I am sitting on Oxley Bank in the United Kingdom, which is part of the Bretton Estate, which since 1977 has been the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and a deer or hunting park for a thousand years before that. It is a mid-August morning looking west out over a working landscape of West Yorkshire towards Huddersfield where, in the distance, the Emley Moor telecommunications mast, which is over 300 m in height, serves to mark where I am heading. In the foreground landscape, there is a patchwork of oilseed canola, forage maize, and pasture crops in various stages of production. A small herd of 30 dairy Holstein cows grazes one of the fields near me that is just beginning to ‘burn-off’, that is, to dry out and turn brown in the late summer sun. This landscape is an idyllic view of the countryside in the United Kingdom; there is relative quiet, even though the M1 motorway, one of our main arterial routes through the country, is 3 km behind me in a valley, with the Bretton Lake surrounded by beech trees. The landscape is working with dairying, tourism, intellectual wealth, arable farming, forestry, and wind turbines, and a cluster of small business workshops in the near distance provides a constant purr of metalworking machinery. This is a productivelandscape worked by agricultural activities that has moved with the times in European terms.
My thoughts are of being pleased to be here and this turns my attention to the food security debate because for one I have to return home and write this book, but also I have constantly questioned how real can the food security threat be since 1975, when I first saw an essay by Indira Gandhi, which I will refer to in this book.1 From my vantage point here looking out of what is clearly a well-regulated and managed landscape that provides most of my needs for an acceptable quality of life, it seems an abstract issue. Here I sit on a rural earth bank in West Yorkshire topped by a wire frame sculpture that people climb through and think playful or intellectual thoughts in a landscape that provides work, food, and social capital, but the global food system is on a precipice of shortage and limitation. I am told this, and it is my job to make sense of data and statistics that can evidence stresses and strains in a world food system. What I have come to understand is that food is a very specialized consumer good in that it provides health and pleasure and its time as a food product is extremely transient. Relating this transience to high-level issues of land production, resource limitation, and global shortage of food is extremely difficult because ultimately we have to consider constraint in terms of reducing volumes consumed or reduction in access. This has been achieved in recent years by increases in food prices, which have focused discussions on food security in Europe as never before. The 1970s and 1980s hunger and security issues were driven by individuals such as Indira Gandhi, Willy Brandt, and Gro Harlem Brundtland, and evidence provided by commentators took a Malthus-like view of world situation. In Europe we now experience potential food insecurity directly through pricing and access to high quality food and diets.2,3
The productivity of the landscape in Northwestern Europe is one of the key reasons it is so difficult to convey the need for food awareness and security to family, friends, and colleagues. I have grown up in these landscapes that have had agricultural production supported and guided by government support and industrial investment. The situation is similar to the landscapes of Australia and the United States I have visited, where the support provided for a farming industry may be different but it still exists in some form. I know that this view may not be in line with everyone's thinking on the matter, particularly the issue of direct government support for farming. In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is an important part of the European Commission (EC) spending, as is the Farm Bill in the United States.4,5
The idea of a working landscape that provides many functions beyond agricultural production has not always been a typical one. An incredibly influential piece of work for my students and myself of the time when Europe was considering the value of the whole food supply chain was written by Professor Jules Pretty in the late 1990s, titled The Living Land, which provided a view of changing agriculture in Europe.6 These ideas were effectively packaged in the United Kingdom by the government's report ‘Reconnecting the Food Chain’ chaired by Lord Donald Curry of Kirkharle and known as ‘The Curry Report’.7 This time of change was one where we began to look at the whole food supply chain rather than thinking only of agricultural production or food manufacturing in isolation. In this environment of change, Jules Pretty's analysis developed the directions of many farmers I taught and convinced them to follow what became active and world-changing roles in world agriculture. The transition in agriculture at that time was one of coming from production-focused agriculture to one that included social and environmental value on equal footing with profitable agriculture.
The landscapes across Europe and the world have undergone a revolution in many ways during this period because of the need to consider the food supply chain beyond agricultural functions. This has important implications for the global food system that started with the first programmes aimed at curtailing agricultural overproduction in Europe appeared in the late 1980s. These were the so-called set-aside schemes, whereby farmers would place fields into a resting period or fallow voluntarily and receive a payment for doing so.8 The focus of this set-aside scheme was to reduce agricultural production but it soon emerged that there were conservation and leisure benefits to set aside and they evolved into environmental stewardship schemes.9,10 The schemes themselves became associated with different forms of integrated agriculture because it has been shown that enhancing biodiversity on farms is associated with pest management strategies, and maintaining soil fertility was associated with improved plant nutrition and water management. In short, a range of benefits became apparent, and this approach not only changed farming practice in a time when agricultural produce prices and farm input prices for fertiliser and feed were depressed but also changed how farmers and producers thought about their businesses. There was a transition from a primarily food production mindset or rather one of producing food ingredients to one of being part of a rural landscape. This meant integrating social awareness in terms of fairness, ethical production, tourism, and leisure within farming and food businesses.
Food is made more affordable with a productive agricultural system. The agricultural framework for this does not develop by increasing yield and quality attributes alone. The Living Land laid the ground for this, and in many ways, Professor Pretty's vision for 1990s agriculture in the United Kingdom was proven correct.
