What’s the next course?: Mridula Ramesh on the future of sustainable food

What exactly is sustainable eating? Eating is about food, but the term “sustainable” has grown to mean everything and hence nothing. It’s an unaccountable word, a ne’er-do-well accomplice for virtue-signallers and a welcome shield for climate sinners.

To unpack this term, let us explore its origins: “Sustain” comes from the Latin “sustinere”, which is a combination of “sub” (up from below) and “tenere” (or hold). Sustainable therefore refers to something that can keep going.

Over time, shades have been added, and others scrubbed away to arrive at a modern holdall term of all that is good. For the purposes of this exploration, let us define sustainable food as something that keeps us and the planet going without tipping either over the edge. With this definition, let us explore food from the lens of the person, the planet, and what path the food travels from planet to person.

Person

At the level of a person, a sustainable food system ensures no one goes hungry and no one is overweight either. The good news from the most recent National Family Health Survey is that fewer Indians are going hungry. Given that women tend to have last dibs on a family’s food, it is encouraging to see that the percentage of women who are underweight has fallen from about 23% in 2015-16 to under 19% in 2019-21.

Other measures of hunger, such as children who are too short for their age, or too skinny for their height, show similar trends. But averages obscure the way forward. So, while averages are falling, the stark differences between states show us where we need to act. Moreover, the trend for overweight/obesity data is troubling. For the first time in records, more Indian women are overweight than underweight, a dubious distinction and one that shows that our challenge in making food “sustainable” from a human angle has changed from “more food” to “different food, targeted better”.

Let us now turn our attention to our gut biome, the microbial ecosystem in our gut that is now known to affect everything from sleep to emotions, immunity and well-being. Our current diet, high in processed food and pesticides, is doing it no favours.

Would going organic help? Many of the synthetic fertilisers and pesticides used to grow food harm farmers, the planet, us and our microbiome. But they are useful.

For most of human history, crop production rose only when forest or grassland gave way to farms. But over the past few decades, food production has nearly tripled, even though cropland area has risen by a mere 10%. More crop has been squeezed out of every acre of land by using more-productive seeds, six times more fertiliser, more pesticides, more mechanisation. More.

The benefits are immense: spared forests and grasslands, and food security for billions. The cons take the form of depleted soils, a brutal blow on biosphere health, rising greenhouse-gas emissions and an unprecedented emptying of the world’s groundwater reserves. Unsurprisingly, from the comfort of a full stomach, there has been a call to return to simpler times. So, is going organic sustainable?

Sri Lanka’s experience makes us pause. In recent decades, that country had become almost self-sufficient in rice. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s data shows that tea exports soared to over $1 billion dollars a year from 2008 on, from about half that in the preceding decade. But in 2018, Sri Lanka slipped into a constitutional crisis, with a change of guard in leadership. On Easter Sunday in 2019, a series of bomb blasts rocked churches and hotels in Colombo. Tourism, a bulwark of the island nation’s economy, floundered and then evaporated altogether with Covid.

In 2021, against the advice of some of its most distinguished agronomists and scientists, the Sri Lankan government banned the import of synthetic fertiliser. Going organic would save hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign exchange in fertiliser import and subsidies, went the thinking. But rice output, as the experts had warned, fell by a fifth, and tea exports, a major source of foreign exchange, plummeted.

Sri Lanka lurched into crisis. Millions slid into poverty, and the lines for food snaking across the country released a rage that toppled the government. But, the confidence of pundits who whispered Sri Lanka down the primrose path to organic nirvana remains unshaken. Look at Cuba, they say.

Cuba depended on imported food and fertiliser in 1990, when suddenly the collapse of the Soviet Union and US embargo cut off fertiliser and food imports almost overnight. Cuba, a country that once provided sugar for the communist world and had proudly eliminated hunger, was soon flirting with starvation.

The country adapted by growing crops in small, urban community gardens, scaling up compost factories, reducing food waste and tightening their belts (there was no democratic government to listen to the people’s woes, and no free press to reveal how tight the belt was pulled).

