Transcript for
Ep16: Charles Godfray and Pat Mooney debate the future of food systems
[intro music]
Matthew Kessler
Welcome back to Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I’m your host Matthew Kessler. We’ve got a bonus episode for you today that’s lifted from a TABLE event from this past summer. It’s a high-level conversation on how localized or globalized our future food systems should be.
Pat Mooney
We have to try to have as much self-sufficiency as is viable and possible at local levels and territorial markets.
Charles Godfray
I'm very taken by the Comment of the economist Joseph Stiglitz who said, We live in a globalized world get over it, the real challenge is to make globalization work, work in particular for the environment and work for the poor people, the people who do not do not have a voice.
Pat
But the real concern that Charles and I are unfortunately agreeing upon again, is who owns it? And who controls it? Who gets to have a say in what is safe and what is not and under what conditions?
Matthew
Before introducing the conversation, I’ve a few short updates on what we’ve been doing and what to expect from TABLE in the coming months. First, we’ve officially launched our Community discussion board, which you can visit @ community.tabledebates.org/ There you can sign up for free and join an engaged group of food systems enthusiasts, researchers and professionals to ask questions, post information, and start discussions about food sustainability – and there’s no character limit on these posts!
We also have a podcast sub-forum where you can share what you liked and didn’t like about new and old episodes, and what your wishes are for the future. We’ll also post what guests we’re going to be speaking to so we can pose your questions directly to them.
Last week TABLE published an interactive diagram that explores the ebbs and flows of the regenerative agriculture, organic and agroecology movement. While movement shares concerns about the food systems’ role in causing environmental degradation, they seem to be championed by different stakeholders. We try to map their similarities and differences and we’d love to hear what you think we got right and what we got wrong.
So to set up the conversation that you’re about to hear, you should know that we had to change speakers at the last minute. Our original line up was Maryam Rahmanian – co-chair of IPES food, and Charles Godfray, director of the Oxford Martin school. Unfortunately Maryam couldn’t make it and we were very grateful that Pat Mooney, co-founder and executive director of the ETC Group, was able to step in at the last moment! Just to say it wasn’t our intention for three white men to discuss what the future of global food systems should look like!
We also ended up with a much friendlier dialogue than a fierce debate, which may reflect the how amicable Pat and Charles both are, or that the conversation stayed at such a high level that more disagreements might have emerged when we got into the details. It could also be a sign that polarization gets more attention than where people agree.
As a short intro, Charles Godfray is a British population biologist whose impressive career spans as a researcher and as a science advisor to governments. Charles is interested in how the global food system will need to change and adapt to the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, and he is particularly interested in the relationships between food production, ecosystem services and biodiversity.
Pat Mooney is a Canadian whose been active in civil society for the last 50 years. He has co-authored several books on the politics of seeds, agrobiodiversity, biopiracy and geo-engineering, and Pat received the Right Livelihood Award in 1985 for his work defending peasants and their seeds.
In our conversation we talk about biodiversity, technology and knowledge production as it relates to scale in the food system. I’ll now hand it over to the myself as the moderator to set up the first question.
Matthew (as moderator)
30 years ago, in 1990, we were more than 15 years away from smartphones, and global trade, and the organic and local farming movement look very different than they do today. So we'd like to start this conversation by asking you to each describe your vision of what you'd like the food system will look like in 20 5030 years from now. We'd also like to know how your intellectual background and your life experiences formed this vision. And we'll start with Charles, and we ask you to be as specific as possible in describing the year 2050. What are on people's plates? How are people shopping? What do farming landscapes look like? What is trade look like? How globalized and localized is this from the future? Charles, please go ahead.
