The Truth about GMOs, Pamela Ronald, 2013

Mama Moses has been growing bananas on her farm in southwestern Uganda for twenty years. She farms only bananas, which is typical of subsistence farmers in Sanga, the impoverished village where she lives. Last year, when she saw the flowers on her banana plants begin to shrivel and yellow bacteria ooze from the cut stems, she knew her crop was doomed. Within months the bacterial infection turned her healthy crop into a black, wilted mess.

Banana Xanthomonas wilt disease (BXW) is one of the greatest threats to banana production in Eastern Africa. Cultural practices provide some control, but they are ineffective during epidemics. More than a thousand kinds of banana can be found worldwide, but none has robust resistance to BXW. Even if resistance were identified, most scientists believe that breeding a new variety using conventional methods would take decades, assuming it is even possible.

BXW creates precisely the sort of food insecurity that affects the world’s poorest people. Bananas and plantains are the fourth most valuable food crop after , wheat, and maize. Approximately one-third of the bananas produced globally are grown in sub-Saharan Africa, where bananas provide more than 25 percent of the food energy requirements for more than 100 million people.

For anyone worried about the future of global , Mama Moses’s story is instructive. The world faces an enormous challenge: with changing diets and population growth of 2–3 billion over the next 40 years, UNESCO predicts that food production will need to rise by 70 percent by 2050. Many pests and diseases cannot, however, be controlled using conventional breeding methods. Moreover, subsistence farmers cannot afford most pesticides, which are often ineffective or harmful to the environment.

Yet many emerging agricultural catastrophes can almost certainly be avoided thanks to a modern form of breeding that uses genetic engineering (GE), a process that has led to reduced insecticide use and enhanced productivity of farms large and small.

In spite of these benefits, genetic engineering is anathema to many people. In the , we’ve seen attempts to force labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In much of Europe, farmers are prohibited from growing genetically engineered crops and so must import from the United States. And “GMO-free” zones are expanding in Japan.

The strong distrust of GE foods is curious. Opponents typically profess a high degree of concern for human welfare and the environment. They want the same things that scientists, farmers, food security experts, and environmentalists want: ecologically sound food production accessible to a growing global population. But their opposition threatens the great strides that have been made toward these goals through deployment of new technologies.

• • •

For 10,000 years, we have altered the genetic makeup of our crops. Conventional approaches are often crude, resulting in new varieties through a combination of trial and error, without knowledge of the precise function of the genes being moved around. Such methods include grafting or mixing genes of distantly related species through forced pollinations, as well as radiation treatments to induce random mutations in seeds. Today virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that we have genetically altered in one way or another.

1 Over the last twenty years, scientists and breeders have used GE to create crop varieties that thrive in extreme environments or can withstand attacks by pests and disease. Like the older conventional varieties, GE crops are genetically altered, but in a manner that introduces fewer genetic changes. Genetic engineering can also be used to insert genes from distantly related species, such as bacteria, directly into a plant.

Given that modern genetic engineering is similar to techniques that have served humanity well for thousands of years and that the risks of unintended consequences are similar whether the variety is derived from the processes of GE or conventional gene alteration, it should come as no surprise that the GE crops currently on the market are as safe to eat and safe for the environment as organic or conventional foods. That is the conclusion reached by diverse agricultural and food experts. There is broad consensus on this point among highly regarded science-based organizations in the United States and abroad, including the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, and European Commission Joint Research Centre. In the seventeen years since GE crops were first grown commercially, not a single instance of adverse health or environmental effects has been documented.

To understand why farmers have embraced GE crops and how they benefit the environment, consider genetically engineered cotton. These varieties contain a bacterial protein called Bt that kills pests such as the cotton bollworm without harming beneficial insects and spiders. Bt is benign to humans, which is why organic farmers have used Bt as their primary method of pest control for 50 years. Today 70–90 percent of American, Indian, and Chinese farmers grow Bt cotton.

Recently, a team of Chinese and French scientists reported in the journal Nature that widespread planting of Bt cotton in China drastically reduced the spraying of synthetic chemicals, increased the abundance of beneficial organisms on farms, and decreased populations of crop-damaging insects. Planting of Bt cotton also reduced pesticide poisonings of farmers and their families. In Arizona farmers who plant Bt cotton spray half as much insecticide as do neighbors growing conventional cotton. The Bt farms also have greater biodiversity. In India, farmers growing Bt cotton increased their yields by 24 percent, their profits by 50 percent, and raised their living standards by 18 percent, according to one common standard that measures household expenditures.

GE papaya, engineered to withstand a devastating viral infection, has been similarly successful. First developed in 1998, it is now grown by 99 percent of Chinese and about 70 percent of Hawaiian papaya farmers. The GE papaya carries a snippet of the viral genome that immunizes it against infection. Conventional and organic papayas, which lack resistance, are infected with thousands-fold higher levels of the virus. There is currently no other method—organic or conventional—that can adequately control the disease.

Genetic engineering can be used not only to combat pests and diseases, but also to enable farmers to use less harmful chemicals to control crop-choking weeds. That is why 80–90 percent of the cotton, corn, , and sugar beets grown by U.S. farmers is genetically engineered for resistance to an herbicide called glyphosate. Farmers and home gardeners prefer glyphosate because it is much less toxic than earlier herbicides; indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “worst case risk assessment of glyphosate’s many registered food uses concludes that human dietary exposure and risk are minimal.” Glyphosate kills the weeds but not the herbicide- tolerant crop. This approach greatly reduces the need for ploughing or digging, the conventional and organic method for controlling weeds. In Argentina and the United States, the use of herbicide-tolerant soybeans is associated with a 25–58 percent decrease in the number of tillage operations. Such reduced tillage practices correlate with reduced soil erosion and a significant drop in . In 2005 the decreased tillage that accompanied planting of herbicide-tolerant soybeans was equivalent to removing 4 million cars from the roads.

There are dozens of other useful traits in the GE pipeline: nitrogen-efficient crops that reduce run off; golden rice, a provitamin A–enriched rice; cassava that is resistant to viral infection; and drought-tolerant corn.

2 My laboratory at the University of California, Davis has genetically engineered rice for tolerance to flooding and resistance to disease.

Some of these crops, such as cassava and golden rice, are important to poor farmers and their families in developing countries who lack nutrients and cannot pay the price of improved seed. Consumption of golden rice, within the normal of rice-dependent poor populations, could provide sufficient vitamin A to reduce substantially the estimated 2,2000–6,850 deaths caused every day by vitamin A deficiency and save the sight of several hundred thousand people per year. This “biofortification” approach complements conventional supplementation, such as the World Health Organization’s distribution of Vitamin A pills, which costs many times more and often does not reach the rural poor who have little access to roads.

These well-documented benefits of GE crops, which have been repeated around the world, appear to be precisely the kind of triumph of biology over chemicals envisioned by Rachel Carson, food security experts, and organic farmers who have long dreamed of reducing the use of synthetic chemicals and enhancing biological diversity on farms.

• • •

Considering our long history of plant genetic manipulation and the success of modern GE seeds in enhancing the sustainability of our farms and food supplies, why do some consumers still express grave unease over the planting of GE crops?

Much of the concern relates to a general distrust of large corporations, in particular, Monsanto, which produces a large proportion of the world’s seeds. GE opponents fear that such corporations are taking advantage of farmers. Yet one need only observe the overwhelming farmer adoption of GE crops in the United States and elsewhere to conclude that the GE crop varieties on the market are useful to farmers. It is unlikely that experienced and skilled farmers would buy GE seeds if their farm operations did not benefit economically. Many U.S. farmers prefer Bt seed because it reduces reliance on sprayed insecticides that can harm farm workers and the environment. A recent Supreme Court case, Bowman v. Monsanto, highlighted the lengths farmers will go to obtain the seed, even when non-GE conventional alternatives are available.

The practice of buying seeds from seed companies has been criticized by opponents of GE seed. But seed purchasing is the norm in any non-subsistence farming system, whether or not the seed is genetically engineered, a fact that points to the abundant misinformation that plagues the debate over genetic engineering of crops.

Farmers often prefer to buy hybrid seed, a type of seed that inherits its useful traits, such as high yield, from two genetically distinct parents. These beneficial traits are lost in the second generation, so it makes no sense to save the seed from a crop and replant. The production of hybrid seed benefits the farmers, who are able to reap the advantages of the high-yielding seed, and the seed companies, which are able to reap a tidy profit each year the farmer buys the seed. Seed companies do produce seeds that can be replanted, but they are often lower yielding or susceptible to disease, which is why many crops grown by conventional and organic farmers are hybrids. Hybrid seed is not generated through genetic engineering and has been available since the 1920s. Genetic engineering does not, in and of itself, affect the ability of farmers to save their seed.

The priority for Monsanto and other for-profit seed companies is to produce high-quality seed for farmers in the developed world who can pay for them. But most farmers live in less developed countries and grow crops such as cassava or rice, which are not a priority for crop improvement in the developed world. For this reason, we need strong investment in public-sector research to develop improved seed for farmers who otherwise cannot afford it. We also need regulation of the seed industry to ensure fair dealing and to avoid the rise of a single company monopolizing the world’s seed supply. 3 Today, more and more countries are exploring the use of genetic engineering for a greater variety of crops. Currently there are 30 commercialized GE crops cultivated worldwide. By 2015 there will be more than 120. Half will come from national technology providers in Asia and Latin America and are designed for domestic markets. The reduced dominance of U.S. seed companies may alleviate concerns of consumers who oppose genetic engineering because they see it only as a tool of large U.S. corporations.

Another common fear of anti-GE activists is the emergence of “super weeds” in the fields of herbicide-tolerant crops. Indeed, one drawback to using a single herbicide is that overuse can lead to the evolution of weeds that are resistant to that herbicide. For example, the liberal use of glyphosate has spurred the evolution of herbicide- resistant weeds. Twenty-four glyphosate-resistant weed species have been identified since herbicide-tolerant crops were introduced in 1996. But herbicide resistance is a problem for farmers who rely on a single herbicide regardless of whether they plant GE crops. For example, 64 weed species are resistant to the much more toxic herbicide atrazine, and no crops have been genetically engineered to withstand it. So even if herbicide-tolerant plants were nowhere to be found, conventional farmers would still have to develop strategies to manage weeds that are resistant to herbicides.

Farmers face similarly complex issues when controlling pests. One limitation of using any insecticide, whether it is organic, synthetic, or genetically engineered, is that insects can evolve resistance to it. For example, one crop pest, the diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella), has evolved resistance to Bt toxins under open-field conditions. This resistance occurred in response to repeated sprays of Bt toxins to control this pest on conventional (non-GE) crops.

Partly on the basis of the experience with the diamondback moth, scientists predicted that pests would evolve resistance to Bt crops if they were deployed widely in monocultures. For this reason, U.S. farmers who plant Bt crops are required to deploy a “refuge strategy”: creating refuges of crop plants that do not make Bt toxins. This promotes survival of susceptible insects and has helped to delay evolution of pest resistance to Bt crops.

Global pest-monitoring data suggest that Bt crops have remained effective against most pests for more than a decade. Failure to provide adequate refuges appears to have hastened resistance of pink bollworm in India. In contrast, Arizona cotton growers who planted adequate refuges saw no increase in pink bollworm resistance. This example emphasizes the need to deploy a crop diversity strategy and crop rotation to reduce the evolution of insect resistance. This is the case for organic and conventional farmers too. Farmers cannot rely on seed alone to eliminate pests.

Perhaps the greatest concern surrounding GE foods is their effect on human health. Opponents regularly point out that GMOs have never been proven safe, which creates a great deal of anxiety. This is a difficult claim to rebut because GMOs don’t define a testable class—in the same way that the Federal Aviation Administration can’t test “planes” but can test individual aircraft—and because there is no evidence of harm for scientists to explore.

Yet individual GE crops have been studied extensively. A vast scientific literature considers the potential risk associated with GE crops. To help bridge the gap between consumers and scientists, one of my former students, Karl Haro von Mogel, and his colleague Anastasia Bodnar have created the GENetic Engineering Risk Atlas, a database that currently lists 600 studies examining safety, environmental impact, food composition, and other aspects of GE crops. One-third of these studies are not funded by companies that stand to profit from the results, and these studies support the scientific consensus that genetic engineering of crops is not inherently riskier than conventional methods of crop improvement.

There are a few intensely promoted and controversial studies that claim to refute the broad scientific consensus. For example, a study published last year purported to show that corn engineered for tolerance to glyphosate caused tumors and early death in rats. However, this finding was widely dismissed by scientists not involved 4 with the study, including the European Food Safety Authority and six French science academies. They reported, “The authors’ conclusions cannot be regarded as scientifically sound because of inadequacies in the design, reporting and analysis of the study as outlined in the paper.”

Although the GE crops currently on the market are safe, every new variety must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Each new plant variety, whether it is developed through genetic engineering or conventional approaches of genetic modification, carries a risk of unintended consequences. Whereas each new genetically engineered crop variety is assessed by three governmental agencies, conventional crops are not regulated. To date, compounds with harmful effects on humans or animals have been documented only in foods developed through conventional breeding approaches. For example, conventional breeders selected a celery variety with relatively high amounts of psoralens in order to deter insects that damage the plant. Some farm workers who harvested such celery developed a severe skin rash—an unintended consequence of this non-GE breeding strategy.

• • •

With all of the scientific evidence arrayed in support of the safety and environmental benefits of the GE crops currently on the market, we must look to other sources to understand opposition.

To some extent, it is a product of our political culture. There is often little critical scrutiny of the issues within a particular “tribe.” For example, just as many on the political right discount the broad scientific consensus that human activities contribute to global warning, many on the left disregard the decades of scientific studies demonstrating the safety and wide-reaching benefits of GE crops.

Both the left and the right (and the center) discard reason when it doesn’t suit their politics. Some activist groups manufacture uncertainty to stoke fear in consumers. They demand more testing despite the fact that GE crops are the most highly regulated crops on the market. As Daniel Engber aptly remarks in Slate, the success of the manufactured-uncertainty strategy “shows how the public’s understanding of science has devolved into a perverse worship of uncertainty, a fanatical devotion to the god of the gaps.”

Anti-science campaigns can have devastating consequences. Consider the anti-vaccination movement led by actress Jenny McCarthy and discredited physician Andrew Wakefield, which claims a link between the administration of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the appearance of autism and bowel disease. Many newspapers have promoted their views and many parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children, invoking a personal-belief exemption to skirt public school requirements.

The result has been a worldwide outbreak of measles and whooping cough. Marin County, California, home to a wealthy, educated populace, recently experienced the largest outbreak of whooping cough in the nation. Health care workers descended on Marin as if it were a third-world country to reeducate parents about the importance of vaccinating their children. Even today, despite the revocation of Wakefield’s medical license because of his fraudulent claims and undisclosed conflicts of interest, the notion that vaccines can cause autism or other problems remains prevalent in some places, especially certain liberal, affluent ones.

