Feeding ourselves is the first and fundamental task of economic life. How the world produces food is both a problem and a potential answer to both poverty and climate change.
Different ways of growing food and getting it onto people’s plates can either worsen inequality and climate breakdown or work to reduce them. The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that changing how the world farms to focus more on plant-based food has the some of the best potential to bring both climate benefits and meet people’s needs. But what people choose to eat, and the best ways for rural people to support themselves, vary hugely from place to place.
Recent decades saw a big shift towards heavily industrialised and more meat-based farming – a model with a major carbon footprint not primarily concerned with ensuring that everyone gets enough, good food to eat. But better ways of growing and distributing food, and more sustainable diets, are spreading rapidly; and traditional ways of producing food are being championed too.
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Story of change
When everything changed: the US & UK economies in World War IIBoth the United States and the United Kingdom has within living memory gone through a period of very rapid transition in terms of a huge reduction in the...
Story of change
Transition Towns – the quiet, networked revolutionThe Transition Network began in 2006 in the small rural UK town of Totnes, Devon. It was initially a response to the twin threats of climate change and peak...
Story of change
The vegans have landedThe numbers of people following a plant-based diet have soared over the last 10 years. In the UK, polling by the Vegan Society indicates that around 1% of...
Story of change
The post-Cold War Cuban food experimentWith the rising awareness of the speed and scale of action needed to prevent climate breakdown, is a nervousness about our ability to meet the challenge....
Story of change
The land is ours – movements reversing legacies of inequality and modern land grabsFood security is one of the first victims of the increasingly extreme weather patterns linked to the climate emergency. People face even greater insecurity...
Story of change
The Attenborough effect and the downfall of plasticsA pilot whale carrying her dead calf across the ocean for days. A baby albatross bringing up a plastic bag. Millions worldwide watched these events unfold...
Story of change
Rojava in Syria – growing local democracy and defending ecology in the midst of conflictIn 2012 in Rojava, Northern Syria, a group of Kurds set up a secular, ethnically inclusive and bottom-up democratic system, in which all ethnic and...
Story of change
Nature and local democracy – how a River Parliament shows what community control can doIt is often said that democracy is too slow to win urgent ecological progress. But when communities in Rajasthan, India, formed a special parliament to...
Story of change
How does your city grow? Lockdown illuminates urban farming and gardening’s potentialThe lockdown and threat of a global pandemic has turned a lot of people who previously may have depended solely on supermarkets for their food into...