Charles
Thank you, Matthew. And it's a pleasure to be part of this event. I guess when I look at the global food system 2050. What I would like to see is first of all, a global food system that feeds a population that's going to be somewhere between nine and 10 billion people, and which will contain people who are wealthier than they are today and that's a good thing. People should come out of poverty and there are important feedbacks on population growth. I think to do that it is inevitable that we will need a globalized food system and I'm very taken by the comment of the economist Joseph Stiglitz who said, ‘We live in a globalized world get over it, the real challenge is to make globalization work’, work in particular for the environment and work for the poor people, the people who do not have a voice. So I think we will have a globalized food system, I think we'll have a food system where which will just have to be sustainable. So what I would like to see by 2050, is however you farm, whether you're farming, sort of high technology farms, or you're farming, very low intensity, it must be sustainable. It must add up with carbon emissions as well. So I would envisage the food system being very much a patchwork where you have some areas which are farmed pretty intensively, you'll have some areas, which are farmed at low intensity. So that's what I hope it looked like. And if we are - and I'm an optimist - if we are to make the global food system work, we need action on all fronts. So that includes diets. So I would hope that by the middle of the century, we especially in the rich world are eating a spectrum of food, which has a much smaller environmental footprint. And I think that will involve eating less meat and dairy. And then the other thing I hope we do is that we spend much more attention on people whose, at the moment, income depends on agriculture in the global south, among low income countries. And there, I think the real challenge is to bring these people out of poverty to give them a good life. And some of that will be by remaining on the farm, but some of it will remain will be by people moving off the farm. And I hope that that transition, which I think will have to happen in the global South, will happen in a socially just way unlike what happened in most of Europe, where we threw people off the land. And many people emigrated to Pat's continent, we don't have another continent where that can happen. So it's an enormous question, Matthew, one could talk about it for ages. But let me stop there.
Matthew
Thanks, Charles. And the same question to you, Pat, what would you like the food system to look like in 2050? And how does your own background and experiences bring you to this vision?
Pat
Thanks, Matthew. The bad news is that I agree with Charles. Not a good way to begin a debate. That’s the kind of world I would like to see, what I hope we might have in 2050, I might nuance a few things a bit differently here and there. The question is not really what I would like to see, so much as what will see. And I’m afraid that given the crises around climate, the crises around biodiversity loss, the challenges of geopolitics these days, the kinds of level of corporate manipulation of the economy that we have these days, it’s going to be very hard to achieve that. I would think we should all do our best to achieve what Charles is envisioning but it’s not going to be easy. So realistically, we can get to a world by 2050 which is surviving all these crises and can see its way to a better time ahead but we’re going to go through some very rough decades coming up.
Getting there I think we’ll have to try a diversity of strategies. I think that we are going to develop what I believe will be a wide-tech approach to how we change our systems, in terms of the technologies at least. We’ll need much more inclusive strategies for technology introduction and assessments in the future. I think we’re going to need to have a global system yes, but a decentralized global system. And that there will be multiple centers of action and change, which will be a distinct difference from the way the world is today where it’s becoming ever more centralized in terms of who controls and who makes decisions. We’ll need to have diversification I the sense of if we’re going to get through climate change and biodiversity loss, where production will depend heavily upon a much wider range of crops and livestock and fish species and marine species to keep us alive. We’ll need to have a system of much greater exchange of experiences between what I would describe as 350 million laboratories around the world which are the farms and fisheries of small producers around the world exchanging their information with one another as to what works with climate change, what pests and diseases must be encountered and overcome, how best to do it. Then working together with the scientific community, the so-called traditional scientific community to do that. We’re going to need to develop more territorial markets. That doesn’t mean we exclude the rest of the world, but it would be silly for communities around the world not to try to be as food self-sufficient as possible, under their conditions and their situation to survive these challenges. And we’re going to need to change our lifestyles which is happening already, whether it’s in China or in Canada. People are adjusting their consumption patterns, that will have to continue to be adjusted. We can’t live and consume at the same level of meat and dairy products as we do today. To get to that point, we need to also look at where the problems are and where the opposition is coming from and I do believe it’s coming strongly from the economic system, coming strongly from Agribusiness. We can’t get to a more diversified and safer world, not a totally safe world, but a safer world unless we control agribusiness’s power over the economy. We need to break up multinational corporations in the food system, they can’t continue as they are. We’ll need to look at new treaties and structures to get us to those places over time. And again, have a more disciplined view of how we share our world with one another.
