This is one of the points identified in a global food security survey by consultancy PwC. The report, “The Sustainable Food Revolution”, looks at ways to avoid a looming food crisis.
“Today, the way we produce food is undermining the potential to feed ourselves in the future. Many of the critical challenges the world is facing are affected by food production, including climate change, water shortage, deforestation, forced labour and corruption.
“That is why the world needs to treat food security and affordability as critical issues for global prosperity and well-being,” the report says.
The long-term global shift towards higher meat consumption is seen as a primary cause of the over-use of agricultural resources such as land and water. Focusing on beef, it says that meat production is a “relatively inefficient” form of food production, requiring as much as 100 times the amount of land resources compared to plant agriculture to produce an equivalent volume of calories.
PwC says beef production is responsible for nearly 10 times the greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of meat compared to poultry. Food sustainability could be improved by influencing diet choices at the consumer level.
“Simple food substitutions – for instance substituting meats with a high environmental footprint with lower impact alternatives – can alter environmental outcomes very significantly.
“For example, if the world were to substitute beef with chicken, meat-related CO2 emissions would fall by roughly half, while water usage would be cut by around 30%.
“A wholesale shift to vegan diets could more than halve the food-related CO2 emissions per person in a wealthy meat-eating economy such as the US.”
The report also looked at ways to minimise food loss across the entire value chain by leveraging advanced technologies, as well as the application of the latest farming and food production techniques.
“Feeding a population of around ten billion humans by 2050 in a sustainable way is one of the most important challenges humanity is facing,” PwC says.