In the case of the vaccine fraud, skepticism isn’t a product of political culture so much as scientific illiteracy. The respected science journalist Michael Specter points out that consumers have a tendency to trust anecdotes over peer-reviewed results, which may explain why today “the United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down.”

A similar lack of comprehension likely afflicts opponents of modern crop varieties. Consumers have a tendency to group all “GMOs” together without regard to the purpose of the engineering, the needs of the farmer, or the social, environmental, economic, or nutritional benefits. They may be unaware that research organizations and scientists they otherwise trust agree that all GE crops currently on the market are safe to eat and safe for the 5 environment, that each new crop variety is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and that because each GE crop is different, testing them as a group is simply not possible and contesting their safety, in general, makes no sense.

This misunderstanding of the nature of GE crops underlies the labeling campaigns we have seen in recent years. These are not only public campaigns. Grocery giant Whole Foods has declared that within five years it will require labeling of all GMO foods sold in its stores. The implication of this labeling is that there is something worrisome about GMOs that consumers need to be warned about.

But to those of us who farm, carry out scientific research, or regulate food safety, it is clear that a GMO label provides scant information to the consumer and hinders the advancement of sustainable agriculture. The Food and Drug Administration does not support a GMO label because there are no known health effects. Almost all food would require such a label because virtually every crop grown for human consumption has been genetically modified in some way: bananas are sterile plants with artificially induced triple chromosomes, some varieties of California-certified organic rice were developed through radiation mutagenesis, and most cheeses use genetically engineered rennet as a key ingredient.

In other words, unless you forage for wild berries, hunt game, or catch wild salmon, you are consuming a food that has been genetically altered. For this reason, the FDA has concluded there is no universal or logical definition of GMO food. The FDA already requires stringent testing of food products and labeling of those that carry an ingredient found to be potentially harmful (such as peanuts), so there is no nutritional need for more labeling. The claim that consumers have a right to know what is in their food, prevalent during a 2012 referendum campaign to require GMO labeling in California, is also specious. Consumers have a right to know about potentially harmful ingredients, but a right to know about the presence of harmless GE ingredients is tantamount to a right to know that contain sugars.

Whole Foods either believes that it can safeguard the food supply better than the FDA can, or it simply wants to sell more of its high-priced products. A. C. Gallo, president of Whole Foods, recently told the New York Times, “Some of our manufacturers say they’ve seen a 15 percent increase in sales of products they have labeled.”

To reap greater profits is a perfectly legitimate goal for a corporation such as Whole Foods. But what about the health of families, farmers, and the environment? For those of us who want to advance sustainable agriculture, the fears promoted by Whole Foods and popular media figures such as Dr. Oz do a major disservice. These anti- GE forces have much to gain financially, but at great cost to farmers and their families in less developed countries, who benefit from what plant can offer.

• • •

Once upon a time, if we needed more food, we could simply plough more land or cut down more rainforests for cultivation. No longer. This approach causes environmental damage and ignores the need of poor farmers in developing nations to enhance the productivity of their farms to ensure local food security.

It is time to change the debate about food production. Let’s frame discussions about agriculture in the context of environmental, economic, and social impacts—the three pillars of sustainability. Rather than focusing on how a seed variety was developed, we must ask what most enhances local food security and can provide safe, abundant, and nutritious food to consumers. We must ask if rural communities can thrive and if farmers can make a profit. We must be sure that consumers can afford food. And finally we must minimize environmental degradation. This includes conserving land and water, enhancing farm biodiversity and soil fertility, reducing erosion, and minimizing harmful inputs. We must work together to identify the most appropriate technology to address a particular agricultural problem.

6 In the last twenty years we have seen dramatic advancements in plant genetics. In 2000 the first plant genome was sequenced after seven years at a cost of $70 million. This year the same project is expected to take two or three minutes and cost $99. Through genomic sequencing of diverse plant species and varieties, we have already learned an astonishing amount about the genetic diversity of our food crops. Seed is just one of many components needed for sustainable food production, but it is an important one. We would be foolish not to take advantage of the advances in plant genetics.

In the case of bananas and BXW, we may be able to control the disease by introducing genes from other plant species, such as rice, that confer resistance. Such resistance genes are widespread in plants and animals and are highly effective at controlling bacterial infection. These genes have already been incorporated in virtually all crops that we eat today, through conventional genetic approaches.

If millions of small-scale farmers see their banana crops wiped out for want of new disease-resistant varieties, it will be due both to the failure of world’s agricultural scientists to make their voices heard and to the resistance of ideological opponents of modern genetic techniques. This is suffering that we can prevent.

Is Organic Food Healthier?

You've no doubt noticed that organic foods are a fair bit more expensive at the grocery store. An organic head of lettuce can cost twice as much as a regular one. But is it actually any healthier?

Many scientists have found no clear health benefits from organic produce

In recent years, many scientists have answered this question with a flat "no." There just doesn't seem to be much evidence that organic foods are any more nutritious.

In 2009, the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency reviewed 67 studies on this topic and couldn't find much difference in nutrient quality. In 2012, a larger review of 237 studies published in the Annals of Internal Medicine also found that organic food didn't appear to be any healthier or safer than their conventionally grown counterparts.

But there have long been dissenters who argue that there must be some health benefits to organic. And a new study in the British Journal of Nutrition, led by Carlo Leifert of Newcastle University, has reopened this debate by adding a small twist. Their review of 347 previous studies found that certain organic fruits and had higher levels of antioxidants than conventionally grown crops.

Unfortunately, this doesn't prove very much by itself. No one knows if those moderately higher levels of antioxidants actually boost your health. For that to happen, they'd have to be absorbed into your bloodstream and distributed to the right organs — and there just hasn't been much good research showing that. For now, there's little evidence to suggest concrete health benefits.

In the meantime, some experts have suggested that this endless health debate has become a distraction. Marion Nestle of New York University argues that the best reasons to buy organic produce is for the environmental impacts and production values. Any nutritional benefit is a "bonus," if there even is one.

Other food experts point out that most Americans don't eat enough fruits or vegetables of any type — and that's a far more pressing concern than whatever minor differences may exist between organic and conventional food. "What's missing in this debate is the important fact that the best thing consumers can do is to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, period, regardless of whether they are produced organically or conventionally," says Carl

7 Winter of the University of California, Davis. (He's also skeptical, by the way, that organic food is any healthier for you.)

So here's an overview of this sometimes contentious topic:

One big obstacle for anyone trying to compare "conventional" and "organic" foods is that these are incredibly broad terms.

In the United States, there's technically a dividing line between the two: farms certified as "organic" by the USDA are prohibited from using synthetic pesticides, petroleum-based , or sewage sludge. Organic animals can't be fed antibiotics or growth hormones.

CONVENTIONAL AND ORGANIC PRACTICES CAN VARY WIDELY

But that still leaves a of room for variation. Some conventional farms go heavy on the synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. But others spray more selectively or use alternative pest management techniques

Likewise, some organic farms use natural pesticides that are considered "organic" but can nonetheless be quite toxic. And some organic farms use compost that can contain more contaminants like lead or cadmium than regular fertilizer. It all depends — there's no single "conventional" farming system or single "organic" system.

What's more, there a vast array of different variables that can affect the nutritional value of crops — from soil type to climate conditions to the crop cultivars being planted. Teasing all those variables out in order to make a grand statement about "organic" versus "conventional" farming is incredibly difficult.

Still, that hasn't stopped scientists from trying. So far, however, they've had a tough time finding clear nutritional differences. One 2013 study found that organic tomatoes have more vitamin C, but they're also smaller, so the differences are fairly minimal. Another 2013 study found that organic milk in the US contained more omega 3s — although this may be driven more by the types of feed used rather than being a unique property of "organic" farming.

More recently, researchers have been conducting large meta-analyses — studies of studies — to try and pinpoint some big picture lessons here. To date, those reviews have usually found that there's little nutritional difference between organic and conventional produce. (See here and here.) But now comes a new study with a slight dissent…

In the latest meta-analysisLeifert and his colleagues reviewed 347 studies comparing organic and conventional produce around the world. They concluded that organic fruits and vegetables had, on average, higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of synthetic pesticide residue.

What's not clear, however, is whether these differences have any actual health impact on human beings. And there have been a few sharp criticisms of the study. Let's take a closer look at the paper's findings:

1) Organic produce, on average, had higher levels of antioxidants. This is the part of the study that got the most attention from the media. On average, the authors found, organic produce had higher levels of flavonoids, phenolic acids, anthocyanins, and carotenoids — in some cases, 20 to 40 percent higher.

These compounds — referred to as "antioxidants" — are essentially plant defenses, produced when the plants are stressed by their environment. So one possibility is that organic crops create more of them since they're not protected by chemical pesticides and have to deal with more pests.

8 But there's a catch: We don't really know whether these compounds boost people's health. We don't know how many of these extra antioxidants are actually absorbed by humans. We don't know what the optimal level of antioxidant intake actually is. It's true that some studies haveshown that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can protect against disease. But those studies looked at people mostly eating conventionally grown vegetables — and the precise role of antioxidants is still being debated.

The University of Washington's Charles Benbrook, a co-author of the new study, noted this point in a blog post: "Our team, and indeed all four reviews, acknowledges that many questions remain about the bioavailability of plant-based antioxidants, how necessary they are at different life stages, and how inadequate intakes shift the burden of disease." He added that there were some reasons to think those antioxidants are beneficial, but it's hard to say for sure.

2) Organic , on average, had 48 percent lower cadmium levels. Cadmium is a heavy metal that is taken up by plants in the soil and harmful to humans in very high doses. So at first glance this seems relevant.

Yet it's hard to see why itself would lead to lower cadmium levels — this may just reflect differences in various soils. (Crops from some organic farms can be quite heavy in cadmium.)

It's also not clear this is a pressing health concern. The EPA says the average American gets 0.0004 micrograms of cadmium per kilogram of body weight per day from food — ten times lower than levels that would cause kidney damage. If you want to reduce your cadmium intake, quitting smoking and eating less shellfish are much more important steps to take.

3) Organic fruits and vegetables had less synthetic pesticide residue. This shouldn't be too surprising — synthetic pesticides aren't used on organic farms and the study didn't test for organic pesticides (which can themselves be quite toxic). Still, some experts are unconvinced that pesticide residue is a big problem either way.

Some Experts aren't convinced that differences in pesticide residue matter

"From my 27 years of research on pesticides and food safety, I remain skeptical that the extremely low levels of pesticide residues we encounter from foods have any impact on public health, and slightly lowering such levels even more would not have any additional impact," Carl Winter, a pesticide and risk assessment specialist at the University of California-Davis, wrote to me in an e-mail. "Our typical exposure to pesticide residues is at levels 10,000 to 10,000,000 times lower than doses that cause no observable effect in laboratory animals that are fed pesticides daily throughout their entire lifetimes." (Here's some of his research on that.)

(That said, anyone who's worried can wash their fruits and vegetables in tap water and significantly reduce pesticide residue.)

4) Organic produce had lower levels of protein, fiber, and nitrates. This was another finding that didn't get as much attention and might actually be a point in favor of conventional produce — as Tom Sanders, a nutritional scientist at King's College London, points out. That said, there's still some debate over whether higher or lower levels of nitrates in vegetables are preferable.

As with all big studies on a contentious topic, Leifort's study also received a fair bit of criticism — you can see a roundup here. A few points made:

Some experts argued that comparisons are inherently difficult

9 1) The health benefits of those antioxidants are still uncertain: "There is no evidence provided that the relatively modest differences in the levels of some of these compounds would have any consequences (good or bad) on public health," said Richard Mithen of the Institute for Food Research. He added this twist: "The additional cost of organic vegetables to the consumer and the likely reduced consumption would easily offset any marginal increase in nutritional properties, even if they did occur, which I doubt."

2) The analysis may have included too many low-quality studies. Alan Dangour — the scientist who led the 2009 review finding no significant differences in organic food — arguedthat Leifert likely included too many low-quality studies in his review. Leifertshot backthat Dangour's own study excluded too many studies. This is often a point of contention when dealing with meta-analyses.

3) Comparisons between "organic" and "conventional" may be inherently flawed. And still other experts reiterated the point made above that it's difficult to compare "organic" to "conventional" farming because practices vary so widely. For instance: on average, cadmium levels may be lower in organically grown crops. But some organic farms use compost that's extremely high in cadmium.

To make this even trickier, the Leifort review surveyed studies across the entire world — 70 percent of the studies were in Europe, with the rest in the United States, Canada, Brazil and Japan. There may well be regional variations within that average.

Meanwhile, a few other commentators have suggested that the debate over whether organic or conventional food is healthier is becoming increasingly useless.

Back in 2009, food writer James McWilliams pointed out that only about 2.5 percent of food eaten in the United States is even organic — and the typical consumers tend to be college-educated and fairly well-off. That means we're quibbling over marginal nutritional differences (if any) for a population that's already fairly healthy.

By contrast, about 73 percent of the US population doesn't eat the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day. For many nutritionists, that's a much more pressing concern — fixing that would swamp any of the health benefits organic food might have.

Indeed, a few experts wonder if the endless debate over organic versus conventional might even be counterproductive: "I worry that some consumers might actually reduce their consumption of fruits and vegetables because of pesticide residue concerns," notes Winter, "which would do them more harm than good."

Even some proponents of organic food are now suggesting that the nutrition question is a bit of a sideshow. On her blog, Marion Nestle argues that the case for buying organic produce hinges more on how our food is produced and concern for the environment: "As I said, if they are more nutritious, it's a bonus, but there are plenty of other good reasons to prefer them."

She doesn't list those reasons, but proponents often cite things like less fertilizer runoff and pollution or fewer antibiotics being used in farms or less pesticide exposure for farmworkers.

Still, the Guardian recently cited one survey suggesting that at least 55 percent of organic buyers list "healthy eating" as a reason for purchasing. So it's unlikely this debate will go away anytime soon — and it'll remain of keen interest to a lot of people.

10 The biggest study so far finds that GM crops have large, widespread benefits, Economist

ON NOVEMBER 4th voters in Colorado rejected a ballot initiative that would have required special labels for foods made with genetically modified (GM) ingredients. As The Economist went to press, voters in Oregon seemed likely to say no to a similar proposal there, though the count was not complete. Regardless of the outcome, however, the referendums indicate the strength of feeling generated by GM crops: the Oregon vote was the costliest ballot in the state’s history. By chance, the day before the poll saw the publication in PLOS ONE of the largest review yet conducted of the crops’ effects on farming. It concludes that these have been overwhelmingly positive.