Scales have to be, scales of justice as well. How do we scale up to that? Frankly, that’s going to be a struggle for us. I'd simply say and I'll end with this that the last 70 years or so of agribusiness control of the food system, the industrial food chain has shown us that they can't scale up, industry hasn't been able to scale up beyond feeding about 30% of the world's population with any remote level of adequacy. So I'll end with that.
Matthew
Thank you, Pat. And one way to dive into this topic is exploring the relation of scale, and the role of farming systems in impacting both on farm agro-biodiversity, and off farm biodiversity. So as you mentioned, Pat, the food system has radically changed in the last 70 years. We’re producing calories more efficiently and affordably than ever before. But this is having its very large impacts on biodiversity. So it's a topic that you both care about, you've had a lot of background in, but you also come at this from different angles. So starting with Charles - what role do you see agriculture playing in reducing biodiversity loss? And do you find that either different farm sizes or long or short supply changes favor either biodiversity or agrobiodiversity differently.
Charles
So the way I approach this as someone who sort of spent most of his career in biodiversity science and as we really do need to make room for nature. So, there are certain ecosystems, which we just need, you cannot maintain the richness of life on Earth purely on the highly altered landscapes that humans have created. And similarly, we have to maintain the carbon stocks in our tropical rainforests and things such as that. So I think one component of the agricultural system has to be to produce enough food that we do not convert more land into agriculture, and in fact, we take land out of agriculture. And that means the components of biodiversity that provide direct services to agriculture, such as the soil microorganisms, one needs to spend a hugely more attention into maintaining them at the moment, so that they provide services to agriculture free, and we don't need to substitute them with artificial fertilizers.
Given that so much of the world is agricultural land, a lot of biodiversity is maintained on agricultural land. So again, going back to something I was talking about earlier about the mosaic of mixtures of high intensity, low intensity and semi natural habitats, then those low intensity agriculture will maintain a lot of, of biodiversity as well. So I think it's too simplistic to think about it as land sharing versus land sparing. It's much more of a spectrum. Yes, we do need to make room for that part of biodiversity and that part of carbon storage that cannot coexist with agriculture. But then within the agricultural footprint, one needs to have sustainability everywhere. And then a context specific spectrum of agricultural intensity, that in some areas will allow rich biodiversity, in some areas will allow less biodiversity.
Pat
This is going to be frustrating. I again, I agree with Charles, that that's absolutely the case. We have to look at what's blocking that vision from taking place now. How do we move towards it without also encumbering those people who are on land now that may be shifting over time? So that means, I believe, looking at, for example, forestry and conserving forests and savannas and parklands in my part of the world. And it means recognizing that the best preserved lands in the world today are those that are preserved by indigenous peoples who still use the land. I'm sure Charles would agree with us. And we still need to make sure that the systems we put in place, protect that. The forests are an important food source for people still, and there is no conflict necessarily between that and, and in preserving diversity. We also need to look at the major problem we're faced with now of land grabs around the world where sovereign trusts and corporations are grabbing large chunks of land, sometimes not even using the land at all, or using it for export crops only and not be concerned about the needs of local peoples. We can't have a world where land is controlled that way it has to be landed that's guided, governed by local peoples under the international context. So we need to develop systems that allow that, but it's doable. I think we can get to that place. We also will have to look at some decentralization from cities. I think we're seeing that already where I live, and I'm sure in the UK as well, a slight movement away from cities now because of new technologies, making that more possible and pandemics making it more necessary. But trend, I think, to some degree continue. We’ll have a flow of some people moving into cities and others moving away from cities, and we need to be sympathetic to those needs.
Charles
I wonder if I could ask Pat a question. And it's something that that you said in your in your first question. And so I'm going to be devil's advocate here. And you talked about the importance of self-sufficiency. So my devil's advocate position is, isn't that a red herring if one wants a well functioning global food system. I guess I put myself in the position of the food minister in a country such as Egypt, a population of 90 million people will double in the next 50 or 60 years. With the best will in the world, Egypt is only going to be able to feed a small fraction of its population from the land and the delta and a few oases and things like that, and surely, what we need is a global food system that can meet the demands of the countries such as Egypt. And if we encourage too much self-sufficiency, I'm not saying that local agriculture isn't important, but the sort of narrative of self-sufficiency might actually get in the way of an efficient global food system that produces good livelihoods for farmers and allows some land to be spared for carbon sequestration and biodiversity.