Individuals have had incredible impact in bringing the principles of general sustainability to policy development. An example is John Elkington, who has transformed how large organizations think about sustainability through the triple bottom line approach described in his book, Cannibals with Forks, which I first read in 1999.11 The triple bottom line approach put forward by Elkington has transformed how senior officers of companies view future business with regard to value and values across the social agenda.12 This is becoming evident with a 2010 Accenture survey of 766 chief executives worldwide: 93% see sustainability as important for the future of their businesses; 88% accept that they must drive new requirements through their supply chains; and 81% say they have already integrated sustainability into their businesses.13 These surveys are now commonplace, and people like Elkington have helped the global arena define the sustainability problems facing them and what they need to do about them. It is not surprising that people like Elkington, who came from an activist background in environmentalism, are now asking for accelerated change.
Activists do not like to wait or see ineffective actions that achieve very little; they are disruptive. This is a major criticism that is currently facing international organizations that have developed major events, such as the Rio Conferences, and international protocols that are not without successes. These include the Montreal Protocol to reduce halogenated refrigerants, identified as the root cause of the growing ozone hole observed at the South Pole in the 1980s.14 The Basel Convention developed international standards for the trade in waste materials, providing further requirements for businesses to act responsibly with regard to polluting impacts.15 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the 1990s established the requirement to define the impact of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and this now packages several aspects of how businesses procure and utilize resources.16 These actions have defined the issues we now face extremely well, and this book presents solutions to many of the issues they identify that are being delivered to the food arena by companies and their supply chains.
It is clear that materials and foods are becoming scarcer, and many are considered critical resources. The way in which we measure reserves of materials is always debatable, but organizations are taking actions that will deal with scenarios of critical resource availability. For example, the concept of ‘peak resources’ is well established for oil and phosphorus resources, and the peak scenarios are clearly dependant on exploration for new reserves; calculations typically consider the reserves of 30 years into the future.17 This results in revitalised prospecting and exploration for resources each 30 years. This situation exists for most resources and should be borne in mind for our analyses here. For example, the impact of new technologies and new management systems can improve efficiencies of use or find new routes to conserve wastes.
What has become apparent for critical resources is that the quality of material found during exploration has decreased. This is the case for iron ore, for example, where a 1% decrease in iron ore results in more energy required extracting steel and significant costs in recovering ore. Together with peak scenarios, there are useful analogies we can make with food supply because similar scenarios are seen for high-quality land, which is ultimately the primary resource for food production. There is clear evidence of land trading or ‘land grabbing’ activities for biomass, biofuel, and agricultural food production since the 1990s, and the ability for land to provide efficient nutrient balance or protein production is under increasing stress. Resources that are currently considered to be at points of criticality in the global food system include water and phosphorus.18,19 Water supplies are most stressed in parts of the world where crop production is or is likely to be most important, and they are most susceptible to the impact of temperature and precipitation changes that are the outcome of long-term climate change.
Resource regeneration and closed-loop thinking are most definitely subjects that are dominating the mining industry where the use of metals in consumer goods has identified both its criticalities and opportunities. The scenario for the critical metals arena is important to us because there are important cross-considerations for food supply globally; the issues of ‘resource nationalism’ that have become apparent are also emerging in the food system with water and land resources. The requirement to consider using materials such as protein more efficiently is as apparent as the global metals system, but in order to do this, new business models, such as those that Elkington and others have established, are needed. For example, in the case of metal supply, there is more gold in one cubic metre of mobile phones that are disposed of at the end of their product life than there is in a cubic metre of gold ore currently mined.20 The problem faced by the electronic consumer goods industry is being able to recover gold and other metals, particularly rare earth metals, efficiently and cost-effectively. The possibility to generate geoeconomic conflict has been seen by restricting the trade of rare earth metals by China in the period 2005–2009, where prices of rare earths increased dramatically.21 This response is termed ‘resource nationalism’, but it is something that has existed for centuries and it ultimately forces industries to consider new relationships, methods, and materials. In short, resource criticality can be debated in terms of geopolitical and geoeconomic factors, but it is stimulating innovation that aims to overcome current limits to supply; the same is true for all natural resources, and this type of critical thinking has important impacts on food supply chains.
In the food system, we have seen criticality expressed by companies and their supply chain through the prospecting and use of phosphorus, water, and land. However, the food system itself is somewhat different from the other primary industry of mining for materials in that there are fewer opportunities for regenerating stock in supply chains because foods are ultimately digested. Of course, the recycling of minerals and nutrients are integral to any food production system and were perhaps the first recycling industries as identified by Lawes and Gilbert of Rothamsted, who are discussed later. Furthermore, the use of manufacturing and retailing infrastructures associated with a sustainable food supply chain are largely transferrable globally because of efficient logistics. Establishing sustainability in the food system does depend on trade and trade routes, and these are experiencing huge change globally, particularly in response to establishing trade in the Indian Ocean and the rise of the middle class associated with the growth of China and other emergent and emerging economies.
Thus, this book places the importance of obtaining a supply chain approach in tackling food security and sustainable food supply where technical and social factors are integrated to provide solutions. The technical breakthroughs that will provide novel nutrition, safety, and design attributes of products will need to be integrated with consumption trends and a very clear understanding of how consumers taste and experience foods. For example, the use of genomics technologies that will provide libraries of materials to work with must be developed with a very good understanding of how consumers use and consume food products. This requires the capacity to assess increased amounts of information, and the need to use methods that visualize and provide a framework for information to be applied to security challenges will be increasingly important. In this book, the use of geographical methods and life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches are put forward as a means to help companies deal with the issue of analysing large and complex datasets in their supply chains.