The review in question is a meta-analysis. This is a statistically rigorous study of studies, rather than a mere summary of the literature. Its authors, Matin Qaim and Wilhelm Klümper, both of Göttingen University, in Germany, went through all examinations of the agronomic and economic impacts of GM crops published in English between 1995 and March 2014. This provides a near-complete survey. Most studies of the subject have been published in English, and the widespread adoption of such crops began only in the mid-1990s.

Commercial genetic modification for crops comes in two forms. One makes them resistant to insect pests. The other confers tolerance to glyphosate, enabling farmers to spray their fields with this herbicide and kill off all the other plants (ie, the weeds) in them. As a consequence, the study found, herbicide-tolerant crops have lower production costs—though this was not true for insect-resistant crops, where the need for less pesticide was offset by higher seed prices, and overall production costs were thus about the same as for unmodified crops. With both forms of modification, however, the yield rise was so great (9% above non-GM crops for herbicide tolerance and 25% above for insect resistance) that farmers who adopted GM crops made 69% higher profits than those who did not.

Many poor countries eschew GM crops, fearing they will not able to export them to areas which ban them, notably the European Union. This has a big opportunity cost. Dr Qaim and Dr Klümper found that GM crops do even better in poor countries than in rich ones. Farmers in developing nations who use the technology achieve yields 14 percentage points above those of GM farmers in the rich world. Pests and weeds are a bigger problem in poor countries, so GM confers bigger benefits.

In debates about GM the methodology of studies has often generated as much controversy as the crops themselves. Drs Klümper and Qaim have done something to moderate these controversies, too. Though some studies they include were not peer-reviewed, and a few of the early ones did not report sample sizes, limiting their value, the data they used for the meta-analysis—which include conference papers, working papers and book chapters as well as work published in academic journals—may correct for perceived publication bias, the tendency of journals to publish only the most dramatic findings. This large body of evidence enabled the authors to control for possible differences in matters other than whether a crop was modified or not, such as fertiliser use. They also found that who pays for a study does not seem to influence its results.

Dr Klümper and Dr Qaim conclude by expressing a hope that their work “may help to gradually increase public trust in this promising technology”. To judge by the heat generated in Oregon and Colorado, that may take time.

We Need GMO Wheat, Lusk & Miller, 2014

THREE crops — corn, soybeans and wheat — account for a vast majority of the value of America’s agricultural crop output. But wheat is different in one important respect. While more than 90 percent of the nation’s corn and acres are now planted with seeds genetically engineered to resist insects, herbicides or both, there is not a single acre of genetically engineered wheat being grown commercially in the United States.

11 Wheat farmers have suffered as a result, as have consumers of bread and pasta, who have been paying higher prices than they might have because fewer and fewer acres are planted in wheat. Without the benefits of the newer molecular techniques of genetic engineering, the nation’s wheat industry will continue to struggle against other commodities that have adopted biotechnology, and against the drought conditions out West. All of this is happening as the planet’s population increases and global wheat demand expands in response.

Why has wheat lagged behind? One reason is that, back in the mid-1990s, corn and soybean farmers avidly embraced the nascent biotechnology revolution, snatching up new, genetically engineered seed varieties. But wheat farmers balked at the potentially higher prices of these new seeds and feared that anti-genetic engineering views held by some of our trading partners would hurt exports.

Today, it’s easy to see why corn and soybean farmers made the switch. Crop yields have increased and farmers have been able to reduce their use of chemical insecticides and shift to less toxic herbicides to control weeds. They’ve also made more money. Over the same period, the amount of land planted in wheat has dropped by about 20 percent, and although yields have increased, productivity growth has been lower than for the crops genetically engineered with molecular techniques.

Monsanto recently said that it had made significant progress in the development of herbicide-tolerant wheat. It will enable farmers to use more environmentally benign herbicides and could be ready for commercial use in the next few years. But the federal government must first approve it, a process that has become mired in excessive, expensive and unscientific regulation that discriminates against this kind of genetic engineering.

The scientific consensus is that existing genetically engineered crops are as safe as the non-genetically engineered hybrid plants that are a mainstay of our diet. The government should be encouraging and promoting these technologies.

How does wheat differ from the other commodity crops, and why does it matter? Much of our domestically produced corn and soybeans are fed to animals or made into ethanol, while most wheat is consumed by humans as bread or pasta. This is why there were fears that genetically engineered wheat would suffer as an export crop. The European countries and Japan have traditionally imported about 15 percent of our wheat exports. But they have also been antagonistic to genetically engineered crops and food derived from them.

As a result, wheat farmers missed out on perhaps the most important benefit of genetic engineering: the development of crops that can survive droughts or grow with lower-quality water. Those attributes would go a long way to improving wheat yields and making the crop more attractive to farmers.

Much of the nation’s wheat crop comes from a section of the central plains that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, which is rapidly being depleted. The direst warnings suggest that at current rates of use, in 50 years only 30 percent of its water will remain. Farmers who have relied on the aquifer may face tougher restrictions on use or be forced to change their farming practices.

The severe drought that has parched the region over the past few years has accelerated the aquifer’s depletion. Although conditions have recently improved somewhat, during the last growing season for winter wheat, much of the region was still in severe drought.

New crop varieties that grow under conditions of low moisture or temporary drought could increase yields and lengthen the time farmland is productive. Varieties that grow with lower-quality water have also been developed.

12 In Egypt, for example, researchers showed a decade ago that by transferring a single gene from barley to wheat, plants are able to tolerate reduced watering longer. This variety requires only one-eighth as much irrigation as conventional wheat and can be cultivated with meager rainfall alone. This is what wheat farmers need.

Monsanto, the world’s leader in agricultural genetic engineering, scrapped its effort to modify wheat in 2004, in part because of opposition from North American grain merchants and growers worried that some major foreign countries would reject imports of all American wheat. Since then, many growers and millers have reconsidered and now want access to genetically engineered varieties with resistance to pests, disease, frost and drought.

While some importing nations are skeptical of — or hostile to — genetic engineering, others, like China, Brazil, Indonesia and some in sub-Saharan Africa, are deeply concerned about their food security and have only limited opportunities for growth in domestic production. They should be receptive to genetically engineered wheat.

Given the importance of wheat and the confluence of tightening water supplies, drought, a growing world population and competition from other crops, we need to regain the lost momentum. To do that, we need to acquire more technological ingenuity and to end unscientific, excessive and discriminatory government regulation.

Farm Bill Reflects Shifting American Menu…Senator’s Persistent Tilling, Steinhauer, 2014

WASHINGTON — The farm bill signed by President Obama last month was at first glance the usual boon for soybean growers, catfish farmers and their ilk. But closer examination reveals that the nation’s agriculture policy is increasingly more than white bread.

Within the bill is a significant shift in the types of farmers who are now benefiting from taxpayer dollars, reflecting a decade of changing eating habits and cultural dispositions among American consumers. Organic farmers, growers and hemp producers all did well in the new bill. An emphasis on locally grown, healthful foods appeals to a broad base of their constituents, members of both major parties said.

“There is nothing hotter than farm to table,” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican from a district of vast cherry orchards.

While traditional commodities subsidies were cut by more than 30 percent to $23 billion over 10 years, funding for fruits and vegetables and organic programs increased by more than 50 percent over the same period, to about $3 billion.

Gravenstein apples being harvested in Sebastopol, Calif. The new farm bill gives fruit and vegetable farmers greater access to crop insurance, protecting them from the vagaries of weather. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Fruit and vegetable farmers, who have been largely shut out of the crop insurance programs that grain and other farmers have enjoyed for decades, now have far greater access. Other programs for those crops were increased by 55 percent from the 2008 bill, which expired last year, and block grants for their marketing programs grew exponentially.

In addition, money to help growers make the transition from conventional to organic farming rose to $57.5 million from $22 million. Money for oversight of the nation’s organic food program nearly doubled to $75 million over five years.

13 Programs that help food stamp recipients pay for fruits and vegetables — to get healthy food into neighborhoods that have few grocery stores and to get schools to grow their own food — all received large bumps in the bill.

The new attention and government money devoted to healthy foods stem from the growing market power of those segments of the food business, as well as profound shifts in nutrition policy and eating habits across the country.

“This is my fourth farm bill, and it’s the most unique I have ever been involved in,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat who negotiated, prodded, cajoled and finally shepherded the bill through Congress over two and a half years. “Past farm bills pit regions against regions. I said that we were going to support all of agriculture.”

The bill also eased a 75-year-old restriction on growing and researching industrial hemp, paving the way for several states to begin pilot growing programs for this variety of the cannabis plant, which can be refined into oil, wax, rope, cloth, pulp and other products.

At the same time, hunting programs were protected in the farm bill, which attracted the rare approbation of the National Rifle Association. The bill also ties conservation requirements to crop insurance benefits, which many environmental groups praised. “I think this is the new coalition,” Ms. Stabenow said.

While still in the shadows of traditional farming, organics are the fastest-growing sector of the food business. Support for that movement has traditionally come from Democrats in Congress, but the organic farming provisions in the bill had broad support from both parties.

“We kind of overperformed with younger new members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,” said Laura Batcha, the executive director of the Organic Trade Association.

Ms. Batcha pointed to a provision sought by her organization to exempt organic producers from having to pay assessments for certain marketing programs, which received broad backing from both Republicans and Democrats. The support surprised her, she said, but showed the popularity of organic products.

“I think we should let consumers make their own decisions about what kinds of foods they purchase,” said Representative Reid Ribble, Republican of Wisconsin, who is a member of the House Agriculture Committee. “And if there’s a market for organic products, we should support it.”

Over all, healthy food has become more politically popular because of efforts to combat childhood obesity and diabetes and a growing national interest in the farm-to-table movement promoted by the first lady, Michelle Obama, and other national figures.

“The average member of Congress, whether they are urban or suburban, knows that is what their constituents want,” said Ferd Hoefner, the policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. “Even the most ag-centric member of the Agriculture Committee knows that is what helps sell the bill when it gets to the floor.”

For farmers of fruits and vegetables, oddly referred to in ag-speak as specialty crops, the ability to participate in crop insurance programs, which were expanded as direct payments to farmers were ended, is a major victory.

John King, a co-owner of King Orchards, which specializes in Montmorency cherries in Central Lake, Mich., was previously able to get insurance only for his apples. His cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots and raspberries went uncovered.

14 In 2012, the combination of a bitterly cold winter and a March heat wave resulted in Mr. King’s greatest losses in the farm’s 34-year history, wiping out all of his stone fruit and a third of his apple crop. “Crop insurance did not even cover half my labor bill for the year,” said Mr. King, who has already signed up for the maximum insurance for 2014.

“Over the years the big-program crops have been able to get what they want while for specialty crops it has been, ‘Tough luck as you freeze,’ ” Mr. King said. “Well, we grow the stuff people eat and want to eat, and we do need some financial cover from this increasingly precarious weather situation.”

On the farm bill, Ms. Stabenow was able to come to an agreement with her Republican counterparts in the Senate as well as the House, where the most conservative members sought large cuts to the food and nutrition program that makes up about 80 percent of the bill.

Ms. Stabenow had to fend off the most conservative House members, who at one point wanted drug testing for food stamp recipients. (Ms. Stabenow told them that she would agree only if every recipient of farm bill dollars was also tested.) But she also had to deal with some liberals who pushed back against any cuts to the food stamp program, including a provision that had allowed some states to inflate residents’ food assistance by counting the costs of utility bills that residents did not actually have.

“I appreciate passionate advocates,” Ms. Stabenow said. “But I believe it helps to be the first one to call out situations where there is not accountability.”

Ms. Stabenow was so persistent, her colleagues, supporters and Senate aides said, that some senators began to fear her approach as she moved purposefully between the Republican and Democratic cloakrooms just off the Senate floor. The clerks there would bet over drinks whether she could get her bill passed.

In general, the bill reflects the diverse agricultural landscape of Ms. Stabenow’s home state, which plays a leading role in movements like community gardens in schools and offers a program that gives food stamp recipients double credit for food and vegetable purchases — a model for the federal farm bill.

“I give her a lot of credit,” Mr. Hoefner said. “She made it clear from the get-go that these items needed to be in the bill.”

GMOs: Vermont v. Science, The Economist, 2014

VERMONT banned slavery before the rest of America, back in 1777, and local greens talk like they have just achieved something comparable. “We’re first again,” exults Will Allen, a delighted organic farmer, as the Green Mountain state prepares to require labelling of foods containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients. As The Economist went to press Peter Shumlin, Vermont’s governor, was set to sign a bill that would come into force in July 2016.

Vermont is a quirky mix: it has strict environmental rules, loose gun laws and America’s only self-proclaimed socialist senator. It also takes its food very seriously, says Andrea Stander of Rural Vermont, a group that advocates a “local food system which is self-reliant and based on reverence for the earth”. Per capita, Vermont has more organic farms than any other state. Montpelier is America’s only McDonald’s-free state capital.

A fitting place, then, for a law designed to satisfy the unfounded fears of foodies. Repeated studies have found no threat to human health from GM ingredients, which are found in up to four-fifths of processed food in American shops; nor have any ill effects appeared during the 20 years in which Americans have been eating the stuff. Indeed, ever since the genetically engineered Flavr Savr tomato reached supermarket shelves in 1994

15 Americans have taken a more relaxed approach to the technology than much of the rest of the world. Some 64 countries, including the 28 of the European Union, require labelling. America does not, but that is changing.

In 2012 and 2013 GM-labelling initiatives in, respectively, California and Washington state failed narrowly after biotech and food companies spent millions on ads to persuade voters that they would be costly and pointless. Last year Maine and Connecticut passed labelling laws, though both have trigger provisions stopping them from taking effect until nearby states follow suit. Generic polling finds 90% or more of Americans in favour of compulsory labelling. Over a million have signed petitions urging the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees national food-labelling rules, to mandate labelling of GM food. (In 1992 the FDA ruled that since there was no material difference between GM and non-GM food, labelling was not required.)

Rural Vermont’s website has a cartoon depicting GM foods as radioactive mutant creatures with eyes on stalks. But most campaigners downplay the wildest claims about Frankenfoods, preferring to emphasise consumer choice, which is hard for GM food producers to argue against.

If they lobby to suppress information, consumers may wrongly assume they have something to hide. Yet if the government requires labels, consumers may assume that this is an official health warning, even if it isn’t. Europeans shunned GM food after labels were introduced, and many European supermarkets declare themselves (not entirely accurately) GM-free. The same could happen in America. “The activists did a great job of scaring people about their food sources,” sighs Norm McAllister, a farmer (and Republican state senator) who grows GM corn in Vermont.

The fatuous fear of Frankenfoods

Genetic modification is one of the most promising tools for feeding a global population that will one day hit 9 or 10 billion. Yet its development depends partly on consumers in rich countries, since the 842m malnourished people don’t have much spare cash. As with other technologies, the techniques honed in rich countries tend eventually to spread to poor ones. But if greens scare Americans into rejecting GM food entirely, that benign process may be interrupted.