Pat
Absolutely, it’s not either a ones and zeros options or a black and white option here. I think we should agree that we should be as self-sufficiency as we are able to be and not more so. And there will be many people in many parts of the world that cannot be self-sufficient for all kinds of reasons. They’re in the middle of Shanghai or they’re caught in, again an environment such as Egypt where they simply cannot be under those conditions and we have to address that. But we should agree that there is much self-sufficiency as is viably possible for our planet. And that can be a lot more than there is today. And in order to ensure that we get that level of self-sufficiency, we've got to break away the barriers that prevent it and we've got to stop subsidizing an industrial food chain, which makes it very hard to do that which makes cheap food available subsidized by governments, and by poor people in the world, the $750 billion per year that's in agricultural subsidies, most of which goes to the wrong people in the wrong places. We need to apply those kinds of resources to encourage self-sufficiency and to make sure the industrial food chain does what it can do best where it can do it well and not encroach upon the interests and concerns and needs of poor people around the world.
Charles
So let me try and push back a bit. And I'm a biologist, not an economist, but I'm going to pretend to be an economist with. With any of my hats, I completely agree with you about the perverse subsidies, which are damaging to the global food system and to sustainability. But an economist would say, actually, the degree of self-sufficiency that a country should go for is determined by its comparative advantage in producing food or not producing food. So one should expect, say some of the countries in South America with relatively poor populations, large agricultural lands, to really concentrate on food and other countries to concentrate on other activities. So I'm parroting a sort of simplistic Ricardo view of the world. But do you see any argument for that?
Pat
We’re both getting older if we can both remember comparative advantage as being a key economic argument. I don't think it is. I think that there's a recognition now that there are certain fundamental needs where comparative advantage doesn’t really work. It’s simply unacceptable that in large parts of the world they can’t produce their own vaccines and can’t get access to them because comparative advantage would now argue that well, we can produce them all in India or Brazil or the United States or in Germany. That capacity for production has to be in multiple places. The same way, for something as vital as our food system, logic dictates that in a world of rapid climate change that is uncontrollable and unknowable as to how it’s going to work and with other pandemics possibly down the road, we can’t presume to think that a long-supply chain is a safe way to survive. So no, I don’t agree with that. I think we need to try to again have as much self-sufficiency as is viable and possible in local levels and territorial markets.
Charles
And so I think that's a good reply that the political economy in some sense, trumps the straight economics, I suspect, we probably do disagree a little bit on that spectrum about where one will put comparative advantage versus self-sufficiency, but probably not that much.
Matthew
How do you view Charles the role of corporations in transforming the food system? And what role do you see them in the future? Because it seems that Pat has a bit of a stronger stance in that there should be a more decentralized structure.
Pat
I was trying to hide my bias there.
(laughs)
Charles
Well, let me say where I agree with Pat and then try to at least raise a question. So I'm appalled by some of the lobbying on sees in the private sector. I am appalled by the way that you can regulator capture, and unfair taxation and things like that. So I think there's some really negatives about the structure of multinational corporations at the moment. I guess I am slightly hopeful by some of the things that are coming out of the OECD, the Biden administration, that we might be moving in the right direction, but I think these are baby steps. I do think that the – and Pat wouldn't argue with this, I do think that the private sector is an absolutely critical part of producing an efficient and fair global food system. And I don't believe the arguments of food is too important to be leave to part of the private sector. And if you look at some of the big commodity companies, the Cargills, the Arches, the Bungies, and we have a global commodity system dominated by a relatively small number of companies and Chinese ones coming in. And these sorts of private companies, so we know less about them than if they were publicly listed companies. Now, they do their job at the moment pretty well.
I guess I'm agnostic about how about the arguments about breaking them up, I guess what I really would want to see is a sort of stress testing that we wish we had done to the banks about 2000s. I'd like to see that stress testing being applied to the big commodity companies. Were they to come through that, then I would be relaxed. Were they not to come through that, I'd be really worried.