Deprived of synthetic pesticides, Cuba turned to biological pest control. They bred insects to eat other insects. Slowly, Cuba, thinner but resilient, survived. But fast-forward to today. Cuba still imports much of its food and much of Cuban farmland is not organic.

My conversations with organic food companies and personal experience with organic farms suggests that it takes time, handholding, trial and error to increase yield in organic farming. Can we go half-way? “Natural” farming, which eschews synthetic pesticides, is less verifiable but more resilient than organic farming. But with customers willing to pay a steep premium, greenwashing makes us question whether natural farming is either real or “sustainable”. Moreover, to transition nationally to natural farming needs enormous quantities of cheap, natural fertiliser and pesticides — a daunting ask, to say the least.

The clincher is national security: current organic yields are too low to keep India food-secure. To wit, imagine how the recent fracas with Canada would be playing out if India was dependent on Canadian wheat for its rotis.

So what can we do? To understand the path to success, goes the Chinese proverb, ask those coming back. Cuba’s success with the biological control of pests deserves further study, but Sri Lanka’s experience tells us to be wary of going organic wholescale. Instead, consider that India may spend more than ₹1.75 lakh crore on fertiliser subsidies in 2023-24 — a fortune by any reckoning. This can be better targeted, using the under-tapped gold mine of the soil health card scheme. Available data confirms that Indian farms sorely need more organic content, which will not be met by subsidising synthetic fertiliser. Cutting and targeting the subsidy could smoothen the transition to a more sustainable way of growing food. But such moves are stonewalled by the reflexive chorus of “anti-farmer”. Hmmm.

Planet

Concerns of planetary health reinforce the need to eat and grow food differently.

If food production were a country, it would eclipse China as the leading carbon polluter of the planet. Growing and transporting food from farm to our fingers generates roughly a third of humanity’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions. Worse, about a third of food is wasted. Think. How many of us have been outraged by the carbon pollution of a coal plant? Yet all of India’s coal plants — together — emit a sliver of global food waste emissions.

There is also a matter of philosophy. Coal plants, climate-unfriendly as they are, generate steady electricity that a fast-growing economy like India needs. Food waste, which faces far-less-organised outrage, is a worse climate villain, smirking in the shadows as coal takes the heat. India’s food waste alone, depending on which data set one considers, emits far more greenhouse gases than all the coal plants in South India put together. And yet, where is the outrage? The protests? The torrents of virtuously angry words that can beget action?

The rage against coal helped India install hundreds of gigawatts of renewable power. We waste food because we can afford to, underscoring again that India’s food challenge has changed from “more food” to “food targeted better”.

Talking about food emissions brings us to the bovine in the room. Methane is released when ruminant animals (such as buffaloes) belch or pass gas. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, about 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide in terms of the warming it can cause over 100 years. But when we shrink our horizon to 20 years, a period more relatable to us, methane becomes 80 times as powerful as CO2.

Our relative indifference to livestock (and rice field) emissions looks a lot less defensible in this shorter horizon. Of course, reducing emissions is only one consideration in the trade-offs we must negotiate while looking at livestock. Dairy products and eggs provide cold, hard daily cash to the rural economy in a way nothing else does (although MGNREGA and the PM-Kisan scheme are beginning to address this). Livestock also provide income when crops fail (crop insurance could help). Can we club these schemes into a Kamadhenu bucket, providing all the financial benefits of livestock (cash, counter-cyclical income) without the emissions? Worth considering.

Livestock has transformed global biodiversity. Humans and farmed animals now account for 96% of the weight of all mammals. Sometimes, I wonder if we realise that we are waltzing along a precipice.

Humans are part of the whole, and the whole is being ravaged. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, extinction rates today are tens to hundreds of times higher than the average during the past 10 million years, and the pace is accelerating. And yet, we continue on this road.

Take the Amazon. Brazilian agriculture is the child of deforestation. Soy cultivation (most of which goes to feed livestock) and cattle ranchers in particular have deforested an area in the Amazon roughly the combined size of Spain and Germany. Bite something long enough, paraphrasing Nietzsche, and it bites back. Carlos Nobre, one of the foremost experts on the Amazon, told me that if deforestation continues, parts of the Amazon can tip over from forest to savannah, much like a person becoming diabetic, with similar consequences on the water health of South America. Are we close to this tipping point?