Vermont (population 626,000) is small enough that food firms could withdraw their products from its shelves at no great cost. But dozens of states, including California, are considering labelling bills. If they pass, America would have a patchwork of labelling laws, creating a financial and logistical headache. Food firms would have to separate GM from non-GM ingredients, disrupting the whole supply chain. Prices would rise for everyone.

Aware of the threat, the food industry is seeking federal help. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, an industry body, has convened 35 food organisations to lobby for a law that would oblige the FDA to test all new GM traits before they reach the shelves, and to finalise guidelines for a voluntary labelling regime. Crucially, this would preclude state laws that mandate labelling, like Vermont’s.

The organic lobby, naturally, cries foul. But, points out Greg Jaffe of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, in other countries compulsory labelling has tended to restrict consumers’ choice; try finding GM products in European supermarkets. As things stand, those who want to avoid GM foods can buy organic products. Moreover, state laws are often badly written; the California and Washington initiatives contained impossible-to-attain “zero-tolerance” provisions that could have led to endless lawsuits.

Retailers and some manufacturers are already shifting with the wind. Whole Foods, a supermarket for the rich, plans to introduce GM labelling for all products by 2018. Ben & Jerry’s, a Vermont-based maker of pricey ice- cream, plans to source all its products with non-GM ingredients by the end of the year, as it already does in Europe. Even Walmart, America’s largest food retailer, is reported to have softened its stance on labelling. 16 A legal challenge to Vermont’s law looks likely, possibly on free speech grounds. The bill provides for a defence fund, partly filled by taxpayers. “A $1m lawsuit is nothing to California,” says David Zuckerman, a state senator and organic farmer who supported the bill, “but for little Vermont that would be significant.”

The outlook is unappetising. Food scares are easy to start but hard to stop. GM opponents, like climate-change deniers, are deaf to evidence. And the world’s hungry people can’t vote in Vermont.

Odd Priorities Chart: 3,100,000 deaths from malnutrition; 0 from GMOs

The new green revolution: A bigger rice bowl, Another green revolution is stirring in the world’s paddy fields The Economist, 2014

A SEED of rice that could transform the developing world saved Asha Ram Pal’s farm in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the summer of 2008. Mr Pal had planted rice on his small plot, not much bigger than a football field. Floods are an ever-present threat in the state, making it one of the poorest places in the world. And that year the monsoon was particularly heavy, remembers Bob Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Mr Pal’s fields flooded for two weeks after he planted the rice seedlings; a few weeks later, they were inundated again. He thought his crop was lost. His neighbours advised him to do what they have always done when the floods come: prepare for hunger.

But this time Mr Pal had planted an experimental seed developed by scientists from IRRI in the . The seed has a genetic sequence bred into it which puts it into a sort of suspended animation when submerged. Instead of drowning, Mr Pal’s rice sprang back when the water receded. In a normal year he gets a tonne or so from his 1-hectare (2.5-acre) plot; in a bad year nothing. In that terrible flooded season, he harvested 4.5 tonnes—as good a yield as on any rain-fed paddy in the world.

Flood-resistant rice is now spreading as fast as the waters themselves. Five years after the first field trials, 5m farmers across the world are planting more than a dozen varieties of rice with flood-resistant genes, collectively called “Sub 1”. They are proliferating even faster than new rice varieties during the heady early days of the first green revolution in the 1960s. “And Sub 1 is the first of a new generation of seeds,” says Mr Zeigler. If all goes well, over the next few years plants that tolerate drought, salinity and extreme heat will revolutionise the cultivation of mankind’s most important source of calories. But that will depend on the technology working as promised and, in particular, on public policies that support a second green revolution. Neither is guaranteed.

The first green revolution helped save the developing world from disaster. Two plant breeders, Norman Borlaug with wheat and M.S. Swaminathan with rice, persuaded governments in Asia and elsewhere to encourage the planting of higher-yielding varieties, especially of rice; 3.5 billion people, half of mankind, get a fifth of their calories or more from the stuff. When the men started work in the early 1960s, China was suffering the famine of the Great Leap Forward. And India was widely thought to be on the brink of starvation.

Today in Asia, famines are things of the past. One reason is the spread of democracy. Another is the green revolution, which has ensured that there is plenty of rice—India even exports it. And demand seems to be shrinking: the richest Asian countries, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, are eating less rice. This has led governments which once supported the green revolution to think that a new one would be unnecessary. Rice, they reason, is a problem that has been solved. Better to improve the diets that are causing obesity or change the intensive-farming practices that are damaging the environment.

But it is not clear that the mission has been accomplished. In Asia as a whole, consumption per person is flat, not falling. The population is still growing, so demand for rice is rising on the continent where 90% of the crop is raised. In Africa, where a third of the population depends on rice, demand is rising by almost 20% a year. At that rate rice will surpass maize as Africa’s main source of calories within 20 years. 17 Seeds of stagnation

As a rule of thumb, if the world’s population grows by 1 billion, an extra 100m tonnes of rice is required to feed them. Given current world-population forecasts, total rice consumption, now under 450m tonnes, is likely to grow to 500m tonnes a year by 2020 and to 555m by 2035—an increase of 1.2-1.5% a year. That would be manageable if rice yields were also growing at that rate. But they are not. They are rising at barely half that pace.

The first green revolution almost doubled yields from 1.9 tonnes a hectare in 1950-64 to 3.5 tonnes in 1985-98. Even that was only enough to keep pace with population growth: yields and population rose at the same rate (1.75% a year) in the half century after the green revolution started.

Now the gains seem to have levelled off. Plant breeders fear that, with current technology, ten tonnes a hectare for rice in intensive-farming systems may be the limit, though it is not clear why. What is clear is that, out in the fields, output per hectare is stalling, and in some places falling.

For 25 years, IRRI has been planting a field using its best seeds. The field itself has remained much the same: the bugs and microbes that live in the roots of the rice plant mean that soil fertility is maintained even if three crops are grown each year. But output from the plot has fallen from nine to ten tonnes a hectare in the early 1990s to seven to eight tonnes now, as pests and diseases have taken their toll. Rice yields were rising at 2.5% a year between 1962 and 1982. But between 1992 and 2012 growth fell to just 0.8% a year (see chart 1).

The facts of rice

Without new seeds, yields will decline further. Global warming will tend to push harvests down: higher night- time temperatures are associated with lower yields. The richest rice-growing areas in the world are the deltas of Asia’s great rivers, such as the Mekong, Brahmaputra and Irawaddy; they are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increased salinity, which kills rice. The plant uses two to three times as much water as other (largely for levelling the paddies; the plant itself consumes no more than wheat or maize), but water is scarce everywhere. And each year the spread of Asian—especially Chinese—cities converts millions of acres of good rice-growing land into buildings and roads.

The consequences could be momentous. Rice plays a role in Asian societies that is hard for outsiders to appreciate. (A small example: Toyota means “bountiful rice field” and Honda means “main rice field”.) In the river basins that are the world’s rice bowls, nothing else will grow with the same productivity. It is rice or nothing, and if there are problems with rice, there are problems with everything. A rice shortage would have geopolitical implications. No Indian or Chinese government could contemplate the possibility with equanimity. They would do whatever it takes to ensure they have enough rice. If this pushes up world food prices, so be it. If they must twist the arms of exporting countries, they will. If Asia’s giants feel insecure, their neighbours will tremble.

So a lot is riding on boosting rice yields. But how likely is it that a second green revolution will take off?

The first was a relatively simple affair, technologically at least. Conventional rice varieties were long and leggy. If you gave them fertiliser, they grew too tall and fell over. That changed in 1962, when IRRI released a dwarf variety called IR8. Because its stem was short, it was able to absorb fertiliser without collapsing. So now farmers had a crop they could feed. And with stem growth restricted, more of the increase in plant size went into the head of seeds (called a panicle). IR8 spread from the Punjab to the Philippines, transforming farming wherever water could be controlled and fertiliser delivered.

18 The second revolution will be different. Farmers will not adopt a single miracle variety. Instead, researchers will tailor seeds for particular environments (dry, flooded, salty and so on). And they are also trying to boost the nutritional quality of rice, not just the number of calories. As a result, the second revolution will be felt most profoundly in the poorest areas and among the poorest farmers. In contrast, the first had the biggest impact in the richest fields, with the most water and fertiliser.

The flood-resistant trait that rescued Mr Pal’s crop was first identified in the 1980s, in a few old-fashioned varieties native to Odisha, another flood-prone state in eastern India. After more than a decade of false starts, plant scientists identified the genes that make the Odisha varieties flood-tolerant. They went back to IR8’s descendants, spliced these genes into them and bred from the result. Having spent years getting nowhere with traditional plant-breeding methods, scientists went from marking the genetic sequence to producing flood- resistant seeds in four short years.

Abdelbagi Ismail, IRRI’s principal scientist, hopes to do the same for other traits that have so far eluded breeders, such as drought resistance and heat tolerance. High temperatures during rice flowering can lead to sterility. If it is too hot, the anthers of the plant, which contain the pollen, do not open properly; the pollen is not released, the stigma are not pollinated and the crop is lost. The problem occurs during the hour or so when the plant flowers. It could be overcome if it were possible to encourage rice to flower in the cool of the early morning—as opposed to scorching midday, its usual hour. Tom Ishimaru, who works at IRRI and the Japan International Research Centre for Agricultural Sciences, has found a gene which codes for early-morning flowering, raising hopes of solving the problem.

Such breeding programmes will not have the same dramatic impact that IR8 did. But developing miracle seeds is not the only way to boost yields. During the 1990s China did it by improving hybrids: crossing different lines to combine the advantages of both. This is the usual way of improving maize, but it is less common with rice. Unlike maize, rice breeds true in successive generations, so farmers can retain seeds from one harvest and plant them for the next. Farmers will switch if a new variety gives them a big one-off boost, but not just to get the small increments offered through hybrid improvements. Hence, it takes a long time to boost yields using hybrids—unless the government forces farmers to use new seeds. China’s rulers could do that; less authoritarian regimes cannot.

Cereal killers

China’s experience shows that a series of small improvements can add up to something large. This will be true of the second revolution on the poorest lands. The first green revolution had most impact on irrigated land and, thanks to it, the 80m hectares which are irrigated (an area equivalent to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia put together) now have yields of five to six tonnes a hectare; they produce three-quarters of the world’s rice. But there is nearly as much rice land which depends on rainwater. Yields there are far lower—between one and two and a half tonnes a hectare—and rain-fed lands produce only a quarter of the world’s rice. Yields are low because almost half this land is prone to drought and a third to floods. Most African paddies fall into this category, which is why the first green revolution passed Africa by.

Drought- and flood-tolerant seeds could double yields from these areas. That would boost harvests from 110m tonnes to 220m, and push global output to 550m tonnes—enough to meet expected demand in 2035. In short, all the extra rice could come from rain-fed areas alone.

Because yields on rain-fed lands are low, even a doubling would not increase total production by as much as the first green revolution did. But the impact on poverty would be greater. More than 500m of the absolute poor (those with $1.25 a day or less) depend on rice, far more than on any other food (see chart 2). A disproportionate number of them live in north-east India, Bangladesh and the Irrawaddy delta of Myanmar. In these areas the lowest castes and tribes have been forced onto the worst lands. 19 Those are the very places where the second green revolution would make the biggest impact. Flood-resistant rice “differentially benefits [India’s] scheduled castes and tribes”, a recent study of one of the early field trials concludes. If these improvements were combined with another programme to boost the nutritional quality of rice—the so-called Golden Rice project which genetically modifies rice to include additional vitamin A—then the benefits to some of the poorest people in the world would be vast.

The first green revolution did not improve people’s livelihoods just by providing technological fixes. It did so because the new seeds attracted new capital into farming, encouraged mechanisation, credit markets, new management techniques and so on. The second revolution will also do this. Already, rice farming is changing faster than for generations. Age-old habits of raising seedlings, transplanting them into the fields and threshing, drying and storing the plant are being rejected. Now, seeds are planted directly into the field by machine and everything from threshing to milling is done by specialist firms. For such changes to become more widespread, though, incentives and policies need to push in the right direction. Alas, they don’t all do so.

On the face of it, the second revolution is subsidised. Not only do governments finance the basic research. In many Asian countries, from rice importers such as Indonesia to exporters such as Thailand, they also pay farmers above the world price. Thailand’s scheme is so generous that it ran out of money this year. Such price distortions artificially boost demand for green-revolution seeds in the short run.

But high domestic prices are also bad for the economy. They impose heavy costs on consumers. And they undermine incentives to export, making world prices more volatile and international markets thinner. This hurts farmers who stand to gain from the shift of comparative advantage in rice-growing towards India and Bangladesh thanks to the second green revolution. If world trade becomes even more marginal, any advantage those countries gain will be muted.

High domestic prices also tend to drive up local wages, reducing the competitiveness of manufacturing and making rural labour dearer. And by making rice farming a safe bet, the policies blunt entrepreneurship in agriculture too, reducing farmers’ incentives to invest in new machinery and new ways of farming. On balance, therefore, artificially high rice prices make the new generation of seeds attractive, but by less than one might expect.

Land-use policy is equally messed up. In America and Europe technological change has tended to make farms bigger. The bigger the operation, the greater the gains from technology. That has not happened in Asia. In the most productive irrigated areas, farms are often smaller than two hectares and, despite mass migration from the countryside, have been getting even smaller during the past three decades. Governments have intervened to prevent farm consolidation partly because they want to slow down urbanisation, fearing that it could drive up unemployment in cities. Such policies have only not done considerable harm because of an extraordinary proliferation of efficient rental markets (see article).

The original green revolution transformed Asia from a continent stalked by hunger into one that could think and plan beyond the next harvest. It helped lay the foundation for the continent’s economic miracle and made possible Asia’s demographic transition from high fertility and high mortality to smaller, richer families. The second green revolution will not do that. But it should complete the first one, mainly by bringing benefits to the poorest, who missed out first time round. It will help mechanise and move more people off farms and into more productive labour. And it should prevent Asia slipping back under the shadow of hunger and all the political and social disruptions that such misery causes. Few other things can promise as much.

20

Meat & Greens, The Economist, 2013

ENVIRONMENTALISTS don’t like meat. It is not just—or even mainly—that some will not eat meat on moral grounds. Rather, greens say, meat has a big environmental hoofprint. It takes much more grain, land and water to fatten an animal to produce a pound of meat than it does to grow the same number of calories in the form of grain that is eaten directly (as bread, say). Animals also belch and fart forth remarkable quantities of greenhouse gases. The logical conclusion was drawn by Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said “eat less meat; you’ll be healthier and so will the planet.”

New research in the current (special) edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that raising livestock does indeed chew up a disproportionately large share of the world’s basic resources. But it also suggests that reforming the livestock business, rather than rejecting it, is the way to go.