Pat
I would argue that the, as I said before, that the industrial food chain hasn't managed to scale up over the last several decades, they don’t know where the poor people are, or how many people are in the world, much less how to how to feed them, or support them. But I'd also say that it's sort of an industry that seems to suffer from I should have to call it ‘late onset dementia’, it doesn't seem to know where it's been. I recall the president of Coca Cola speaking to bankers in Atlanta, Georgia, saying that we're in the midst of a revolution here, everything is changing in our system, we've got to move quickly to adjust to these changes to recognize the environment that we live in. And he meant the both the social and the ecological environment. And we've got to do it fast. But he said that in 1970, and Coke really hasn't changed in all the decades since then. We constantly see the companies telling us that ‘they're going to do this, they're going to do that, they're going to cut back on plastics, they're going to cut back on waste, they're going to cut back on fertilizer.’ They haven't actually achieved any of those things. And every time I opened up another issue of the Financial Times or The Economist, I read again, how greenwashing is a constant theme of these companies and their lobbyists. And they just don't do what they say they're going to do. And they don't seem to remember what they promised before and haven't delivered. So I would not want to trust them to direct our food system. And I wouldn't believe what their promises are. And I'm pretty nervous if they if they really propose to use the marginalized peoples of the world as guinea pigs for technologies, which they can't be sure will work well or safely for everybody. They might, but they may not. And the risk is high. So it has to be managed more carefully. I guess I'd like to - maybe this is provocative. I would like to see some of the technologies that are being proposed and could have potential to be seen as public utilities. Information Technology can be as public utilities, not controlled by companies. But once which we all have access to like, we used to have access to things like remember old fashioned days, we used to control water, in our inner cities. And we used to be able to control telephones. I would like to see that kind of capacity in our governments so that new technologies can be introduced in a way which are for all of the benefit of all the people and not in the hands of a few companies.
Matthew
I'm curious, Charles, if you agree with Pat, and what he just laid out around technology as a public utility, but also I'd like to ask about specific technologies. What types of technologies and under what conditions you'd like to see in your future food system? And if you could also mention whether or not you think GMs hold a role in that.
Charles
Well, let me first comment on what Pat just said, I think the concept of utilities for some issues around data and, IT services, I think that's really good. And something we should think more of. To respond to your question, Matthew, let me start at the end with GM and sort of use it as a sort of portfolio of modern technologies and things. I mean, you asked of my life experience, I'm a biologist. So this is the world I know very, very well. And full disclosure, I'm involved in a GM technique, to control mosquitoes that transmit malaria guess my view is, first of all, they need to be regulated very carefully and not regulated by scientists, they need to be regulated from people completely outside us. When it comes to GM in agriculture, then I think the - my view is that the overwhelming evidence is that they have relatively benign environmental effects and little effects on health. But to me, it's much more of an issue for our civil society and for the public to debate this. And to me, some of the really main issues is what does the adoption of these technologies mean to power relationships within agribusiness.
And I often feel that some of the arguments around the health effects and the environmental effects are actually surrogate arguments for arguments around power and economics. And my view is that we should have those arguments in the proper domain, which is around power and economics, and come to a conclusion on that. And that is something for us as citizens, not me as the scientists to sort of really determine. We may as a society decide that we don't want to have GM and some of these modern technologies within our portfolio to address some of the food issues ahead. I think that would be a shame if we could get the economics and the power, right. Because it will mean we will just have to do more heavy lifting on other areas. As a biodiversity person, I'm dismayed by the quantities of broad spectrum chemicals that we pour into the environment. And there are modern technologies could reduce that. So from a biodiversity perspective, I really do see some advantages there. But I do think it's a social and economic question, primarily.
Pat
Full disclosure, I just had an mRNA vaccine. So I'm compromised.
