal, and the land that had to be cleared to produce that feed.

The trillion-dollar paradox

In 2024, the global meat market was worth about US $1.43 trillion, projected to rise to US $1.7 trillion by 2033. That’s nearly the size of the entire global pharmaceutical industry.

The scale is huge, but that, in and of itself, isn’t inherently bad. But this value is generated by supplying high-income markets. This means that AFSP is more abundant where it is contributing to health burdens, and scarce where it could reduce them.

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Like any industry, the global AFSP industry seeks to maximise profits. In a recent paper we published examining climate neutrality in Ireland, we highlighted that Ireland exports 90% of its AFSP, with the stated aim of maximising the return. Less than 1% of Ireland’s AFSP goes to lower-income countries. We also showed that Ireland’s per person share of agricultural methane was 6.3 times the global average.

As such, Ireland takes up a higher share of the global emission space, which means less overall emission space, to contribute AFSP to the diets of those who can afford to pay for it, while contributing almost nothing to the diets of the 2.8 billion people who cannot afford a healthy diet.

If the production and trade of AFSP less about maximising profit, and more about alleviating food security challenges, there would likely be far less resistance to the implementation of sustainable change.

We cannot “tech” our way out

The ramification of continuing a “business as usual” approach to the global food system is terrifying. Rather than deal with the required system change, there is often an insistence that technical innovation will be the solution.

Methane inhibitors, feed additives, precision breeding. Great, they all matter, but they are not systemic change. Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows, calls these “delays”. By this, Meadows means, they delay and buy time for true systemic change, but they do not represent the fundamental rethink that is required.

Even if we did lower emissions sufficiently to offset the reductions that are required to meet long-term temperature goals via technical solutions. What then? The status quo is maintained, and the 30% of the globe that had access can just continue on as normal, and the other 30% who cannot afford a healthy diet, well, the fulfilment of their right to a health and sustainable diet, that is a question for another day?

We cannot solve these multifaceted challenges by catering to entrenched interests.

The disinformation playbook

Systemic change, no matter how compelling, is not going to be politically easy. There will always be entrenched interests, and some of them are equal parts powerful and resistant. While not everybody benefits equally, the livestock industry generates substantial wealth, and it does so by maximising profits in the worlds wealthiest markets.

Years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists described the The Disinformation Playbook. Industries facing inconvenient science, such as: tobacco, fossil fuels, and now, meat, deploy similar tactics to manufacture doubt, fund “balanced” research, attack scientists who speak out, and frame regulation as elitist control and an erosion of fundamental freedoms.

Some of the online rage campaigns we have seen recently are far from organic. A recent report from Changing Markets Foundation, Meat vs EAT-Lancet, launched just ahead of EAT-Lancet 2.0. It provided an in-depth analysis on the online, industry orchestrated, campaign to undermine the first EAT-Lancet report and its mobilisation ahead of the release of EAT-Lancet 2.0.

Given the urgency, and the sheer scale of challenges that face the global food system, you would be forgiven for wondering why on earth anyone would want to derail progress towards sustainability and justice. We all have a right to a healthy diet. Besides, the livestock industry is, itself, at risk from the same environmental burdens it is contributing to.

Undermining sustainable transitions, to protect wealth, is incredibly short-sighted.

Choosing the controlled transition

I am not anti-farming. Nor am I vegan, or anything else I am likely to be pilloried with. Other than contributing to a sustainable future for life on our planet, I don’t have particularly strong views on what people choose to eat or not eat. Though, I do hold the opinion that my right to something should not negate someone else’s rights. I also do not think that the industry narrative on livestock production is representative of the views of the farming community, at least here in Ireland. I think our farming communities can see the pressures as well as I, or anyone else, can. We all need to have a conversation about real choices we face, while acknowledging that there are constraints.

Within those boundaries, we can present a positive vision of the future.

At a very high, global, level, I think we need to acknowledge that we can have a managed transition toward a fair, sustainable food system; or an eventual uncontrolled collapse driven by climate and ecological breakdown.

The EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet offers a flexible guide to adapt and build around. A guide that will allow us to reduce overconsumption in high-income nations, enable nutritional gains in low-income regions, and stay within planetary limits.

It seems like a pretty good place to start from.

A system worth fighting for

So what is stopping us? The truth is, the challenges we face are scary, terrifying even, and that leaves us open to manipulation, because denial is just easier. On top of that, I feel like we are all being manipulated through constant bombardment. I don’t think it has ever been as difficult to tell truth from fiction as it is today. If its not social media, its AI, or scam emails and texts. At times, it can feel like we are under siege.

Who could blame you if you want to switch off completely.

But, I think the places to hide from these challenges are becoming scarce. We can see the cracks forming in our daily lives, whether it is cocoa shortages or heatwaves, we can sense the pressure that our systems are under. On some level, everyone of us knows that we need a different, more sustainable path.

What we put on our plates has consequences, regardless of what others may tell you. Our health, or environment, and our right to a healthy and sustainable die depends on it.

To secure our future, and that of our children, we need to think beyond our own table and demand a food system that feeds the world without consuming it.

No one is going to hand you the future you want to see for yourself, for your children, for your community.

You are going to have to fight for it.