Livestock matters because it is the biggest land user in the world. More land is given over to grazing animals than for any other single purpose. About a third of the world’s crops are fed to animals, and they use a third of all available fresh water. Something like 1.3 billion people depend in some way on raising animals; animals provide a third of the protein in peoples’ diets and the business accounts for a third of global agricultural GDP. But meat is an inefficient source of calories. It accounts for 17% of global calorific intake, but uses twice that amount of land, water and feed.

Livestock also damages the environment. It accounts for between 8% and 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions, depending on how you account for changes in land use (when the Amazon is cut down for pasture, carbon emissions rise). Roughly a fifth of all the world’s pasture has been degraded by overgrazing. Livestock uses water inefficiently: you need about 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef but only 1,250 litres for a kilo of maize or wheat. And animals form a significant reservoir of diseases that affect humans; avian flu, the best known example, is far from an isolated case: 60% of human diseases are shared with animals and three quarters of new infectious diseases of people were first found in animals.

But a reduction in the size of the business isn’t going to happen soon, if ever. Urbanisation and rising incomes mean that more of the world is converging on European and American levels of meat consumption, which is roughly 100kg a year (80kg in Britain, 120kg in America). At the moment, most of Africa and South Asia eats less than 20kg of meat a year. Even if parts of India remain vegetarian, shifting patterns of demand imply worldwide meat consumption will double by 2050.

So the question is, what sort of livestock farming can satisfy the growing appetites, while using land, water and food crops more rationally? Environmentalists have an answer for that: small-scale, traditional pastoralism, of the sort practised for thousands of years. Such farming is, says Worldwatch Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, “essential to combat the destructive trend of factory farms.” The research in PNAS suggests this is back to front. Intensive livestock farming is more efficient and environmentally friendlier. It is essential to combat the destructive trend of traditional pastoralism.

The research by Mario Herrero of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and colleagues starts by establishing a new data set on biomass use, meat production, feed efficiency, and other measures of livestock farming. It breaks this down by region, animal species, products (meat, milk, eggs and so on). This is vital because, even though the livestock sector is big, comprehensive, disaggregated data on it has been patchy.

21 The results confirm that efficiency in livestock varies hugely. Chickens and pigs convert grain into meat at rates of two or three to one (ie, it takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken). The ratio for lamb is between four and over six to one and that for beef starts at five to one and goes as high as 20 to one. This has long been known. What is new are the amounts of greenhouse gases associated with the production of a kilo of protein by different animals. These vary even more widely: 3.7kg for chicken; 24kg for pork; and up to 1,000kg for cattle. The lower, more efficient ratios for chicken and pigs come about because they are kept in hated factory farms. Factory farming is good for the planet, if not for the animals.

The new research shows that there is an enormous spread of efficiency throughout livestock farming, not just between different animals. Milk is far more efficient than meat: it takes five times as much feed to produce protein in the form of meat than in milk.

A cow in America or Europe will need to eat somewhere between 75kg and 300kg of hay and other dry matter for each kilo of protein. In most of Africa, she will need 500kg or more. On the dry rangelands of east Africa— in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia—the figure is up to 2,000kg, because the land is so poor. In these places, switching from traditional pastoralism to feeding cattle with grain would dramatically improve efficiency. It would also reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Cattle on dry rangelands produce 100 times as much greenhouse gases as cattle in America or Europe for the same amount of protein. Cattle account for 77% of the greenhouse gases produced by livestock for 59m tonnes of beef each year. Pork and poultry produce 10% of the greenhouse gases, but 215m tonnes of meat.

Several lessons emerge from the new research. The advantages of white meat (chicken and pork) are even greater than was thought. Milk is more efficient as a source of protein than meat. And there are big opportunities for efficiencies in South Asia, South-East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where 45-80% of pig and chicken farms are run by smallholders (compared with America and Europe, where 98% are run at industrial scale). There are risks, too, because industrial-scale livestock farming harbours some of the diseases that humans share with animals. But efficiencies in livestock farming imply better use of scarce basic resources such as land and water—which is environmentally essential.

Meat & Greens, Part II, 2014

IN DECEMBER angry farmers drove their cattle to Manapparai, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and blockaded the market. They were protesting against a decision by health inspectors to close their own market at Trichy, 35 kilometres (22 miles) away, after cases of foot and mouth. India is famously tolerant of cattle in the road. Now, cows were everywhere.

It was just one example of the tensions affecting the livestock business worldwide. In places like Tamil Nadu, one of India’s richer states, middle-class supermarkets and food-safety rules coexist uneasily with older customs of selling live animals in cities and consumer preferences for local meat and milk. Europe has been transfixed after horsemeat was found in processed beef in Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands; French, Polish and Romanian suppliers were implicated. China is gripped by a donkey-meat scandal: the “Five Spice” donkey sold in Walmart stores had been adulterated with fox.

The new attention is warranted. Around the world 1.3 billion people, most of them poor, raise animals, accounting for a third of total agricultural GDP. More acres are given over to feeding animals than to any other single use. Meat provides a third of the protein in worldwide diets. But it is a mixed blessing. Animals are less efficient than plants at converting nutrients and water into calories. Meat accounts for a sixth of humanity’s calorific intake but uses roughly a third of its crop land, water and grain. Producing a kilogram of grain takes 1,500 litres of water; a kilo of beef takes 15,000 litres.

22 Domestic animals also belch and fart amazing quantities of greenhouse gases—and when jungle is cut down for pasture, carbon emissions rise. In all, livestock farming produces 8-18% of greenhouse-gas emissions. It is the main contributor to the build-up of nitrogen and phosphorus in the world’s soils, producing too much ammonia (which is caustic), nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas) and dead zones in oceans (the result of excess phosphorus).

A fifth of the world’s pasture has been spoilt by overgrazing. If the livestock business repeats the growth of the past 40 years during the next 40 the results could be disastrous, with more jungle and savannah turned into pasture, and more rivers and watering holes drunk dry. If all that were not enough, domesticated animals form a reservoir of diseases that afflict humans (see article).

Many environmentalists say the only thing to do is to cut the business down to size. “Eat less meat,” said Rajendra Pachauri of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN gathering of scientists who track global warming. “You’ll be healthier and so will the planet.” Fat chance. Urbanisation and rising incomes in the developing world will lead to much of it approaching European and American levels of meat consumption (see chart). Even if parts of India remain vegetarian, worldwide meat-eating will probably double by 2050.

So what sort of livestock farming can satisfy growing demand while using land, water and crops more rationally? Recent papers by Mario Herrero of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and colleagues argue that the answer is intensive livestock farming, which is more efficient and environmentally friendlier than small-scale, traditional pastoralism of the sort beloved by many greens. But to avoid turning more wilderness into pasture and using more water that the world cannot spare, “factory farming” must be reformed.

A greener hoofprint

Among the lessons of the research is that white meat wins out over red for environmental reasons as well as health ones. It takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken; 3kg for 1kg of pork. The ratio for lamb is between four and six to one; for beef, between five and 20 to one. And cows need five times as much feed to produce 1kg of protein as meat than to produce it as milk.

Even without switching between types of protein, there is scope for big productivity gains in South and South- East Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where 45-80% of pig and chicken farms are smallholdings. In America and Europe 70-98% are run at industrial scale. A cow in America or Europe eats 75-300kg of hay and other dry matter per kilo of protein; in Africa, which has the largest number of traditional pastoralists, she needs 500kg or more. On the dry rangelands of Ethiopia and South Sudan, the figure is up to 2,000kg.

Switching from pastoralism to feeding cattle with grain would dramatically improve efficiency. Just how much can be seen from milk yields. Between 1950 and 2000, they doubled in the Netherlands, from 3,560 litres per cow per year to 7,180. In Africa the improvement was zero.

This switchover would also reduce the damaging build-up of nitrogen and phosphorus in soil, since intensive methods turn the nutrient in feed into meat more efficiently. And it would slash greenhouse-gas emissions. Cattle on dry rangelands produce 100 times as much per unit of meat as cattle in America or Europe. Three- quarters of the total comes from cattle, for 59m tonnes of beef a year. Poultry and pigs produce 10%—for four times as much meat.

Industrial-scale livestock farming can encourage the spread of diseases that humans share with animals. And animals may suffer in factory farms (though they bear a big burden of endemic diseases in pastoral systems). Such downsides are cited by environmentalists who would prefer less factory farming and more traditional

23 pastoralism. But efficient livestock farming makes better use of scarce basic resources—and is far better for the planet.

Entomophagy

How insects could feed the world

At first, my meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I’ve eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodles slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, the aroma of ginger and garlic, a few wilting chives placed on the plate as a final flourish. And then, I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn’t spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere – my noodles are teeming with insects. I can’t say I wasn’t warned. I’ve agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab’s “insect deliciousness” project, a three-year effort to turn insects into tasty treats. The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant that is often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities. The Food Lab operates from a houseboat in Copenhagen, but Reade and Evans are in the Netherlands for a few days, and they’ve borrowed a local kitchen to try out some brand new dishes. Along with three other gutsy gastronomes, I am here to taste the results. We take our seats at a long, high table as Reade and Evans wheel in a trolley loaded with our meals. We each receive a different main course. I get the Asian-style noodles and fixate on the bug I can see. “That’s a locust,” Reade says. “[It] was alive this morning. Very fresh.” But he’s much more excited about another, hidden ingredient: fat extracted from the larvae of black soldier flies (or, to put it less delicately, maggot fat). The whole dish has been stir-fried in it.

“I believe you’re the first human being on the planet to have ever been served anything cooked with this,” Reade tells me. But not to worry: “I’ve eaten some of it myself, an hour ago. I’m still alive.”

I inspect my plate.

Reade urges us to begin: “Eat before it gets cold.”

The next morning, Reade and Evans join 450 of the world’s foremost experts on entomophagy, or insect eating, at a hotel down the road in Ede. They are here for Insects to Feed the World, a three-day conference to “promote the use of insects as human food and as animal feed in assuring food security”.

The attendees are all familiar with the same dire facts. By the year 2050, the planet will be packed with 9 billion people. In low- and middle-income countries, the demand for animal products is rising sharply as economies and incomes grow; in the next few decades, we’ll need to work out how to produce enough protein for billions more mouths. Simply ramping up our current system is not really a solution. The global livestock industry already takes an enormous toll on the environment, gobbling up land and water. It’s a potent polluter, because of the animal waste and veterinary medicines that seep into soil and water. And it emits more greenhouse gases than planes, trains and automobiles combined. The insect authorities assembling in Ede believe that entomophagy could be an elegant solution to many of these problems. Insects are full of protein and rich in essential micronutrients, such as iron and zinc. They don’t need as much space as livestock, emit less greenhouse gases, and have a sky-high feed conversion rate: a single kilo of feed yields 12 times more edible cricket protein than beef protein. Some species of insects are drought resistant and may require less water than cows, pigs or poultry.

24 Insect meal could also replace some of the expensive ingredients, such as soybeans and fishmeal, that are fed to farm animals, potentially lowering the cost of livestock products and freeing up feed crops for human consumption. As an added bonus, bugs can be fed with food scraps and animal manure, so insect farms could increase the world’s supply of protein while reducing and recycling waste.

Officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) became interested in the role of insects in food security about a decade ago, after documenting the significant part that insects play in central African diets. Since then, the FAO has been commissioning studies, issuing reports and arranging small meetings on eating insects. The gathering in Ede, jointly organised by the FAO and Wageningen University and Research Centre, is the culmination of all these efforts – the first big international conference to bring together entomologists, entrepreneurs, nutritionists, chefs, psychologists and government officials. They are here to discuss how to expand the use of insects as food and feed, particularly in the west, and to lay the foundation for an edible insect industry – to review the science, identify the obstacles and talk about how to progress.

Over the next three days, they will lay out their vision. It is ambitious and optimistic. They will speculate about creating an insect aisle at the supermarket and fast-food restaurants that serve bug burgers. They will imagine putting packages of “beautiful, clean” shrink-wrapped mealworms on display at the meat counter, alongside the steak and chicken. And they will dream about a world in which forests are thick, land is fertile, the climate is stable, water is clean, waste is minimal, food prices are low, and hunger and malnutrition are rare.

Turning to insects for nourishment is not a new idea – the Bible mentions entomophagy, as do texts from Ancient Greece and Rome. But insect eating never caught on in Europe. The reasons are unknown, but the spread of agriculture – and, in particular, the domestication of livestock – may have made insects, and undomesticated plants and animals in general, less important as food sources. The advent of agriculture may have also contributed to a view that insects were primarily pests and that insect eating was primitive. What’s more, Europe’s temperate climate makes wild harvesting less practical than in the tropics, where insect populations are larger and more predictable.

Nevertheless, entomophagy remains common in some parts of the world: at least 2 billion people worldwide eat insects, according to the FAO. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a favourite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1,900 and growing.

Laura D’Asaro’s first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania. In the summer of 2011, D’Asaro – a tall, freckled Harvard student with a relentlessly cheerful disposition – had gone to east Africa to take classes in Swahili. One day, she came across a Tanzanian woman standing by the side of the road, selling fried caterpillars out of a big basket. D’Asaro, an on-again off-again vegetarian, wasn’t sure she wanted to eat an insect, but curiosity trumped apprehension. “When else am I going to try fried caterpillar?” she wondered. So she tried not to look too hard at the brown, inch-and-a-half long caterpillar as she placed it in her mouth and chewed. She was pleasantly surprised – the texture and the taste reminded her of lobster.

When the summer ended, D’Asaro returned to the US and moved on with her college life until, two years later, she stumbled across an article on a newly released FAO report called Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security. As she read about the benefits of bug eating, she thought back to her time in Tanzania. “All these things clicked,” she recalls. “It made me reconsider why I was vegetarian and made me realise that insects could be this more sustainable protein that I’d been looking for pretty much my whole life.”

D’Asaro decided to start a company to introduce insects to diners and enlisted two of her college classmates, Rose Wang and Meryl Natow. They began ordering boxes of bugs from pet food companies and playing around in the kitchen, making waxworm tacos and smothering crickets in soy sauce. “We were immediately very impressed with the taste of it all,” D’Asaro says. They teamed up with a Boston-area chef and started 25 developing recipes. But when they shared samples with friends, or tried out their new dishes on the public, it did not go well. “People seemed very frightened.”

They had run smack into what may be the biggest hurdle in expanding insect cuisine: getting people to eat it. Some foods, like chocolate, sell themselves. Insects are not one of those foods. “Insects,” says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “are disgusting. Things that are disgusting are offensive because of what they are. It’s not that insects taste bad. It’s that the idea of an insect is upsetting to people.”

