Beyond the field

Our history as a species is inseparable from our food, a decisive factor in shaping our civilisations. From the development of our brains to the global obesity pandemic; from the first great civilisations of antiquity to today's world of megacities; from the appearance of trade and money to globalised capitalism — the way we have organised, as a society, the production, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal of our food has shaped how we inhabit the Earth. It is what allowed us to settle most of the planet's land surface, including the most inhospitable parts, and to adapt to extremely varied environments. Eating says something about our relationship to time, to others, to our values, our religions, our upbringing — and about our social organisation. Feeding a population is a deeply political matter. It secures social stability and the stability of power, and it frees up surpluses and resources — labour, time, energy, capital, purchasing power — to fuel economic growth. The rise and the power of the great empires of antiquity, of the city-states and of the industrial metropolises all rest on their capacity to produce food, or have it produced, then move it and distribute it to feed armies, officials, priests, artisans, workers and scholars. Our political cultures reflect successive waves of globalisation just as much as our diets do; the potato, tea, sugar and cotton still mark our history and our political geography. Fossil energy let us resolve the Malthusian dilemma: raising productivity to feed a population growing exponentially. But it also upended the organisation of our food and, through it, of our societies — the urbanisation of Western countries, the commodification of the economy, the demographic explosion and the "great acceleration" in the withdrawals we make from resources and ecosystems. Food amounts to a double social contract for humanity: one with nature, to draw resources from it, and one with our own model of development. Supplying safe, varied food while shrinking its share of our budgets and of our time gave the West the most remarkable period of economic growth, peace and stability, social progress, education and life expectancy in its history. As we enter a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in a world less stable and less predictable, the globalised thermo-industrial model of modern food is undermining both sides of that contract. Today's great challenges put the question squarely back on the table. We have gone from one to eight billion people on Earth in two centuries, and we are heading for 9.7 billion, 70% of them urban, by 2050. Can our food systems deliver on all of those promises? Food will always carry a particular responsibility, a heavy and demanding one, in the face of what the world now confronts: by construction it is the human activity that touches every planetary boundary — climate, but also soils, biodiversity, and the biogeochemical cycles of water, nitrogen and phosphorus. Yet our current model, mass production for linear mass consumption (extract, manufacture, transport, consume, discard), draws on resources and discharges into ecosystems far more than the Earth can naturally regenerate. Reading the world's food system reveals new fault lines: no longer over-consumption in "rich" countries and undernutrition in developing ones, but overweight or obese and undernourished populations living side by side in the same places. This is especially true in Western societies, where the middle classes are slipping gradually into both faces of food insecurity. Poor diets also risk reversing, for the first time in centuries, the rise in our life expectancy, and deficiencies and imbalances may leave us intellectually less developed than our parents' generation. The other great losers in this slow decline are farmers themselves: the race for output, economic fragility, debt, suicide and the failure to renew generations all weigh on the future of the profession, of farmland and of rural areas, on our capacity to carry out the transitions we need, and even on our ability to feed ourselves on our own terms. Systemic land grabbing and the financialisation of farmland are emerging, widening the gap further between countries and between populations, with conflict, migration and the slide into drug trafficking or terrorism. Agroecology, the bioeconomy and nature-based solutions nevertheless carry real hope of helping us rebuild a world that is not merely viable but regenerates resources and ecosystems. Starting from concrete examples on the ground, a picture begins to emerge of farming as a supplier of solutions across the whole economy: food, of course, but also energy, health, cosmetics, construction, the plastics and automotive industries, land-use planning, urban design, urban and environmental services, transport, mining, social inclusion and much else besides. What that sketches, above all, are models of progress built on collaboration and on sharing — of raw material, of finance, of knowledge — for a world that ends up more decentralised, rooted in its territories, more resilient to shocks, more inclusive and more innovative. In short, a new narrative for a model of progress that lets us face the great planetary challenges without being punitive: attractive and motivating instead.