“Some believe that the southern Amazon has already tipped over,” Dr Nobre told me. “Indeed, the southern Amazon has become a source of carbon, rather than a sink. I think we are at the edge. With the combined impact of global warming, El Nino, forest fires and current rates of deforestation, I’d say we have about one to two decades before we completely exceed the tipping point.” And what would that mean? “Oh boy! It’s terrible. About 250 billion tonnes of CO2 [about six times annual global emissions] would be released over several decades into the atmosphere.”

Farming animals, at the scale we are, is not sustainable in any sense of the word. Any symphony that sings sustainability but goes silent on this facet sounds off-key.

Until now, I have not mentioned climate change. If the Amazon tips over, the resultant warming will bring famine back into the headlines. For instance, many parts of wheat-growing India are perched on the upper edge of the optimum temperature range for wheat cultivation. As temperatures rise further, yields will fall. Much of Indian wheat relies on groundwater. As that groundwater supply sputters, yields will plummet.

Wheat is not alone. Most crops in India will suffer if they do not adapt to the changing climate. Whether they can adapt fast enough without engineering is unclear. Moreover, India starts on the back foot when it comes to crop climate adaptation, because we have spent the better part of the previous century growing the wrong things in the wrong places.

In pre-colonial India, crop varieties and irrigation systems were designed to cope with swings in rainfall, a must for a country where most of the annual rain falls in about 100 hours. Vast forests moderated flooding and helped maintain dry season river flow. Taxes were usually paid as a share of crop, meaning they were lower in a drought and higher in years with bountiful rains.

Each of these pieces reinforced one another to create a resilient agricultural society that made India fabulously wealthy once. Colonialism changed this.

First, the British cut down vast swathes of forest, destabilising the water regime. Second, they imposed a fixed cash tax on farmers, which made farmers choose to plant cash crops over crops better suited to their local, variable water availability. Canals and dams, built with more than one eye on the return on British capital, accelerated the shift to cash crops. Post-independence, India’s newly minted leaders, anxious to cater to their rural voter base and with an ocean of then-unexploited groundwater to tap into, widened this colonial-crop-legacy faultline by doubling down on cash crops. As a result, a large chunk of India’s crops does not gel with local water regimes.

This square peg-round hole wound stings especially when an El Nino visits India. Think of the El Nino as the warmer upswing of a giant ocean-air seesaw straddling the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean seesaw (and there are similar seesaws in other oceans) swings up and down every few years, changing global climate and rainfall patterns alongside.

Finance provides a useful metaphor: many of the financial world’s peccadillos lay concealed in a high-liquidity environment, revealed only as monetary conditions tightened. In the same vein, the three-year La Nina (the cooler downswing of the Pacific Ocean seesaw, which helps the monsoon), shielded Indian agriculture somewhat from the talons of the warming climate. Now, with an El Nino in play, there is less “give” in the climate cycle, a tightening of the climate quantitative easing, as it were. Unwise crop choices made in a different era, and climate, are coming to bite, just as bad investments fail as interest rates rise.

One way to adapt is to revert to some of our traditional crops, which can cope with these swings in rainfall. But as long as we have urban palates accustomed to rice and wheat, and as long as the minimum-support-price regime encourages rice and wheat, this adaptation is likely to remain a forlorn hope. It’s like subsiding heroin for an addict while asking them to quit. The moment we look at tinkering with this regime (and we can’t change if we don’t tinker), the predictably shrill chorus of “anti-farmer” erupts.

The path forward

Another way to adapt is to manage the path by which food reaches our plates.

Our path is problematic — we waste food, allow prices to fluctuate wildly and use too much plastic, to name just three issues. We are believed to lose about a third of our food to rot and damage as it travels from farm to fork. Indeed, not understanding where and why we waste our food shows our apathy. Moreover, price swings in vegetables are legendary: we all wept when tomatoes cost more than ₹200 per kg, but there is scarcely a peep when they cost less than ₹10.

