Pablo Tittonell: “Distribute the capacity to grow food, not the food itself”

We often hear that only intensive, industrial agriculture can produce enough to feed a growing global population.

“Let’s start with a reality check. Is intensive agriculture feeding the world today? In 2024, over 800 million people are still hungry. Two billion people experience food insecurity, and in 2020, three billion people could not afford a healthy diet. Despite high-yield intensive agriculture, we still fail to feed the world, and we are destroying our ecosystems in the process. These are the facts.”

Why can’t intensive agriculture feed the world?

“Who will transport the food to where the poorest people live? There’s no attractive market there, and infrastructure is lacking. We know the idea of food distribution from famine relief, but it’s not a structural solution. Ultimately, you must distribute the capacity to grow food, not the food itself.”

If intensive agriculture contributes so little to food production, where does our food come from?

“You can distinguish different groups of countries in food production. There is a group with low yields per hectare, such as countries in Africa, South Asia, and Central America, which largely grow for their own consumption – hand to mouth. Then, you have a large group of countries with more intensive and productive agriculture that also export food, like Australia, India, Mexico, China, Ukraine, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey and Vietnam. These countries produce the majority of our food. The most productive countries with the most intensive agriculture, like the United States and Western European countries, including the Netherlands, contribute only 12.5 percent to global food production, measured in calories. Much of what is produced here is animal feed, biofuel, biomolecules for plastics and paint, etcetera. And if you consider that 90 percent of Dutch agricultural exports go to other EU countries, you’ll understand that our intensive agriculture is largely irrelevant to the hunger issue.”

This argues for even further intensifying agriculture to increase production and feed the world, right?

“No, because hunger is not related to production. We already produce enough food to feed the world population one and a half times. There is enough for everyone! Hunger has nothing to do with agricultural yields but with poverty and inequality. The food doesn’t reach those who need it, or they lack the firewood to cook it. About 40 percent of all food produced never reaches a human mouth. A lot is lost in storage, distribution, and we waste a lot of food. That’s why I say we need to help poor countries improve their capacity to produce food. And that brings us to regenerative agriculture.”

Why regenerative and not intensive agriculture?

“You need to come up with a solution that suits the ecological and social reality of the local area. How will intensive agriculture with costly pesticides, fertilizers, and machinery work in rural Malawi? And then we’re not even talking about the ecological damage of those types of practices. Moreover, our biggest problem is the degradation of agricultural land. More than half the world’s agricultural land is degraded to some extent, and on 26 percent production is no longer possible at all. That affects food supply and the lives of billions of people. You can’t fix that land with intensive agriculture; you need to restore it, regenerate it: hence, regenerative agriculture.”

What exactly do you mean by regenerative agriculture?

“It’s a way of farming that actively helps restore soil life, but also the physical structure of the soil, and the surrounding ecosystem. This often improves water management, promotes biodiversity, increases carbon storage and circularity. Things like animal welfare, attractive landscapes, and fair compensation for farmers are also linked to it; they almost logically go hand in hand.”

And the rejection of pesticides and artificial fertilizers?

“When the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ was first used by the American agricultural pioneer Robert Rodale in the 1980s, he spoke of regenerative organic agriculture. ‘Organic’ referred to the absence of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but for a long time, completely halting the use of those substances was a bridge too far, there was a lot of resistance against it. I’m just glad the world has increasingly experimented with regenerative agriculture, but for the future, I hope we can one day minimize the use of synthetic fertilizers and completely stop using pesticides. In regenerative agriculture, you’ll need both less and less anyway.”

Industrial agriculture doesn’t feed the world; but does it produce higher yields than regenerative agriculture?

“Also not true. Research has been looking into this matter for forty years, but the results are spread across various papers, reports, and scientific articles, which is why many people don’t know that regenerative agriculture produces as much as intensive agriculture. If you transition from one system to the other, you may see a dip in production, but studies repeatedly show that after about five years, yields are nearly the same. With regenerative agriculture, you can feed the world just fine. In addition, once again, I would like to remind you that the global hunger issue is fundamentally not a matter of production.”

But will regenerative agriculture lead to much higher consumer prices?