Rozin, who is known as “the father of disgust in psychology”, has come to the conference in Ede to present his work on consumer attitudes toward insects, and he outlines the challenges that entomophagic entrepreneurs will face. At one point during his talk, he clicks forward to a slide that displays two photos, side by side: a cockroach and Adolf Hitler. “In my research on disgust,” he tells the audience, “these are my two best stimuli. Because they reliably produce negativity.” Insects are so repellent that most Americans, at least, don’t want to consume anything that bugs have ever touched. In the 1980s, Rozin conducted a study in which he invited volunteers to try two different kinds of juice and rate them on a 200-point scale. Then, he briefly submerged a dried, sterilised cockroach in one of the glasses of juice and a birthday candle holder in the other. The participants were asked to evaluate each juice again; their ratings of the “cockroached” juice plummeted, by 102 points on average. The candleholder, by contrast, produced a ratings drop of a measly three points.

Why do we find insects so disgusting? The answer, Rozin says, is simple: because they’re animals. As a general rule, most of the foods that humans find disgusting are animal products and most animal products are disgusting; even the most insatiable carnivores eat only a small fraction of the species that exist on the planet. In some ways, roaches are no different to gorillas, gerbils or iguanas, or any other creatures that we don’t routinely eat. In other ways, though, they’re much worse. Many insect species are found on, in or around waste, and they’re commonly associated with dirt, decay and disease, all of which can significantly up the yuck factor.

D’Asaro and her partners realised that they would need to ease consumers into the idea of bug gastronomy, so they abandoned the idea of serving whole insects and decided to work instead with cricket flour, which could be invisibly incorporated into familiar foods. They decided to launch their company, which they named Six Foods, with a product Americans already love: crisps. They created “chirps”, a triangular crisp made of black beans, rice and cricket flour, which is lightly spritzed with oil and then baked. Chirps are high in protein and low in fat and taste similar to tortilla chips, D’Asaro says, although the cricket flour adds a slightly nutty, savoury flavour.

In some ways, however, chirps are a Trojan horsefly, a way to sneak bugs into American diets and transform sceptics into insectivores. Six Foods hopes to eventually introduce products in which the critters aren’t so hidden. “That’s our ultimate goal,” D’Asaro says. “Where you can go to the store or a restaurant, and you can get a beefburger or a chicken burger or what we call an “ento” burger. But we’re just not quite there yet in society.”

D’Asaro isn’t the only one hoping we get there: in the past few years, there’s been an explosion in businesses trying to put the “meal” into mealworms. A Belgian outfit called Green Kow makes carrot-mealworm, tomato- mealworm and chocolate-mealworm spreads. Ento, based in the UK, sells mealworm and cricket pâtés at food festivals and last year created a pop-up restaurant devoted to insect cuisine. In the US, Chapul and Exo sell protein bars full of cricket flour, while New Generation Nutrition, in the Netherlands, has experimented with a falafel-like chickpea and buffalo worm patty.

Then there are the companies that are raising insects for animal feed, such as AgriProtein, which is based in South Africa and building “a damn big fly factory”, as co-founder David Drew puts it. The plant is scheduled to open next year and will produce 24 tons of larvae and 7 tons of maggot meal, or MagMeal, every day. Agriprotein plans to create nine more of these factories across the globe by 2020. Enviroflight (in the US), Ynsect (in France) and Protix (in the Netherlands) have also built large insect production facilities. 26 Representatives of many of these enterprises have made their way to Ede, carting along product samples or prototypes to display in a large foyer at the conference hotel. Delegates can ponder whether they prefer made with grasshoppers or silkworms, buy a plastic container of freeze-dried mealworms for €3.50 (£2.80), or lean against the enormous sacks of black soldier fly meal stacked up at the back of the room. These businesses may one day be competitors, but for now, they’ve got an industry to build, so the atmosphere is one of camaraderie and collaboration. They trade strategies and suggestions and commiserate about the obstacles ahead.

Many companies have arrived at the same conclusion as Six Foods – that it’s best not to confront consumers with insects too directly. That often involves processing and disguising the bugs, but it can also mean doing a little clever rebranding. Take waxworms, which live in beehives and eat honeycomb. By all accounts, they’re delicious: buttery, with a taste reminiscent of bacon. But the word “worm” can be a deal-breaker for diners, so Six Foods has re-christened them “honey bugs”. Ento calls them “honeycomb caterpillars”. Florence Dunkel, an entomologist at Montana State University, recommends borrowing from their scientific name, Galleria mellonella. “We say ‘We’re having Galleria quesadilla’, and it sounds much more exotic,” she tells the audience at one presentation. “It’s very romantic.” Dunkel also suggests using the euphemism “land shrimp” for insects.

The arthropod advocates know they have some convincing to do, but they are optimistic. In consumer surveys, many people report that they’d be willing to try insects, at least in some form. When Rozin conducted an online survey of several hundred Americans, he found that 75% said they’d rather eat an insect than raw goat meat, and 53% reported that they’d rather eat an insect than endure 10 minutes of moderate pain. “So this isn’t the worst thing in the world,” Rozin reassures the audience during his talk. “It’s just something you’d rather not do.”

The conference-goers seem to find comfort in telling and retelling the story of sushi – a strange, foreign dish that showcased raw fish and yet became not just acceptable but trendy in the west. “There’s no question that food preferences can change,” says D’Asaro. “I mean, there are 450 people here who believe in the future of insects as food. So I think it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen now, and I would certainly – I mean, I am putting my money on it.”

The entomophiles are not just putting their money where their mouths are – they’re putting their mouths where their money is. There is audible excitement on the first morning of the conference when the organiser, entomologist Arnold van Huis, announces that each day’s lunch will feature at least one insect snack. That day, it’s miniature quiches sprinkled liberally with dried mealworms. They don’t look particularly appetising, but I’m in the company of true believers. It’s easy to get caught up in their passion and energy. I put a mealworm quiche on my plate. I don’t want to miss my chance to help save the world.

The one dissenting note at the conference comes from Adrian Charlton. A biochemist at the Food & Environment Research Agency in the UK, Charlton is one of the scientists working on PROteINSECT, a €3m (£2.4m), EU-funded project that launched last year. The team, which includes researchers in seven countries and three continents, is trying to nail down the nitty-gritty details involved in turning insects into animal feed. The scientists are testing different methods of fly farming, conducting livestock feeding trials and analysing the environmental impact of insect factories, among other things. Charlton is leading the safety and quality analyses, and he’s here at the conference the day after we’ve all chowed down on mealworm quiche, to warn us that “not all insects are safe”.

Whether they’re used in animal feed or human food, insects present a slew of hazards. Bugs scooped up from the wild may be covered in pesticides or other contaminants, but even breeding insects in industrial, indoor facilities won’t necessarily eliminate the risks. One of the benefits of insects is that they can be fed on waste, but food scraps may be contaminated with fungus, some species of which produce nasty toxins. Animal manure 27 may contain disease-causing bacteria, such as salmonella and campylobacter, as well as antibiotics or other drugs given to livestock. Heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium and lead can also accumulate in animal manure and agricultural waste – and then in the bodies of insects that feed on it. “We know in some cases insects will tolerate much higher levels of metals than mammals,” Charlton warns. “And therefore that’s a risk in terms of using them as a feedstock.”

In his initial tests, Charlton has found that some flies raised on animal and food waste have cadmium levels higher than limits set by the EU. Other researchers have also documented elevated levels of lead in dried grasshoppers from Mexico and dangerous levels of fungal toxins in the mopane caterpillar, which is eaten in many parts of Africa. “This is not all speculation,” says Charlton.

Insects also have their own pathogens: viruses, bacteria and fungi that colonise their tiny bodies. Although there’s still a lot to learn about these microorganisms, some could potentially pose risks to humans or livestock. Then there’s the allergy question. Insects are arthropods, and several other arthropods – most notably shrimp – can cause severe allergic reactions. One of the major triggers of shellfish allergies is a muscle protein called tropomyosin. The protein sequence of tropomyosin is similar in insects and crustaceans, and people with shellfish allergies may also react to insects.

That’s not to say that all these potential dangers will turn out to be actual dangers, or that they’re insurmountable. But right now, there’s very little data. “We need to know a lot more, really – that’s the bottom line,” says Charlton.

Given that, Charlton says, it makes sense for legislators to take a cautious approach. In the EU, companies that want to introduce edible insect products may be subject to the Novel Food Regulation, which applies to any food that wasn’t “used for human consumption to a significant degree” in Europe before the law was enacted in 1997. Any of these “novel” products or ingredients must undergo a safety assessment, and then be approved by food safety regulators, before going on the market. The situation in the US is similar: companies can sell whole insects as long as they are clean, wholesome and raised specifically for human consumption, but if they want to use a novel insect-derived product, such as protein powder, as an additive, they may need to petition the Food and Drug Administration to designate the ingredient as safe.

The Novel Food Regulation sounds simple, but in practice it has caused confusion. Owing to what many people consider to be an oversight, the law applies to ingredients that are “isolated” from animals but not animals that are eaten whole. And yet, some national food authorities have rejected whole-insect products, and future versions of the Novel Food Regulation may include them. Meanwhile, some companies are selling products that may be forbidden under the current regulation, without any apparent consequence. These and other ambiguities can leave companies in an uncomfortable grey area, unsure of whether they are allowed to sell their products.

Getting insects into animal feed could prove even tougher than getting them on to people’s plates, as a result of rules enacted in response to the outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. The disease spread as the remains of sick animals were processed into feed for other livestock. To combat this problem, the EU instituted a series of policies, including a ban on feeding “processed animal proteins” to farmed animals. There are some exceptions for fishmeal and fish feed, but as the law stands, insect meal is a non-starter. Another problem for would-be insect farmers is a law that forbids “farmed animals” – a category that includes insects raised for food and feed – from being reared on certain kinds of waste, including manure.

The restrictive (and sometimes confusing and contradictory) regulatory system is the target of particular scorn at the conference, where the heads of various insect enterprises point out that these policies were developed before bugs were on the agricultural and gastronomic radar.

28 “Insects will be allowed to be fed to chickens in Europe,” David Drew, of AgriProtein, says in his talk. “It’s just a mistake – let’s be honest … At the time the legislation was created, there was no insect feed. Otherwise, it would be there in the legislation. It’s absolutely absurd that the natural food of chickens, which is maggots … is banned, and fish, which they’ve never eaten, is permitted.”

The audience breaks into a hearty, spontaneous round of applause, but Drew isn’t done yet. “It’s a bit like banning giant pandas from eating bamboo. It just ain’t right.”

But while the entrepreneurs seem to be growing restless – some have brought products to display at the conference that they’re not yet allowed to sell – some scientists are worried about moving too fast. “Until we know more, then the legislation shouldn’t change to allow insects into the food chain,” says Charlton.

When I catch up with him a few weeks later, Charlton makes clear that he’s not trying to shut the bug businesses down or keep insects out of animal feed forever. “I actually do think that this is a good idea,” he says. “It just needs the data behind it to prove that.”

I ask him whether I was foolish to eat the mealworm quiche. “It depends how cautious you are and how adventurous you feel,” he says diplomatically. “I guess I’m more of an evidence-based person.”

Eating the mealworm quiche had given me a good sense of what the insectivores are up against. The dish tasted fine – the mealworms had a slightly nutty, toasted flavour and gave the quiche an extra crunch – but it still made my stomach turn. After taking a few bites, I found myself pushing the quiche to the side of my plate. I pulled a piece of bread off the top of my insect-free cheese sandwich and used it to cover the quiche; I didn’t want to look at the worms while I was eating the rest of my lunch.

But I’d survived the quiche, as well as the maggot fat at that first tasting by the Nordic Food Lab. Over my week in the Netherlands, I’d tried other delicacies: locust tabbouleh; chicken crumbed in buffalo worms; bee larvae ceviche; tempura-fried crickets; rose beetle larvae stew; soy grasshoppers; chargrilled sticky rice with wasp paste; buffalo worm, avocado and tomato salad; a cucumber, basil and locust drink; and a fermented, Asian-style dipping sauce made from grasshoppers and mealworms.

Although I found many of the dishes to be psychologically difficult to stomach, none of them had tasted bad. The insects themselves were quite bland. The crickets had a slightly fishy aftertaste and the buffalo worms a metallic one. The rose beetle larvae were vaguely reminiscent of smoked ham. Mostly, the insects were carriers for whatever other, stronger flavours were in a dish.

In fact, the Nordic Food Lab’s Josh Evans and Ben Reade declared their tasting a failure, largely because the star ingredients – which came from Dutch insect farms – were nearly flavourless. The insects were a far cry from the delectable specimens they’d caught in the wild during their research trips around the world.

Over the past year, they’ve been to five continents and discovered an astonishing world of insect flavour. In Australia, they savoured the sweet-and-sour tang of honey ants and sampled scale insect larvae, which taste like fresh mushrooms and pop softly in the mouth. In Uganda, they feasted on queen termites, which are fatty – like little – with the texture of sweetbreads, the fragrance of foie gras and a delicate sweetness. In Mexico, they enjoyed escamoles, desert ant eggs with a creamy mouthfeel and the aroma of blue cheese.

Rather than carting crates of escamoles to Copenhagen, the Food Lab hopes to identify European insects that are similar to the ones tasted further afield or can be prepared in similar ways. (One pro tip, which they picked up from a farmer in southwestern Uganda: crickets should rest for a few minutes after being cooked.) The goal isn’t necessarily to get everyone eating insects. Rather, it’s to introduce diners to delicious, under-used ingredients, expand food choice and encourage people to embrace the edible resources that surround them. 29 But Evans and Reade object to large-scale insect farming. It’s partly on gastronomic grounds – in their experience, farmed, freeze-dried insects taste “like cardboard”, Evans says – but also on ecological ones, worrying that we may end up merely replacing one industrial protein-production system with another.

“Insects themselves could be the most sustainable thing, they could have no carbon footprint at all,” Reade says. “But then if we insisted on freeze-drying them all using huge amounts of energy and sending them halfway across the planet for energy-consuming protein extraction and then decided to sell that protein in another part of the world shaped like chicken breasts in a little plastic packet – well, there’s nothing sustainable about that at all.”

Indeed, just because insects have a killer feed-to-food conversion ratio doesn’t mean that anything we do with or to insects will be eco-friendly. Bart Muys, an ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, tells the conference-goers that although insects can be reared on relatively tiny plots of land, producing insect meal requires significantly more energy than fishmeal or soymeal does, largely because the bugs need to be raised in warm conditions. The environmental impact of each production system will vary, depending on countless factors, including location, species and feedstock. The golden rule, Muys warns, is “Do not claim before you know.”

Although everyone at the conference is dreaming of a future with more insects on the menu, the exact natures of those dreams vary widely – from the chefs who want to showcase insects’ unique flavours at the world’s best restaurants to the businessmen who believe the best use of bugs is as a feedstock to help lower the price of beef. There’s no central authority dictating the next steps; although there’s talk of gathering for another conference in two or three years, all the experts and advocates will pursue their own priorities in the meantime.