Charles
Pat I'm sorry you didn't have the Oxford one,
Pat
I thought you might say that. (laughs) And I remember in 1983 writing a book on a computer and being roundly attacked by friends of mine in Green Peace for using a computer and how enraged I was that I was bowing to that technology. So I have to be sympathetic to many of my friends who really have profound, sort of spiritual view of some of the new technologies and transformations of biological material and ownership of life and I share some of that. But I pretty much agree with what Charles is saying again, that the issue is in a significant part a manner of ownership and control of technologies. Can we trust those who are proposing them and introducing them and have intellectual property over them? Can we assure ourselves of the direction they are going in? I do recall, and this makes me feel old again, that in 1981, writing that with biotechnology the interest of companies would be to develop plants that light their -seed varieties that light their herbicides. And I was hauled off to Basel to meet with companies that time – and Sanders, in those days, who roundly attacked me for even suggesting that herbicide-plant varieties were possible. It was almost scientifically impossible to have them. And of course what happened in the end is if you simply follow the money, you see where they end up. And the corporate greed and logic led them to develop herbicide-tolerant plant varieties and genetically modified crops. And when those first came out 25 years ago now, we warned that the logical next step would be to develop plant varieties that weren't transgenic, because of the opposition to that. But would be called intra genetic and essentially variations on CRISPR-Cas 9 or gene editing technologies today. That that would be a logical trend for the companies to pursue that. And again, you can argue for the benefits of that and the risks of that. But the real concern that Charles and I are unfortunately agreeing upon again, is that, who wants it? And who controls it? Who gets to have a say in? What is saving what is not under what conditions?
Charles
So Pat, trying to pick a fight with you. Do you think there's an issue that because of the faster the GM, then governments have brought in extraordinary levels of regulatory oversight and hoops to go through, which has had the perverse effect that only the very big multinationals can afford to invest in this technologies, so that the smaller, smaller companies that might that might be developing these techniques that could benefit smallholders in Africa? They just know where there. They can't be.
Pat
Okay, we're gonna fight then. Good. I’d say that is all your fault Charles. It’s all the fault of the scientific community for hoof-and-mouth disease and how they handled that in the UK and Europe some decades ago. It’s the fault of how mad cow disease was addressed which created a great distrust in society as to could they trust science, could they trust regulatory agencies to their job correctly? And that’s spilled over then into the introduction of GM crops. But from there, we probably have more commonality again. One important difference though, since then. I don’t think it’s so much overregulation by governments frankly as it is the desire of companies to exclude opposition. It’s very useful for the largest corporations to set up barriers to entry to smaller companies by using government regulation to make sure that they are the only ones can afford to be in the field. And they did that. I remember they argued with governments. I remember one discussion with the UN in the mid 1980s where companies were basically saying that in the context of the pharmaceutical industry. That regulation was helpful to them in order to make sure that they had the playing field to themselves. But that’s been true in this case. The UN – and I was involved in negotiations around the Cartagena protocol in the biodiversity convention that led to what was thought to be conditions for the export of genetically modified seeds from country to country. That actually worked very well in the interests of the major companies again to exclude the minor players and it was an opportunity for the major companies to basically have resources of foreign aid programs to so called educate scientists in the South to simply be regulators of their technologies rather than to be scientists doing their own research. So I think often technologies use regulations to protect their own interests.
Charles
I completely agree with you. That led to a really great mistrust. It’s an irony that the mad cow disease was a fault of old technology, of bad rendering, rather than of a modern technology. But I think you’re exactly right. I’m afraid I completely agree with you around some of the issues around Intellectual Property and the patent jungles that can inhibit innovation. And I think that's something that really does need to be looked at if we are to have a much better innovation ecosystem.
Matthew
So we at TABLE are interested in exploring the evidence and values that people draw from in their own research and work. And as we talked about earlier, our desired visions are based on our own experiences. And here we have three men from the global North discussing these topics, which is also going to influence the tenor of this conversation. And as much as -
Pat
But I'm an accident. Maryam would have done a much better job.
Matthew
As much as we like to aim for these to be evidence based conversations. They're also deeply entangled in our own personal values. So we'd like to start here with Pat. You draw from a lot of different sources to produce your work. Why do you think that's important? And how do you negotiate drawing from scientific or academic publications on one hand, or lived experiences like different food producers’ experiences?
