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Nourishing Humanity without Destroying the Planet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2021

Anne Barnhill Open the ORCID record for Anne Barnhill [Opens in a new window]  and
Jessica Fanzo
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Abstract

As part of the roundtable, “Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System,” this essay discusses some of the major challenges we will face in feeding the world in 2050. A first challenge is nutritional: 690 million people (9 percent of the world's population) are currently undernourished, while 2.1 billion adults (28 percent of the population) are overweight or obese. The current global food system is insufficient in ensuring that the nutritious foods that make up healthy diets are available and accessible for the world's population. Moreover, by 2050, as the global population increases, food demand will increase by 50–60 percent. A fundamental challenge is meeting this demand while not wreaking irreversible havoc on natural resources, the environment, and planetary systems. A body of scientific research has coalesced around the need to reduce food loss and waste, adopt environmentally sustainable production practices, and shift toward plant-dominant diets. Other long-standing food system problems include deficits in providing fair wages and decent working conditions for food system workers, threats to smallholder farmer livelihoods, and tens of billions of animals kept in welfare-deficit confinement conditions. These food system challenges are bad states of affairs that matter from a variety of moral perspectives. In other words, there is a robust moral case for addressing these challenges. Yet concerted policy action in this area is insufficient and largely absent, pointing to the underlying challenge and complexity of political inertia.

Keywords

food systemsethicsmalnutritionobesityundernutritionsustainabilityhealthy dietsanimal welfarefood and agricultural ethicsanimal agriculture
Type
Roundtable: Ethics and the Future of the Global Food System
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 69 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 Willett, Walter, Rockström, Johan, Loken, Brent, Springmann, Marco, Lang, Tim, Vermeulen, Sonja, Garnett, Tara, et al. , “Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems,” Lancet 393, no. 10170 (February 2, 2019), pp. 447–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Swinburn, Boyd A., Kraak, Vivica I., Allender, Steven, Atkins, Vincent J., Baker, Phillip I., Bogard, Jessica R., Brinsden, Hannah, et al. , “The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission Report,” Lancet 393, no. 10173 (February 23, 2019), pp. 791–846CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32822-8/fulltext; and Searchinger, Tim, Waite, Richard, Hanson, Craig, and Ranganathan, Janet, Creating a Sustainable Food Future: A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People by 2050 (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, December 2018)Google Scholar, research.wri.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/creating-sustainable-food-future_2_5.pdf.

2 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene,” p. 3.

3 Marco Springmann, Michael Clark, Daniel Mason-D'Croz, Keith Wiebe, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Luis Lassaletta, Wim de Vries, et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits,” Nature 562, no. 7728 (October 10, 2018), pp. 519–25, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0594-0. Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”

4 Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits.”

5 For example, in a business-as-usual scenario, agricultural emissions in 2050 may make up 70 percent of total allowable emissions across all sectors of the economy (where allowable emissions refers to the level that allows us to keep global warming at two degrees Celsius). See Searchinger et al., Creating a Sustainable Food Future, p. 24.

6 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene”; and Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits.”

7 Springmann et al., “Options for Keeping the Food System within Environmental Limits”; and Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”

8 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”

9 As explained by the World Health Organization, “Wasting is defined as low weight-for-height. It often indicates recent and severe weight loss, although it can also persist for a long time. It usually occurs when a person has not had food of adequate quality and quantity and/or they have had frequent or prolonged illnesses. Wasting in children is associated with a higher risk of death if not treated properly. Stunting is defined as low height-for-age. It is the result of chronic or recurrent undernutrition, usually associated with poverty, poor maternal health and nutrition, frequent illness and/or inappropriate feeding and care in early life. Stunting prevents children from reaching their physical and cognitive potential.” “Malnutrition,” World Health Organization, n.d., www.who.int/health-topics/malnutrition#tab=tab_1.

10 Christophe Béné, Jessica Fanzo, Steven D. Prager, Harold A. Achicanoy, Brendan R. Mapes, Patricia Alvarez Toro, and Camila Bonilla Cedrez, “Global Drivers of Food System (Un)Sustainability: A Multi-Country Correlation Analysis,” PLoS ONE 15, no. 4, e0231071 (April 3, 2020), p. 2.

11 Jessica Fanzo, “Ethical Issues for Human Nutrition in the Context of Global Food Security and Sustainable Development,” Global Food Security 7 (December 2015), pp. 15–23, at p. 15, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912415300158?via%3Dihub.