The edible insect industry is still in its infancy, and it’s too soon to tell how it will develop or whether it will succeed. Will we accept insect flour in our snack foods? Can we be persuaded to make waxworm tacos in our own kitchens? Will crickets become a grocery store staple? And will any of this add up to real change? Many other innovations are also being hailed as the future of food, from fake chicken to 3D printing and from algae to lab-grown meat. Whether any of them, including insects, will turn out to make a real contribution to food security and sustainability remains an open question.

For their part, Evans and Reade reject the notion that insects will be some sort of silver bullet. Bugs, they say, will only be a real part of the solution if we are careful and thoughtful about how we integrate them into the food system. In their eyes, entomophagy is about more than merely getting a precise amount of protein on a plate – it’s about making sure everyone on the planet has access to food that is affordable, healthy, diverse, environmentally sound and, yes, delicious. “Insects can be a vehicle for something,” Reade says. “But it has to be recognised that it’s not the insects themselves that are going to make it sustainable. It’s the humans.”

FAO

Box 1.1 What are insects? The word insect derives from the Latin word insectum, meaning “with a notched or divided body”, literally “cut into sections”, from the fact that insects’ bodies have three parts. Pliny the Elder created the word, translating the Greek word ἔντομος (entomos) or insect (as in entomology, which was Aristotle’s term for this class of life), also in reference to their “notched” bodies. The term was first documented in English in 1601 in Holland’s translation of Pliny (Harpe and McCormack, 2001). Insects are a class of animals within the arthropod group that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes and two antennae. They are among the most diverse groups of animals on the planet: there are more than 1 million described species, which is more

30 than half of all known living organisms. The total number of species is estimated at 6–10 million, and the class potentially represents over 90 percent of the differing animal life forms on Earth. Insects may be found in nearly all environments, although only a small number of species occur in the oceans, a habitat dominated by another arthropod group, the crustaceans.

Insect facts: • Insects have an exoskeleton to protect them from the environment. • Insects are the only winged invertebrates. Insects are cold-blooded. • Insects undergo metamorphosis to be able to adapt to seasonal variations. • Insects reproduce quickly and have large populations. • Insects’ respiratory systems – networks of tracheal tubes – are tolerant of air and vacuum pressure, high- altitude flight and radiation. • Insects often do not need parental care.

The practice of eating insects (Box 1.1) is known as entomophagy. Many animals, such as spiders, lizards and birds, are entomophagous, as are many insects. People throughout the world have been eating insects as a regular part of their diets for millennia. Although this practice should be specified as human entomophagy, throughout this book entomophagy refers to human entomophagy. The earliest citing of entomophagy can be found in biblical literature; nevertheless, eating insects was, and still is, taboo in many westernized societies. The unconventional nature of entomophagy has meant that farming insects for food and feed has largely been absent from the great agricultural innovations in livestock farming that emerged in past centuries – with a few exceptions, such as bees, silkworms and scale insects (from which a red colorant is derived). Insects have also failed to feature on the agendas of agricultural research and development agencies worldwide, including at FAO. Until recently, references to insects for food and feed have been largely anecdotal. It is therefore unsurprising that insects are still lacking from the diets of many rich nations and that their sale for human consumption remains part of a niche food sector of novelty snacks. Nevertheless, insect consumption is not a new concept in many parts of the world. From ants to beetle larvae – eaten by tribes in Africa and Australia as part of their subsistence diets – to the popular, crispy-fried locusts and beetles enjoyed in Thailand, it is estimated that insect-eating is practised regularly by at least 2 billion people worldwide. More than 1 900 insect species have been documented in literature as edible, most of them in tropical countries. The most commonly eaten insect groups are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and planthoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies.

This publication also covers other arthropod species eaten by humans, such as spiders and scorpions, which, taxonomically speaking, are not insects.

1.1 Why eat insects? Overall, entomophagy can be promoted for three reasons: • Health: -- Insects are healthy, nutritious alternatives to mainstream staples such as chicken, pork, beef and even fish (from ocean catch). --Many insects are rich in protein and good fats and high in calcium, iron and zinc. -- Insects already form a traditional part of many regional and national diets. • Environmental: -- Insects promoted as food emit considerably fewer greenhouse gases (GHGs) than most livestock (methane, for instance, is produced by only a few insect groups, such as termites and cockroaches). -- Insect rearing is not necessarily a land-based activity and does not require landclearing to expand production. Feed is the major requirement for land. -- The ammonia emissions associated with insect rearing are also far lower than those linked to conventional livestock, such as pigs. 31 -- Because they are cold-blooded, insects are very efficient at converting feed into protein (crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein). -- Insects can be fed on organic waste streams. • Livelihoods (economic and social factors): -- Insect harvesting/rearing is a low-tech, low-capital investment option that offers entry even to the poorest sections of society, such as women and the landless. --Minilivestock offer livelihood opportunities for both urban and rural people. -- Insect rearing can be low-tech or very sophisticated, depending on the level of investment. 1.2 Why FAO? Since 2003, FAO has been working on topics pertaining to edible insects in many countries worldwide. FAO’s contributions cover the following thematic areas: • generation and sharing of knowledge through publications, expert meetings and a webportal on edible insects; • awareness-raising on the role of insects with the general public through media collaboration (e.g. newspapers, magazines and TV); • support to member countries through field projects (e.g. the Laos Technical Cooperation Project); • networking and multidisciplinary interactions (e.g. stakeholders working with nutrition, feed and legislation-related issues) with various sectors within andoutside FAO. Some of the most important milestones are listed below.

Recent developments in research and development show edible insects to be a promising alternative for the conventional production of meat, either for direct human consumption or for indirect use as feedstock. Nevertheless, a tremendous amount of work still needs to be done by a wide range of stakeholders over many years to fully realize the potential that insects offer for food and feed security. The roadmap drawn up during the Expert

Consultation Meeting on Assessing the Potential of Insects as Food and Feed in Assuring Food Security in Rome in January 2012 summarized the main tasks that lie ahead: • Further document the nutritional values of insects in order to promote insects more efficiently as a healthy food source. • Investigate the sustainability and quantify the environmental impacts of harvesting and farming insects compared with traditional farming and livestock-raising practices. • Clarify and augment the socio-economic benefits that insect gathering and farming can offer, with a focus on improving the food security of the poorest of society. • Develop a clear and comprehensive legal framework at the (inter-)national level that can pave the way for more investment, leading towards the full development (from the household scale to the industrial scale) of production and trade in insect products for food and feed internationally. The case needs to be made to consumers that eating insects is not only good for their health, it is good for the planet. Additionally, insect rearing should be promoted and encouraged as a socially inclusive activity. Rearing insects requires minimal technical knowledge and capital investment and, since it does not require access to or ownership of land, lies within the reach of even the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.

In the future, as the prices of conventional animal proteins increase, insects may well become a cheaper source of protein than conventionally produced meat and ocean-caught fish. For this to occur, there will need to be significant technological innovation, changes in consumer preferences, insect-encompassing food and feed legislation, and more sustainable food production. Insects can contribute to food security and be a part of the solution to protein shortages, given their high nutritional value, low emissions of GHGs, low requirements for land and the high efficiency at which they can convert feed into food. The production of insect biomass as feedstock for animals and fish can be combined 32 with the biodegradation of manure and the composting and sanitizing of waste. Insects can partly replace the increasingly expensive protein ingredients of compound feeds in the livestock, poultry and aquaculture industries. Grains now used as livestock feed, which often comprise half the cost of meat production, could then be used for human consumption (van Huis, 2013).

Considering that insects already form part of the human diet in many countries, their potential needs to be re- evaluated. The sustainable harvesting of edible insects in the wild requires nature conservation strategies. Habitat manipulation measures can increase the abundance and accessibility of insect populations. The possibility of simultaneously controlling pest insects by harvesting them as food/feed should be exploited. Simple rearing procedures for some promising insect species need to be developed. Micronutrient bio- availability (particularly of iron and zinc) in edible insects needs further investigation, given the massive occurrence of these deficiencies in the tropics.

In the Western world, consumer acceptability will be determined, in large part, by pricing, perceived environmental benefits, and the development by the catering industry of tasty insect-derived protein products. Preservation and processing techniques are needed to increase shelf life, conserve quality and increase the acceptability of insect food products; processing procedures are also needed to transform insects into protein meal for animal/fish feedstock and for the extraction of insect proteins to be used as ingredients in the food industry.

Considering the immense quantities of insect biomass needed to replace current protein-rich ingredients such as meal and oil from fish and soybeans, automated massrearing facilities that produce stable, reliable and safe products need to be developed. The challenge for this new industry will be to ensure the cost-effective, reliable production of an insect biomass of high and consistent quality. Regulatory frameworks need to be developed. The close collaboration of government, industry and academia will be essential for success.

Plant-based Diets

Could a test-tube burger save the planet?, Ezra Klein, 2013

The most expensive burger ever made was served in London today. It cost more than $300,000 — thanks, Google's Sergey Brin — and didn't taste very good. But the texture was right, and it saved a cow. Maybe one day it can save the Earth. That's the real play behind the test-tube burgers. The hope, according to Dutch scientist Mark Post, who led the team, is that they can eventually help stop global warming.

The case for moving away from raising and slaughtering animals for food is typically portrayed in terms of . But increasingly the argument is about planetary welfare: Meat is simply a huge, huge contributor to climate change, and it's only going to get bigger as the billions of people in emerging economies begin demanding the meat-heavy diets they associate with wealth.

In this 2009 column, I laid out some of the numbers behind this debate. They're worth thinking about today. The column is slightly edited from its original version.

According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. That's larger than the entire transportation sector. Burgers, in other words, are doing more damage to the planet than SUVs.

33 Some of meat's contribution to climate change is intuitive. It's more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. "Manure lagoons," for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas — interestingly, it's mainly burps, not flatulence — is a real player.

But the result isn't funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. "How convenient for him," was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. "He's a vegetarian."

The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in bacon has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this issue. The National Resources Defense Council has a long page of suggestions for how you, too, can "fight global warming." As you'd expect, "Drive Less" is in bold letters. There's also an endorsement for "high-mileage cars such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids." They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word "meat" is nowhere to be found.

That's not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn't poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. "The Sierra Club isn't opposed to eating meat," was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. "So that's sort of the long and short of it." And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock.

The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you'd otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn't require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn't mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It's healthful.

And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that "you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch." Given that PB&J is delicious, it's not the world's most onerous commitment.

It's also worth saying that this is not a call for asceticism. It's not a value judgment on anyone's choices. Going vegetarian might not be as effective as going vegan, but it's better than eating meat, and eating meat less is better than eating meat more. It would be a whole lot better for the planet if everyone eliminated one meat meal a week than if a small core of die-hards developed perfectly virtuous diets.

Of course, if scientists could come up with an affordable, tasty meat that grows in a lab and doesn't impose much cost on the planet — well, that might be the easiest solution of all.

34 Study: Going Vegetarian…, Plumer, 2014

If you're looking for ways to reduce your carbon footprint, try eating less meat. That's one upshot of a big recent study on diets in the United Kingdom.

The researchers found that vegetarians had roughly half the food-related carbon footprint of meat eaters. Vegans were lower still. But even if you can't bear to give up steak, simply eating less meat could reduce the footprint of your diet significantly:

Note: In the study, "heavy meat eaters" are defined as anyone who eat more than 3.5 ounces of meat per day. "Medium meat eaters" eat between 1.7 and 3.5 ounces. "Low meat eaters" eat fewer than 1.7 ounces per day. "Pescatarians" are vegetarians who also eat fish.

Food production is responsible for around 25 percentof the greenhouse-gas emissions heating up the planet. And scientists have long know that meat has a bigger climate footprintthan fruits and vegetables do — partly because meat takes more energy to produce, but also because cows tend to burp up a lot of methane. But it's always been a bit harder to quantify the impacts of specific dietary choices.

That's why, in this new study, Peter Scarborough and colleagues at Oxford University, assessed the actual diets of 29,589 meat eaters, 15,751 vegetarians, 8,123 pescatarians (that is, vegetarians who also ate fish), and 2,041 vegans aged 20-79 in the United Kingdom. They could then calculate the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with the foods everyone ate. The study found a few things:

Vegans have the lightest footprint, but even eating less meat makes a difference

1) The average "high-meat" diet in Britain produced the equivalent of 15.8 pounds of carbon-dioxide per day. Notably, the study defines "high meat" as more than 3.5 ounces per day — or about one chicken breast. That's a pretty low bar (the average British person eats about twice that much meat), and obviously people who eat more meat will have an even bigger footprint.

The average vegan diet had a footprint 60% lighter than meat-heavy diets

2) The average vegetarian diet, by contrast, produced the equivalent of about 8.4 pounds of carbon-dioxide per day — roughly half as much.

3) Vegan diets were even lighter — at 6.4 pounds of carbon-dioxide per day. That is, the average vegan diet's carbon footprint was about 60 percent lighter than the average diet heavy in meat.

4) There were a few surprises here. The average pescatarian diet (vegetarian plus some fish) was roughly as climate-friendly as the average vegetarian diet. The difference was only 2.5 percent.

5) The difference between a heavy meat eater and a light meat eater was actually bigger than the difference between a light meat eater and a vegetarian. That underscores the idea that eating less meat can have a significant impact — even if a person doesn't give it up all together.

A few caveats: This was only a survey of UK diets. American diets may well be different (the average American eats something like 12 ounces of meat per day, for one). Other surveys have suggested, however, that vegetarian diets in the United States still have about half the carbon footprint that meat-heavy diets do.

35 What's more, this doesn't guarantee that going vegetarian will precisely halve your carbon emissions from food. It depends on what you eat and how much you eat. Giving up fish and replacing it with cheese, for instance, could actually increase emissions at the margins (cows have a bigger impact than fish). And other studies have found cases in which some vegetarian substitutions aren't always so climate-friendly.

But the survey's bottom line is pretty clear: When looking at the eating habits of actual people, diets lighter in meat tend to have a significantly smaller footprint overall.

Where do greenhouse‐gas emissions come from?

The Earth already had greenhouse gases in its atmosphere before humans ever came along, as part of the natural carbon cycle.

But since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been adding even more carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That's through activities such as burning fossil fuels or clearing forests. Carbon dioxide is the most important of these gases and typically persists in the atmosphere for centuries.

This chart from Ecofys breaks down the major sources of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions in 2010:

Some highlights:

Fossil fuels: When fossil fuels are burned for energy, that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.Roughly 25 percent of man-made greenhouse gases came from burning coal, 19 percent from the use of natural gas, and 21 percent from oil.

Land-use change: 15 percent of man-made emissions came from land-use changes. Forests, for instance, absorb carbon-dioxide — so if they're cut down and burned for farmland, that increases emissions in the atmosphere.