Pat
Both are obviously very important. I'm not an academic, I come to this from my own experiences in civil society. And I got into this, quite honestly, I remember painfully well in 1963, there was a World Food Congress that was held in Washington, I was in high school at the time. And we were watching on television, President Kennedy, in front of the World Food Congress, telling everybody - and it's been repeated ad nauseum ever since. He said, ‘we have the means we have the capacity to wipe hunger and poverty from the face of the earth in our lifetime, when you need only the will.’ And as the years have gone by, and I found myself in Asia, and Africa and Latin America working on these issues, what's very clear is that “we” meaning us white guys, don't have the means that we need, we don't have the capacity that we need. And we certainly don't have the will. And we can't assume that technologies are going to solve these problems. It is a social issue. It's an issue of food justice, and food sovereignty. And I find inspiration in the diversity of organizations that I've worked with, whether it's in the Philippines or Ethiopia, or Sri Lanka, or Bolivia, in the world, who are doing amazing work and do know what they need to have and what they want, and are not afraid of science. They welcome scientific participation in these issues. Their biggest fear, and I'm sorry, if I reflect this so much, but it is that, that whenever people talk about let's collaborate together between peasants and scientists, Western scientists. The next question after they agree to collaborate is - so here's what I want you to do. Here's how you can help me because you can be my cheap labor to do these experiments. And that's not the kind of science or the kind of, of dialogue or assessments we need to have in the world to get to a better place. So I guess I came to it with a bit of a chip on my shoulder that I think that the scientific community hasn't learned how to talk and work with and share with indigenous and peasant communities around the world, or those who are food insecure. And that to be able to take advantage of science technologies as we should. We've got to get over that and create a different kind of structure of communications. And maybe this Table is the kind of place where that can happen.
Charles
So I come hampered from the fact that I've been a scientist for 35 years. So I'm probably very blinkered in my response to this. I do think there is something very special about the scientific method as a way of finding out about the world. And I think the scientific method can find out about things within a certain domain that cannot be done in any other way. Having said that, I really resonate with what Pat said about sort of imperialist scientists going abroad and corralling cheap labor. I also worry about my community, especially really good scientists, who sort of assume the authority of science to go well, way beyond the domain of science. And a colleague of mine at Oxford, refers to it as crypto advocacy, so calling upon the authority of science but actually advocating a particular policy, which involves values and the values that are hidden there. So I'll defend to the death, the uniqueness of the scientific methods of a way of finding about nature, but I really think that scientific community needs to be much more open about engaging with a much broader system of knowledge.
Pat
I don't disagree with what Charles said. But I, I don't know just unique. I've certainly been in communities where, again, peasants are looking at their land and they take a very holistic view of their lands. When they think of making a change. They see how it interacts with everything else that they have to face, including the marketplace. And they do it with great rigor, great care and great rigor and great consultation, to be assured that the steps they are taking step by step experiments they take to see if this will work for them or not, will actually work and not kill people, and not cause starvation in their in their own community or in their own family. So there's intense rigor around that there's intense dialogue around that there's a lot of experimentation. So I'm not so sure it's unique to Western science.
Charles
Oh, I wouldn't say Western science. And I will come back and say, aren't they doing science? And isn't it wrong to equate science with Western science?
Pat
You're right, it is wrong to equate it with Western science. And I'm glad to hear you say that. And I got lots more to talk about around that. But I don't think most of your colleagues really share that view or practice that view.
Matthew
So I'm going to have to put a pin in this and we're going to move to audience Q&A. There are at least 35 questions. And obviously, we're not going to be able to get to all of them, but I flagged a few that have been upvoted quite a bit and also relate to the topic of scale. So Sophia Boqvist asked, And I apologize if I mispronounce your name. It's estimated that about 80% of the food produced in low income countries is produced by smallholders. What do role do you see smallholders playing in the future?
Charles
Well, I’ll be very brief in going back to what I said beforehand. If you care about the livelihoods of huge number of people in the global south, then you have to think about agriculture. I want those people to have good incomes and to come out of poverty. Much of that will involve the continuation of smallholder farming, but not necessarily all of it. So I don't put sort of the maintenance of smallholder farmer as the necessary end. I think the end should be sustainable, and just development. And I'd be amazed if smallholder farming isn't part of that.
