The World Wildlife Fund says it doesn’t want to be one of those environmental groups that complains a lot about agriculture but offers little practical help.
The organization hopes to become more relevant by helping companies and stakeholders in the food supply chain develop strategies that make food production more sustainable.
Jason Clay, WWF’s senior vice-president for markets and food, took positions on biotechnology that may surprise some producers during a lecture at the University of Saskatchewan late last year.
He also offered ideas that may help the world’s food systems become more efficient.
“I think international trade is one of the ways that we can achieve global food security,” Clay said.
“Comparative advantage is real.”
For example, Clay said Canada has a significant comparative advantage over countries such as China when it comes to producing animal protein such as meat, dairy and eggs. This is because Canadian producers have access to resources such as cereal grains and can reintegrate animal waste back into the soil, creating a closed loop system.
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As a result, it makes economic and environmental sense to produce animal proteins in Canada for Asian markets.
“Whereas, if China tries to produce all of the animal protein it needs, it produces a lot of pollution as well.”
Clay also focuses on the productivity of the world’s food system, including technologies and genetics.
He said genetic modification has to be one of the options when attempting to make the world’s food systems more productive. However, it’s important to make sure genetic innovations are safe and monitor their impact, he added.
“Using marker-assisted breeding on traditional food crops and having all that information in the public domain, so that producers of seed can really select for drought tolerance or disease resistance in real time: this is going to be a tool that we’re going to need to adapt to climate change,” he said.
“I don’t think we can take it off the table.”
Using marker-assisted breeding is much different than using transgenics, which is a bigger concern to the WWF.
Clay said the location of the transgenic organism makes a big difference to the level of threat it poses to the environment. For instance, a transgenic salmon that could escape into the environment is a much greater threat than a fermentation agent produced in a closed environment with more control.
Clay said transgenics is a part of science, and science-based discussions about its use are needed.
“Probably about 55 to 60 percent of all GMOs today are for medicines: all the insulin on the planet really is GMO today,” he said.
“Another 30 percent or so are for food additives: fermentation agents, French red wine, California wine, beer, yeast, etc. The substitute for animal rennet that’s used for cheese is a GMO. These are things that people aren’t aware of and don’t seem to care too much about. And we’ve eaten certainly billions of meals of these things.”
Clay said the WWF is becoming increasingly interested in food production because it is the biggest reason for species extinction.
Population growth is significantly increasing the demand for food. While demographers say the end of population growth is within sight, there will still be 25 to 30 percent more people on the planet when growth levels off at nine to 10 billion people.
However, Clay said increased individual consumption will be a significant problem in the future as worldwide consumption doubles.
“What nobody is really looking at is that each of these people are going to have about 2.9 times as much income per capita by 2050, and they’re going to buy more things, including food,” he said.
As a sign of things to come, Clay said China doubled the gross domestic product of a billion people in 12 years, which is linked to the commodity price spikes of 2006-08.
“India, Indonesia, Brazil, all these countries are improving their GDP,” he said.
“They’re coming online as middle class consumers, or at least getting people above the poverty line. That has real implications for resources on the planet.”
Clay said climate change will also significantly affect the world’s food systems, including Canadian producers.
“It’s important to realize that what you produce is probably going to change,” he said.
“Adaptation to climate change in the short term is about being more efficient. Adaptation to climate change, even within 10 years, probably is changing crops.”
Grain will continue to be crucial to the world’s food systems, even though diets are shifting in some western countries toward fruits and vegetables.
“Oilseeds and cereals are about 70 percent of the calories (consumed in the world), if you throw in sugars and a few other things,” he said.
“Fourteen plants basically provide about 70 percent of the calories. Three of them provide more than half.”
Farmers who produce animal protein, including poultry, pork, eggs, dairy and beef, are increasingly feeding grain to their animals, which drastically boosts worldwide grain demand.
Clay said Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has determined that animal protein can be produced with on-farm waste if humans obtain 10 percent of their calories from this type of protein. However, the world’s cereal grain production has to double if humans obtain 20 percent of their calories from animal protein.
Thirteen to 14 percent of the planet’s calories now come from animal protein, he added.
Clay said the increase in the number of grain-fed animals in the world is resulting in more soybean acres in Argentina and Brazil and more interest in expanding cereal grain production in Africa.
“I think that we’ve got to figure out how to produce animal protein with less grain, how to produce animal protein differently and maybe how to consume different kinds of animal protein that are less dependent on grain,” Clay said.
He said the challenge of the 21st century is figuring out how to stop the agricultural frontier from expanding through the rest of the planet’s natural habitat.
“As long as environmental values are externalities to our current food production system, then they’re going to be lost because we’re going to convert them to produce more food because that’s what farmers are paid for,” Clay said.
“So how can we figure out how to pay farmers for wetland, or pay farmers for carbon, or pay farmers for things that they don’t currently sell at a market price. That’s the challenge of the 21st century.”