Agriculture: Another 7 percent of man-made emissions come from agricultural sources — methane emissions from livestock, say, or changes in the amount of carbon stored in soil.

The world’s top five greenhouse-gas emitters in 2009 were China, the United States, India, Russia, and Japan. There are many more charts — breaking things down by per capita emissions and historical responsibility — here

Want to have a real impact on climate change? Then become a vegetarian, McKnight,

Millennials who care about the environment should put their money where their mouths are and stop eating meat. These cows don’t know that they’re destroying the environment. But they’re cows. What’s your excuse?

Between widespread economic disparities, population growth, unsustainable agriculture and climate change, a study partially funded by Nasa predicted that civilization as we know it could be steadily heading for a collapse within the next century – and the window to create impactful change is narrowing. That means millennials are potentially the last generation during which creating meaningful change is possible. But how do we accomplish this?

It’s time to start a dietary revolution.

36 Millennials represent $200bn in economic worth, and if a statistical majority of our generation become vegetarians or vegans, or at least eat significantly less meat than previous generations, we have a chance to have a real economic – and thus environmental – impact.

In 2012, there were roughly 70bn animals raised as livestock for 7.1bn people. And a study published in July by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that livestock production is among the most destructive forces driving climate change: it degrades air quality, pollutes waterways, and is the single-largest use of land.

Precisely how much livestock contributes to climate change remains up for debate: studies show numbers ranging from 18% (a 2006 UN food report) to 51% (a 2009 World Watch study). Most other studies fall somewhere in that range but, in each of them, the advice is the same: humans need to eat less meat to curb climate change and resource scarcity.

Raising animals to eat produces more greenhouse gasses (via methane and nitrous oxide) than all of the carbon dioxide excreted by automobiles, boats, planes and trains in the world combined. Over a 20-year period, methane has 86 times more climate change potential than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide has 268 times more climate change potential, according to the 2006 UN report. Radically reducing the amount of methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere can produce discernable changes in the greenhouse gas effect within decades, while the same reductions in carbon dioxide take nearly a century.

Yes, quitting meat can reduce your carbon footprint significantly more than quitting driving.

Besides the methane and nitrous oxide released during livestock production, industrialized livestock contributes to roughly 75% of deforestation (to give animals grazing grounds and grow soybeans used in feedstock).

Raising cows, of course, has the biggest environmental impact. There are roughly 1.5bn cows raised as livestock, and they consume 45bn gallons of water and 135bn pounds of food every day, according to the documentary . Comparatively, 7.1bn humans consume roughly 5.2bn gallons of water and 21bn pounds of food daily. To put this in digestible terms, producing the meat for a one-third pound hamburger patty as much as 18,000 gallons of water depending on the farming method, according to the US government.

In comparison to chickens and pigs, cows require 28 times more land, 11 times more water and cause five times more greenhouse gasses, according to a study led by Gidon Eshel of Bard College. Looking at foods commonly found in vegetarian and vegan diets, like potatoes, rice and wheat, his report finds that, per calorie of beef, cows require 160 times more land and produce 11 times more greenhouse gases.

The resources needed – and sacrificed – to raise livestock is ridiculous; we simply need to stop breeding so many animals for slaughter. You can take all kinds of other small steps to reduce your environmental footprint: commuting to work by biking or walking, monitoring electricity usage by installing energy-efficient appliances, using less water via low-flow faucets and toilets, buying from environmentally-conscious companies - but researchers argue that none of that on its own will be enough to reverse climate change. If you really want to make a difference, then look at what’s on your plate.

As Albert Einstein said, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” If you’re not willing to go vegetarian or vegan, even just significantly reducing the amount of meat in your diet can have an impact: for instance, instead of adhering to “meatless Mondays”, make it “meaty Mondays”, when Monday is the only day that you eat even a small portion of meat.

37 Putting this off for another generation – the way our parents have – just isn’t feasible. Millennials have the opportunity to use our economic power and personal choices to effect real change, and it’s our responsibility to do so.

Besides, if we don’t stop and reverse climate change, all we’ll have left to eat – if we’re lucky – is fish. Whoops – looks like we’re running out of fish, too.

Government may consider sustainability in new dietary guidelines, Jalonick, 2015

WASHINGTON — The government issues dietary guidelines every five years to encourage Americans to eat healthier. This year’s version may look at what is healthy for the environment, too.

A new focus on the environment would mean asking people to choose more fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains and other plant-based foods — possibly at the expense of meat.

The beef and agriculture industries are crying foul, saying an environmental agenda has no place in what has always been a practical blueprint for a healthy lifestyle.

An advisory panel to the Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments has been discussing the idea of sustainability in public meetings, indicating that its recommendations, expected this month, may address the environment. The two departments will take those recommendations into account as they craft the final dietary guidelines, expected by the end of the year.

The guidelines are the basis for USDA’s “My Plate” icon that replaced the well-known food pyramid in 2010 and is designed to help Americans with healthy eating. The guidelines will also be integrated into school lunch meal patterns and other federal eating programs.

A draft recommendation circulated by the advisory committee in December said a helps ensure food access for both the current population and future generations. A dietary pattern higher in plant-based foods and lower in animal-based foods is “more health promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact than is the current average U.S. diet,” the draft said.

That appears to take at least partial aim at the beef industry. A study by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year said raising beef for the American dinner table is more harmful to the environment than other meat industries such as pork and chicken.

The study said that compared with other popular animal proteins, beef produces more heat-trapping gases per calorie, puts out more water-polluting nitrogen, takes more water for irrigation and uses more land.

As the advisory committee has discussed the idea, doctors and academics on the panel have framed sustainability in terms of conserving food resources and also what are the healthiest foods. There is “compatibility and overlap” between what’s good for health and good for the environment, the panel has said.

The meat industry has fought for years to ensure that the dietary guidelines do not call for eating less meat. The guidelines now recommend eating lean meats instead of reducing meat altogether, advice that the current advisory committee has debated. A draft discussed at the panel’s Dec. 15 meeting says a healthy dietary pattern includes fewer “red and processed meats” than are currently consumed.

38 After that meeting, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association sent out a statement by doctor and cattle producer Richard Thorpe calling the committee biased and the draft meat recommendations absurd. He said lean beef has a role in healthy diets.

The American Meat Institute issued comments calling any attempt to take lean meat out of a healthy dietary pattern “stunning” and “arbitrary.”

Objections are coming from Congress, too.

A massive year-end spending bill enacted last month noted the advisory committee’s interest in the environment and directed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “to only include nutrition and dietary information, not extraneous factors” in final guidelines. Congress often uses such non-binding directions to put a department on notice that lawmakers will push back if the executive branch moves forward.

Environmentalists are pushing the committee and the government to go the route being considered.

“We need to make sure our diets are in alignment with our natural resources and the need to reduce climate change,” said Kari Hamerschlag of the advocacy group Friends of the Earth.

Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said the idea of broader guidelines isn’t unprecedented. They have already been shaped to address physical activity and food safety, he said.

“You don’t want to recommend a diet that is going to poison the planet,” he said.

Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner Is Real Food, Hamblin, 2014

Researchers asked if one diet could be crowned best in terms of health outcomes. If diet is a set of rigid principles, the answer is a decisive no. In terms of broader guidelines, it's a decisive yes.

Flailing in the swell of bestselling diet books, infomercials for cleanses, and secret tips in glossy magazines, is the credibility of nutrition science. Watching thoroughly-credentialed medical experts tout the addition or subtraction of one nutrient as deliverance—only to change the channel and hear someone equally-thoroughly- credentialed touting the opposite—it can be tempting to write off nutrition advice altogether. This month we hear something is good, and next we almost expect to hear it’s bad. Why not assume the latest research will all eventually be nullified, and just close our eyes and eat whatever tastes best?

That notion is at once relatable and tragic, in that diet is inextricable from the amount of healthy time we spend on Earth. Improvements in diet are clearly associated with significant lengthening of lifespan and dramatic decreases in risk of most chronic diseases. Combining disease and longevity into the concept of healthspan, the number of healthy years of life—fundamentally more important but less readily quantifiable than lifespan—the data in favor of optimizing our diets are even more compelling. No one is arguing that diet is less than extremely important to health and well-being, but seemingly everyone is arguing as to what constitutes the best diet.

"A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention."

The voices that carry the farthest over the sea of diet recommendations are those of iconoclasts—those who promise the most for the least, and do so with certainty. Amid the clamor, Dr. David Katz is emerging as an iconoclast on the side of reason. At least, that’s how he describes himself. From his throne at Yale University's

39 Prevention Research Center, where he is a practicing physician and researcher, said sea of popular diet media is the institution against which he rebels. It’s not that nutrition science is corrupt, just that the empty promises of memetic, of-the-moment diet crazes are themselves junk food. To Katz they are more than annoying and confusing; they are dangerous injustice.

Scientific publisher Annual Reviews asked Katz to compare the medical evidence for and against every mainstream diet. He says they came to him because of his penchant for dispassionate appraisals. "I don't have a dog in the fight," he told me. “I don’t care which diet is best. I care about the truth."

Katz and Yale colleague Stephanie Meller published their findings in the current issue of the journal in a paper titled, "Can We Say What Diet Is Best for Health?" In it, they compare the major diets of the day: Low carb, low fat, low glycemic, Mediterranean, mixed/balanced (DASH), Paleolithic, vegan, and elements of other diets. Despite the pervasiveness of these diets in culture and media, Katz and Meller write, "There have been no rigorous, long-term studies comparing contenders for best diet laurels using methodology that precludes bias and confounding. For many reasons, such studies are unlikely." They conclude that no diet is clearly best, but there are common elements across eating patterns that are proven to be beneficial to health. "A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention."

Katz, Meller/Annual Reviews

Among the salient points of proven health benefits the researchers note, nutritionally-replete plant-based diets are supported by a wide array of favorable health outcomes, including fewer cancers and less heart disease. These diets ideally included not just fruits and vegetables, but whole grains, nuts, and seeds. Katz and Meller found "no decisive evidence" that low-fat diets are better than diets high in healthful fats, like the Mediterranean. Those fats include a lower ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids than the typical American diet.

The Mediterranean diet, which is additionally defined by high intake of fiber, moderate alcohol and meat intake, antioxidants, and polyphenols, does have favorable effects on heart disease, cancer risk, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and "is potentially associated with defense against neurodegenerative disease and preservation of cognitive function, reduced inflammation, and defense against asthma."

They also found carbohydrate-selective diets to be better than categorically low-carbohydrate diets, in that incorporating whole grains is associated with lower risks for cancers and better control of body weight. Attention to glycemic load and index is "sensible at the least." Eating foods that have high glycemic loads (which Katz says is much more relevant to health outcomes than glycemic index—in that some quality foods like carrots have very high indices, which could be misleading) is associated with greater risk of heart disease.

Finally, in a notable blow to some interpretations of the Paleo diet, Katz and Meller wrote, "if Paleolithic eating is loosely interpreted to mean a diet based mostly on meat, no meaningful interpretation of health effects is possible." They note that the composition of most meat in today's food supply is not similar to that of mammoth meat, and that most plants available during the Stone Age are today extinct. (Though it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Paleo extremists are crowd-funding a Jurassic Park style experiment to bring them back.) 40 Just because Katz is not one to abandon his scientific compass under duress of passion does not mean he is without passion, or unmoved by it in his own ways. The subjects of media headlines and popular diet books are dark places for Katz. "It’s not just linguistic, I really at times feel like crying, when I think about that we’re paying for ignorance with human lives," he told me. "At times, I hate the people with alphabet soup after their names who are promising the moon and the stars with certainty. I hate knowing that the next person is already rubbing his or her hands together with the next fad to make it on the bestseller list."

"That’s an excellent idea, and yet somehow it turns out to be extremely radical."

"The evidence that with knowledge already at our disposal, we could eliminate 80 percent of chronic disease is the basis for everything I do," Katz said. Just as he was finishing his residency in internal medicine in 1993, influential research in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Actual Causes of Death in the United States") put diet on a short list of the lifestyle factors blamed for half of deaths in 1990. "Here we are more than 20 years later and we’ve made just about no progress."

A nod to the fact that popular media is not totally lost, Katz borrows from the writer , citing a seminal 2007 New York Times Magazine article on "nutritionism" in concluding that the mantra, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is sound. "That’s an excellent idea, and yet somehow it turns out to be extremely radical."

Though Katz also says it isn’t nearly enough. "That doesn't help you pick the most nutritious bread, or the best pasta sauce. A member of the foodie elite might say you shouldn't eat anything from a bag, box, bottle, jar, or can." That's admittedly impractical. "We do need to look at all the details that populate the space between where we are and where we want to be."

The current review is in pursuit of that, as is a system for determining the nutritional value of foods that Katz recently spent two years developing. It's called NuVal, and it offers consumers a single numeric value to determine foods' worth, as opposed to a complex nutritional panel. The number does things like differentiate intrinsic from added nutrients. "If you don’t do that, the best thing in the whole damn food supply is Total cereal. Total is basically a completely vapid flake delivery system for multivitamins. You could skip the cereal and take the multivitamin."

"If you eat food direct from nature," Katz added, "you don’t even need to think about this. You don't have to worry about trans fat or saturated fat or salt—most of our salt comes from processed food, not the salt shaker. If you focus on real food, nutrients tend to take care of themselves."

The ultimate point of this diet review, which is framed like a tournament, is that there is no winner. More than that, antagonistic talk in pursuit of marketing a certain diet, emphasizing mutual exclusivity—similar to arguments against bipartisan political rhetoric—is damaging to the entire system and conversation. Exaggerated emphasis on a single nutrient or food is inadvisable. The result, Katz and Meller write, is a mire of perpetual confusion and doubt. Public health could benefit on a grand scale from a unified front in health media: Endorsement of the basic theme of what we do know to be healthful eating and candid acknowledgement of the many details we do not know.

"I think Bertrand Russell nailed it," Katz told me, "when he said that the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so sure, and wise people always have doubts. Something like that."

41 UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet, Carus, 2010

Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change, UN report says

The UN says agriculture is on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth. Photograph: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace HO/Reuters

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products."

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: "Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels."

The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern, former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions.

The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said.

Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products - livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides."

Both energy and agriculture need to be "decoupled" from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.

Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: "Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."

The panel, which drew on numerous studies including the Millennium ecosystem assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for governments around the world: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers, over-exploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational exposure to particulate matter.

42 Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, says the report, which has been launched to coincide with UN World Environment day on Saturday.

Last year the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said that food production would have to increase globally by 70% by 2050 to feed the world's surging population. The panel says that efficiency gains in agriculture will be overwhelmed by the expected population growth.

Prof Hertwich, who is also the director of the industrial ecology programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that developing countries – where much of this population growth will take place – must not follow the western world's pattern of increasing consumption: "Developing countries should not follow our model. But it's up to us to develop the technologies in, say, renewable energy or irrigation methods."

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