12 As Jessica Fanzo writes in Nature: “The World Bank estimates that up to 115 million extra people will fall into extreme poverty (living on less than US$1.90 per day) in 2020 owing to the economic shocks of the pandemic. This, in turn, will have significant impacts on food security, nutrition and health. It is projected that 130 million more people will face acute food insecurity by the end of 2020, in addition to the estimated 135 million who faced it in 2019.” Jessica Fanzo, “Cooperate to Prevent Food-System Failure,” Nature, December 9, 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03444-5.

13 Swinburn et al., The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change, pp. 800–801.

14 Ashkan Afshin, quoted in Allison Aubrey, “Bad Diets Are Responsible for More Deaths than Smoking, Global Study Finds” (transcription of radio program, All Things Considered), NPR, April 3, 2019, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/04/03/709507504/bad-diets-are-responsible-for-more-deaths-than-smoking-global-study-finds.

15 Ashkan Afshin, Patrick John Sur, Kairsten A. Fay, Leslie Cornaby, Giannina Ferrara, Joseph S. Salama, Erin C. Mullany, et al., “Health Effects of Dietary Risks in 195 Countries, 1990–2017: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017,” Lancet 393, no. 10184 (May 11, 2019), pp. 1958–72.

16 Seung Hee Lee-Kwan, Latetia V. Moore, Heidi M. Blanck, Diane M. Harris, and Deb Galuska, “Disparities in State-Specific Adult Fruit and Vegetable Consumption—United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 66, no. 45 (2017), pp. 1241–47.

17 “Prevalence of Overweight among Adults, BMI ≥ 25, Crude Estimates by WHO Region,” Global Health Observatory Data Repository, World Health Organization, last updated September 27, 2017, apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main.BMI25CREGv?lang=en.

18 Honor Bixby, James Bentham, Bin Zhou, Mariachiara Di Cesare, Christopher J. Paciorek, James E. Bennett, Cristina Taddei, et al., “Rising Rural Body-Mass Index Is the Main Driver of the Global Obesity Epidemic in Adults,” Nature 569, no. 7755 (May 2019), pp. 260–64, www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1171-x.

19 Stephen S. Lim, Theo Vos, Abraham D. Flaxman, Goodarz Danaei, Kenji Shibuya, Heather Adair-Rohani, Mohammad A. AlMazroa, et al., “Assessment of Burden of Disease and Injury Attributable to 67 Risk Factors and Risk Factor Clusters in 21 Regions, 1990–2010: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010,” Lancet 380, no. 9859 (December 15, 2012), pp. 2224–60.

20 “Transforming Agrifood Systems and Fostering Inclusive Rural Development in the Context of COVID-19 to End Rural Poverty,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, November 29, 2020, www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/2020/11/end-rural-poverty/; and International Labour Office, Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM), 9th ed. (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2016).

21 International Labour Office, Key Indicators of the Labour Market.

22 Nicole Civita, “Ethics over Exploitation: Urgent Moral Issues Associated with Labor and Communities in the Food System,” in Alan M. Goldberg, ed., Feeding the World Well: A Framework for Ethical Food Systems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

23 Ibid.

24 United States Department of State, “Trafficking in Persons Report 20th Edition” (2020), www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-TIP-Report-Complete-062420-FINAL.pdf.

25 Akisha Townsend Eaton, “Suffering of Animals in Food Production: Problems and Practical Solutions,” in Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 445–73.

26 Ibid.; Chris Schlottman and Jeff Sebo, “Industrial Agriculture,” chap. 6 in Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach (London: Routledge, 2018); and Bob Fischer, “Contemporary Animal Agriculture,” chap. 2 in The Ethics of Eating Animals: Usually Bad, Sometimes Wrong, Often Permissible (New York: Routledge, 2019).

27 T. G. Knowles, Susan M. Haslam, Steven Nicholas Brown, Laura Elizabeth Green, Andrew Butterworth, Stuart J. Pope, Dirk Udo Pfeiffer, Christine Janet Nicol, and Steve C. Kestin, “Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention,” PloS One 3, no. 2, e1545 (February 2008).

28 David Fraser, Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in Its Cultural Context (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), see esp. chap. 4; and Steven P. McCulloch, “A Critique of FAWC's Five Freedoms as a Framework for the Analysis of Animal Welfare,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26, no. 5 (2013), pp. 959–75, link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10806-012-9434-7.

