Half of all the calories we consume come from just three crops, grown in only a handful of locations. What’s more, food production uses increasing amounts of energy.
This unsustainable system serves only a handful of mega-corporations and exposes the rest of us to food insecurity. We’re left vulnerable to disease, geopolitical tensions and climate change.
These are among the arguments presented in Natalie Bennett’s new book, Green Thinking. Bennett is a member of the UK House of Lords and was formerly editor of the Guardian Weekly and leader of the Green Party.
In Green Thinking, Natalie Bennett heaps onto the compost pile a slew of outdated opinions. Instead, she offers fresh alternatives, often rooted in indigenous experience. Among those she mulches are René Descartes, Adam Smith, Richard Dawkins and Abraham Maslow.
She draws inspiration from voices including David Graeber, Kate Raworth, Vandana Shiva, Jason Hickel and Jamie Lorimer, as she tackles social injustices ranging from education and biodiversity loss to political leadership and climate change.
And Bennett unveils the precarity of our food system. She points to research showing that half of all human calories consumed globally come from just three crops (wheat, rice and maize) and three‑quarters of all human calories come from just 12 plants and five animals. The three big crops are grown in only a handful of locations.
“That is, as the world has come over the past decade to acknowledge, a huge threat to food security. Disease is a massive threat. Geopolitical instability is another, as was demonstrated after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with that area being responsible for a huge percentage of the global wheat crop. And, of course, the climate emergency threatens both global supplies and particularly crops in some of the most food‑insecure regions of the world,” she explains.
This current system is also not energy efficient: in 1940, the average US farm produced 2.3 calories of food energy for each calorie put in. This century, with food miles and ultra processing, it is now more like 10 calories put in to produce one calorie.
Bennett writes: “On a scale of dysfunctional systems, this is right at the top of the measure. Although of course that depends on your aim. If it is to feed people well, to ensure future productivity with healthy soil and a stable climate, yes, this is stupidity of unbelievable proportions. If you want to scoop up a lot of short‑term money, then it makes perfect sense, if you are one of the handful of global companies that makes huge profits from producing farm inputs, selling the outputs as commodities, or processing them into highly palatable pap.”
But there is another way, Bennett says: learning from indigenous practices and growing food in holistic ways that don’t degrade soils and poison species, like permaculture and agroecological approaches.
Bennett draws on indigenous practices from around the world and, for example, takes inspiration from El Salvador. There, the ‘campesino a campesino’ (farmer to farmer) method was mobilised on a significant scale during the 1980s, when the country was reeling from a twelve‑year civil war. It proved effective under these difficult circumstances. Bennett says it is “just one example of how the Global North should be learning from the Global South, and its long experience of living through permacrises.”