To lessen waste and to keep prices stable requires us to store crops better and process more of our crop (tomato into puree; milk into powder). But storing and processing need investment, ideally from the private sector. Why is this not happening at scale? Look to the chaos that ensued when the farm laws were first announced. Any company or politician thinks twice about entering the farm-produce sector. Honestly, why bother? So, investments remain lower than we need, waste remains high and prices yo-yo each year. The sad part is, storing and processing crops can create climate resilience and the desperately needed jobs in rural India, as I have explored in my book, Watershed (2021).

Plastic is an issue closer to the consumer end of the food supply chain. Estimates of how much plastic is used in the manufacture, packing and transportation of food are, once again, uncertain. When I raised this issue with an expert group, the answer was essentially “Ummm….”. Meanwhile, the evidence of mismanaged plastic in the food supply chain is strewn in every drain in India, and when we look closely enough, in ourselves.

A 2022 Dutch study found plastic particles in human blood — especially polystyrene and PET, both of which are used in food packaging. Even in the face of tightening plastic management rules, we don’t yet fully know how much plastic waste is generated.

How can we hope to manage what we do not measure? And hence, in this industry perhaps more than any other, greenwashing is rife.

Recently, I flew with an airline that generated a net profit of ₹1.41 crore every hour in the quarter ending June 2023. And yet, when one peruses this company’s sustainability report, one sees that against waste management, their actions involve “To reduce food wastage on our flights, perishables are served to passengers only against pre-booked orders and only non-perishables with longer shelf life are available for instant orders.” How much has food waste fallen? That is not shared.

They go on to say, that in FY 2022-23, they replaced 83 million single-use plastic offerings with biodegradable options. Yet plastic remains rife in the food offering — single-use plastics lining tin cans, multi-layered packaging, plastic bottles. Worse still, I noticed the crew collecting plastic and food waste together routinely. That’s like dieting for a week only to pig out a big bowl of decadent fudge on Sunday. Unhelpful, at best.

Lastly, in an example of greenwashing at its finest, they say: “We have upcycled 5,000+ waste items that resulted in income generation for a community of women supported by the project.” Oh God. This is literally moving deck chairs on the Titanic. But they are not alone. “Sustainable” is as ubiquitous today as “ecom” was right before the Tech Crash of 2000, or “leveraged investment” was on the eve of the 2008 global financial crisis. Not a comforting thought.

***

We have a humdinger of a challenge ahead of us: not only do we have to feed more people, we must do so as the climate conspires against us. Consider climate action a relay race with hurdles. In the first leg of the race, the runner was driven by a combination of conscience and curiosity, to overcome the hurdle of ignorance and inertia. That part of the race is run.

The next leg of the relay is about action at scale, where the runner is driven by enlightened self-interest (“let’s do it or we’re screwed”) to overcome entrenched interests and greenwashing. Policy that could help grow food sustainably faces political pushback from entrenched interests and is therefore not crafted or not implemented evenly, allowing greenwashing to paper over cracks. And so, greenwashing is the hurdle to overcome now in climate action.

In recent months, I have felt fear on this front. Not fear of inaction. But of inanity masquerading as heroism in the face of catastrophe.

That’s where resetting the image of sustainable eating can help. We underappreciate the power of our human frailties. More of us will likely eat millets and less animal product every day not because it is climate-resilient but because a celebrity or influencer showed how cool eating this way is.

Seen in this light, the G20 dinner hosted by President Droupadi Murmu that showcased millets as haute cuisine was a great first step. If more influencers and celebrities espoused truly sustainable eating (and they would if they believed they could be called out for greenwashing), this could shift mindset, and get voices across the political spectrum to publicly commit to sustainable eating. Then maybe the next time we tinker with policy, the sopranos of the “anti-farmer” chorus will remain a little muted.

And as demand for sustainable food goes up, farmers can change what they grow, and the crop patterns can become sustainable. Maybe. There are still a lot of “ifs” along the way. Perhaps in the luxury of the clean air today, we cannot see clearly how to move forward. In a month, as the smoke from our unsustainable food choices stings our eyes, perhaps we will see more clearly.