29 Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue, eds., Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

30 Ruth Faden, Justin Bernstein, and Sirine Shebaya, “Public Health Ethics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, Fall 2020 edition, last updated July 8, 2020, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/publichealth-ethics/; and Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti, Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

31 Schlottman and Sebo, Food, Animals, and the Environment; Tyler Doggett, “Moral Vegetarianism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, Fall 2018 edition, September 14, 2018, plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/vegetarianism/; and Fischer, The Ethics of Eating Animals.

32 For example, Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene”; Searchinger et al., Creating a Sustainable Food Future; and Swinburn et al., The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change.

33 Swinburn et al., The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change, p. 806.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Lancet Commission, quoted in ibid., p. 795.

37 Ibid., pp. 815–18.

38 Ibid., p. 802.

39 For increase of power, see ibid., p. 814; for weak demand for policies addressing undernutrition, ibid., p. 816; for insufficient demand for policies addressing overnutrition, ibid., p. 791; for framing problems and solutions to resonate, ibid., p. 825.

40 William D. Schanbacher, The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger Security International, 2010); and Eric Holt-Giménez, Can We Feed the World Without Destroying It?, 1st ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2019).

41 G. Williams, “The IDEFICS Intervention: What Can We Learn for Public Policy?,” in “Prevention of Childhood Obesity: Results from the IDEFICS Study,” special issue, Obesity Reviews: An Official Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity 16, no. s2 (December 2015), pp. 151–61, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1467789x/2015/16/S2.

42 Anne Barnhill, Anne M. Palmer, Christine M. Weston, Kelly D. Brownell, Kate Clancy, Christina D. Economos, Joel Gittelsohn, Ross A. Hammond, Shiriki Kumanyika, and Wendy L. Bennett, “Grappling with Complex Food Systems to Reduce Obesity: A US Public Health Challenge,” Public Health Reports, 133, no. s1 (November 2018), pp. 44S–53S.

43 Willett et al., “Food in the Anthropocene.”

44 FixUS, Lessons from the Road on How to Heal Our Fractured Country (Washington, D.C.: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, n.d.), www.crfb.org/sites/default/files/FixUS-Report_Final.pdf; Damir Marusic, “To Cure What Ails Us,” American Interest, September 30, 2020, www.the-american-interest.com/2020/09/30/to-cure-what-ails-us/; Shreeharsh Kelkar, “Post-Truth and the Search for Objectivity: Political Polarization and the Remaking of Knowledge Production,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 5 (2019), pp. 86–109, estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/268/183; and Deen Freelon and Chris Wells, “Disinformation as Political Communication,” in “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation,” special issue, Political Communication 37, no. 2 (2020), pp. 145–56, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2020.1723755.

45 Anne Barnhill and Jan Dutkiewicz, “Peak Anthropocene: Cellular Agriculture and the Politics of Disruptive Harm Reduction” (presented as a paper at the 2020 Assailing the Anthropocene: The Ethics of Disruptive Innovations for Surviving Our Climate-Changed World workshop, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, April 24–25, 2020).

46 Eric Posner, “When It Comes to Climate Change, Payback Isn't Enough,” Opinion, Washington Post, January 8, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/01/08/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-payback-isnt-enough/; and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Beba Cibralic, “The Case for Climate Reparations,” Foreign Policy, October 10, 2020, foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/10/case-for-climate-reparations-crisis-migration-refugees-inequality/.

47 Whyte, Kyle Powys, “Food Justice and Collective Food Relations,” in Barnhill, Anne, Budolfson, Mark, and Doggett, Tyler, eds., Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 122–34Google Scholar.

48 Mepham, Ben, “A Framework for the Ethical Analysis of Novel Foods: The Ethical Matrix,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 12 (January 2000), pp. 165–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beekman, Volkert, de Bakker, Erik, Baranzke, Heike, Deblonde, Marian, Forsberg, Ellen-Marie, de Graaff, Ronald, Ingensiep, Hans-Werner, et al. , Ethical Bio-Technology Assessment Tools for Agriculture and Food Production, Final Report Ethical Bio-TA Tools QLG6-CT-2002-02594 (Hague: LEI, February 2006)Google Scholar; and Rachel A. Ankeny, “Inviting Everyone to the Table: Strategies for More Effective and Legitimate Food Policy via Deliberative Approaches,” special issue, “Symposium on The Political Philosophy of Food Policies,” Part 2, “Democracy, Freedom, and Paternalism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 47, no. 1 (Spring 2016), pp. 10–24, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/josp.12141.