Pat
I know that that FAO has gone as high as suggested 80% of food in Africa, is produced by smallholders. And our own research, we'd say probably two things. One is we think it's probably in reality around 70% worldwide. But we'd also say that no one knows for sure. The research hasn't been done in any way that we can feel really confident that we've got those figures right – who is a smallholder? how much land and what different, under what different conditions can be considered to be a smallholder, how much is produced in urban settings, strictly urban settings, peri-urban settings, how much is gathered in the forest? All of those considerations aren't well taken into consideration. But whether it's good or bad entirely, to us it roughly appears that about 70% of the world's food is produced by smallholders in one way or another. And that doesn't mean that everyone's well fed by that does mean you don't need more support, they do that with almost no support with only about 20 or 30% of the resources that the industrial food system uses in terms of water, irrigation systems, and so on. So it's not great that the figure isn’t solving the problem of any kind. More has to be done.
Matthew
And just quickly to plug we have a podcast conversation coming out with Vincent Ricciardi, who conducted one of these global studies looking at what percentage of the world is produced by smallholders, and his number was close to 30 to 35% among under two hectares and under five hectares, it's closer to 50%. And like you said, Pat, there are other kinds of considerations.
Pat
They don’t feel with fisheries or forestry or urban production.
Matthew
This is much longer conversation to get into unpacking that evidence because it is deeply contested. And one more question, this one is on governance. Jeroen Candel asks how to foster collective action towards more sustainable food system outcomes in an increasingly multipolar world. What sort of governments regimes do we need?
Pat
Well, we don't need the kind of food system summit that's being proposed for later this year. It's been developed very tragically by the World Economic Forum where the nobody else is really almost excluding governmental participation, the way they're approaching it. We do need to have major changes to our food system. Back in the in the early 1970s. The United States and a couple of other countries, including my own kind of blew apart, the UN system of food governance, where it was really a rather integrated strategy of science working together with those working in the field working with the investment structures and emergency relief structures all together in one thing called the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. That all got blown apart into different institutions. And it's, I think, been pretty dysfunctional ever since that time. We need to have a food system summit that brings that together so there is harmony and synergy between science technology that's being done by CGIAR for example, and the kind of investment work being done by the International fund for agricultural development and the World Food Program with FAO to make it work better. And we have something that's been created over the last decade called the Committee on World Food Security, which is a UN body, which does try to bring these things together. And it seems tragic that the governance models now being proposed by industry, what actually again, prevent that from continuing to function in the way that has been effective in the last decade.
Charles
A couple of very brief points. One is to go back to something Pat said much earlier about some of the governance system that on sees in indigenous people are really fascinating. And economists, such as Elinor Ostrom have written a lot about that. A lot of lessons there, I think, too, for all of us. And let me jump to something I would like to see. And we have the COP coming up the climate COP in Glasgow at the end of the year. And I hope that works. But I worry about the very, very large multinational things. I would like to see the rich countries, North America, Canada, EU, Japan, possibly China as well actually get together and work out the way in which they can trade in which carbon emissions are also taking part. And I think that the rich countries beginning to get this going by bilateral or small, multilateral things could be a real way of, of shaking things up. So on the government's that's a specific thing I would like to do now. Well, that'd be great.
Matthew
Thank you both very, very much, it ended up being a bit more of a discussion and dialogue than a very intense debate.
Pat
We're just practicing, we’ll work on it.
Matthew
We continued the conversation with more reflections from TABLE collaborators and the audience, and from our speakers Pat and Charles. we’ll add a link in the show notes if you’d like to watch the full event. Thank you for tuning in and we hope you subscribe, tell your friends and rate and review our podcast where it is that you listen! Feed is presented by TABLE, a collaboration between U. Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University. This show was edited and mixed by me Matthew Kessler. Music by blue dot sessions. Let us know who’d you like us to talk to on our discussion board at community.tabledebates.org/
I hope you’re enjoying the fall in the northern hemisphere and the Spring in the southern. Stay tuned for some more bonus content coming soon!