“That doesn’t have to be the case either. For starters, the costs of regenerative agriculture are lower. You need much less fertiliser and little to no pesticides. But the most important thing is: what we pay in the supermarket is not the real price. What farmers earn is not their real wage. These prices do not come about according to the much-celebrated principles of the free market. Intensive agriculture is heavily subsidised, sometimes farmers have to sell at cost price, there are significant power imbalances in the chain – all market distortions. Moreover, the external costs of intensive agriculture, the damage to our environment, are not reflected in the price. So yes, under the current rules, products from regenerative agriculture may be more expensive at first. But if we decide to shift the subsidies from intensive to regenerative agriculture, this changes completely. That’s why it makes me itchy when people claim that agriculture in Europe is so efficient. It’s productive, but not efficient: it requires so much money, fertiliser, energy, and on top of that, all the harmful consequences are not reflected in the price.”

A common objection: The Netherlands is the second-largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. We’d be crazy to jeopardise that position!

“The Netherlands is the second-largest exporter in terms of money, not food. Much of what we export is grown elsewhere and processed here, like soy, or is inedible, like ornamental flowers. The Netherlands only produces 0.02 percent of all the calories in grains that are annually consumed worldwide. And the contribution of agriculture to our gross domestic product is as little as two percent. So really, agriculture is not that crucial to our economy. Culturally, agriculture is important, which explains the fuss amongst farmers. But why couldn’t the Netherlands claim the new niche of regenerative agriculture? Technology and knowledge can also be exported. With regards to greenhouse horticulture, for example, the Netherlands has proven to be very innovative. It used to be an example of all the things that could go wrong in agriculture, but now they’ve created a controlled system where no pesticides are needed and so much sunlight is captured that they even have become energy suppliers.”

Another myth: regenerative agriculture requires more land, which will come at the expense of nature.

“That’s a misleading narrative that emerged in the 80s and 90s. The yields are comparable, so you don’t need more land when switching from intensive to regenerative. Moreover, with regenerative agriculture, we can restore and reuse degraded agricultural land. Look at the deforestation that’s happening in the Amazon: it doesn’t happen because the fields don’t yield enough produce, but because land is continually cleared to grow more of the most profitable crops. Soy, for animal feed, and coca, for cocaine.”

Another one: regenerative agriculture requires more manual labour, which we don’t have.

“Currently, we don’t see that this form of agriculture in the Netherlands requires more labour. You do maybe need to replace some agricultural machinery. In emerging economies, you see that crop diversification actually helps more people find work, which really can’t be seen as a problem. Because if farmers are paid fairly, farm work is not unattractive at all.”

Regenerative agriculture requires us to stop eating meat!

“Not stop, but reduce. In the Western world, we eat an average of 80 kilos of meat per person per year, which indeed is unsustainable. Also from a health perspective: the World Health Organization recommends 32 kilos per person per year. You could argue that we shouldn’t eat meat at all; that’s a respectable, philosophical consideration. Purely from an agricultural perspective, however, it makes sense to smartly combine farming and livestock on a farm. You can feed the animals part of your harvest, and use the manure directly to fertilize your soil; these are nice cycles, the farm as an ecosystem. Let’s ensure that livestock and people no longer ‘compete’ for the same food: let livestock eat grass and at the same time, enable them to fertilize the soils. This is known as regenerative grazing, which we can use to capture and store carbon as well.”

One last myth: we don’t need to fully transition towards regenerative agriculture; we can just slightly adjust the current system…

“That’s not possible. You can’t suddenly stop using synthetic fertilisers: your soil won’t generate nutrients for crops anymore, it has become an addict that constantly needs new inputs. You can’t just stop using pesticides because our fields are still monocultures with one type of crop that’s highly vulnerable to insects that eat that crop. The transition to regenerative agriculture is really necessary – and it will bring us so much. When I give a presentation, I like to show the improvements researchers have measured with crop diversification alone: biodiversity increases by an average of 24 percent, pest control improves by 63 percent, water quality by 51 percent, soil quality by 11 percent. And make no mistake: this research is based on thousands of cases of crop diversification around the globe.”

But will the farmers want it too?

“The reason farmers are upset is because they are defending their income, not necessarily the system. Intensive agriculture is not a good model: it’s bad for nature, bad for consumers, and bad for farmers. Farmers are also victims; they go into debt for 40 years, sit on land worth millions but earn a modest salary, and are now also society’s scapegoats. This system only works for a few multinationals, animal feed traders, fertiliser and pesticide producers, and banks. They form the powerful lobby that governments still listen to way too much. Regenerative agriculture doesn’t have that lobby. But when I sit at the kitchen table with farmers for coffee, they almost always agree with me. Regenerative agriculture is the future.”

Original Publication Date: November 13, 2023. Translated on the 18th of November 2024.