What's the worst thing we've ever done to the planet? The answer is tough to hear, and many people recoiled from it because it conflicts with some of our most cherished beliefs. Farming is the greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of wildlife loss, the world's greatest cause of extinction. It's caused roughly 80% of the deforestation this century. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species. All the rest are poultry.
Just 4% of mammals by weight are wild, 36% is accounted for by humans, and farmed animals make up the remaining 60%. Yes, look, we all need food and we all need farming. But that shouldn't blind us to the fact that it's also among the world's foremost causes of climate breakdown, of water pollution, of air pollution. But perhaps most importantly, it's the foremost cause of land use. Now, I've come to see land as perhaps the most important of all environmental questions.
Every acre of land that we use for our own purposes. is an acre that can't support wild ecosystems, such as forests and wetlands and savannas, on which the great majority of the world's species depend. It's our use of land. which above all is driving the sixth great extinction of species. Now, there are some thrilling and world-changing solutions to these great crises.
And I'll be coming to those in just a minute. I mean, some of them are mind-blowing and have the potential to solve several problems at the same time. But in order to understand them and the need for them... First, we need to understand the scope and direction of the global food system. Now, we rail against urban sprawl, and rightly so. But all our homes and businesses and infrastructure occupy just 1% of the planet's land.
agricultural sprawl is a far greater ecological threat. Farming occupies 38 percent. of the planet's land. Most of the rest, incidentally, is protected areas, forests, deserts, ice and mountains. So we have this vast amount of land being occupied. A lot of people complain about intensive farming and the harm that it does to us in our world. And this harm is real. But so is the harm caused by extensive farming, which means using more land to produce a given amount of food.
Now, I know some of you will find this a shocking statement, but the most damaging of all farm products And that's because of the agricultural sprawl it causes. You remember that 38% of land used by farming? Well, only 12% of the land is covered by crops. The remaining 26% is used for pasture, mostly for cattle, sheep and goats. Our environmental crisis is not driven by intensive farming or by extensive farming, but by a disastrous combination of the two.
The problem is not the adjective. It's the noun. Farming itself is threatened by the environmental harm that it's contributed to, such as climate breakdown and soil depletion and the exhaustion of water supply. But there could be an even greater threat to our food supply. it's possible to see the biggest threat that the global food system faces as the global food system. it's beginning to look a bit like the global financial system in the approach to 2008.
For a long time, we thought we were beating hunger. Between the 1960s and 2014, hunger was declining fairly steadily. But then in 2015, the trend began to turn and the number of chronically malnourished people began rising and has continued to rise ever since. Astoundingly, that rise began just as world food prices were falling. So what's going on? Well, the world food system, like global finance, is a complex system, and complex systems behave in counterintuitive ways.
They're resilient under certain conditions because there's weird self-organizing dynamics. Stabilize them. But if they're pushed by an extreme amount of stress, then those same self-organizing dynamics can start transmitting shocks across the network. And beyond a certain point, they can tip. the whole network past its critical threshold, whereupon the system collapses suddenly and unstoppably.
Now, over the past few years, the crucial elements of systemic resilience that we call redundancy, modularity, circuit breakers, and backup systems have been stripped out by corporate strategies. On one estimate, just four companies now control 90% of the global grain trade. Only four crops, which are wheat, rice, corn and soy. account for almost 60% of the calories that farmers produce.
And the production for export of those crops has become highly concentrated in a handful of nations, including Russia and Ukraine. Nations have polarized into super exporters and super importers. And much of this trade passes through vulnerable choke points, such as the Turkish Straits and the Suez and Panama Canal. Had the blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 by that giant container ship, you remember that, had that coincided with the closure of the Turkish Strait?
in 2022 by the war in Ukraine, then the food chain for hundreds of millions of people might have snapped. The reason why hunger is rising seems to be that as the food system has lost its resilience, more and more contagious shocks are being transmitted across it.
Now, we in the rich nations, we scarcely notice The shocks being caused by speculative surges and export bans and bottlenecking and other issues like that until 2020, when COVID began to make us more aware of some of the issues we were facing. But those shocks for years have been hitting the poorer nations with weak currencies which stand at the end of the queue. And what they saw is that local food prices can surge even as global prices.
remain low. Now, these problems are likely only to become worse as the system becomes less stable and is possibly approaching a critical threshold. Governments prevented the banks from collapsing by bailing them out with future money. But you can't bail out the food system with future food. So we face two enormous issues here. One, the environmental harm caused by the food system, and secondly, the possibility that the system itself could collapse.
Might there be a solution, a solution to both these problems? Can we find a way of feeding the world without devouring the planet? Well, there are some fascinating new techniques for growing crops being developed by farmers and scientists. I'm especially interested in the potential of perennial grain crops. which are being developed in particular by the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
If we can grow grain on plants that stay in the soil from year to year, we can greatly reduce the damage to the soil caused by plowing and the amount of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, irrigation required to establish new crops. Other farmers are finding really amazing ways of boosting their yields without using either fertilizers or manure.
Crucial, as all these developments are, though, they can only be partial solutions to the issues we face, because perhaps our most urgent task... is replacing the protein-rich and fat-rich foods that we currently obtain from animals and from crops like soy and oil parts. If the biggest problem that farming is causing is the amount of land it uses, then perhaps the biggest environmental solution is shifting food production off the land and into the factory.
Now, I realise that's another shocking statement. Many people hate the idea of food being produced in factories, forgetting somewhat that almost all the food we eat passes through a factory at some point in its production. In fact, the great majority of the animals we eat are factory farms. Well, in Helsinki, Finland, I visited a company called Solar Foods, which is using a technique called precision fermentation to create a protein-rich flour.
from a soil bacterium that eats hydrogen. It requires no farm products at all. I was the first person outside the lab to eat a pancake made from this flour. A small flip for man. Amazingly, this pancake tasted, well, just like a pancake, rich and mellow and filling. But this isn't just about making pancakes. These flours, which have a protein content of about 65%, could form the basis of much better alternatives.
cheaper alternatives, healthier alternatives to the animal products and some of the plants, like soy and coconut and oil palm, that we currently eat. In fact, they could trigger a whole new cuisine. a shift as profound as the Neolithic Revolution. Most importantly, they require just a tiny fraction of the land and a tiny amount of the water and fertilizer needed to raise either crop
or animals. And this is why I see precision fermentation as perhaps the most important environmental technology ever developed. It could be all that stands between us. Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, which was first developed by NASA in the 1960s. But it's not rocket science. It actually requires no major technological breakthrough. the bacteria being multiplied by solar foods use hydrogen in similar ways to how plants
use sunlight. But this process, powered ultimately by solar energy, you use the electricity to make the hydrogen, is far more efficient than photosynthesis. Are you horrified by the idea of eating bacteria? I'm sure some of you are. Well, if so, I've got bad news for you. You eat them with every meal. Some of our food, like cheese and yogurt, is deliberately inoculated with live bacteria.
If you're still disgusted by the idea of eating microbes, could I invite you to visit a factory pig or factory chicken farm? And the slaughterhouse, which processes and kills and processes the animals that it raises, that's what disgusting looks like. So we have this extraordinary potential. If we can replace the protein which we currently obtain from the flesh and secretions of animals... with protein from single-celled organisms.
we could release vast tracts of the planet from our impacts, restoring forests and salt marshes and freshwater marshes and mangroves and steps and savannas and kelp forests and sea floors. This great rewilding could stop the sixth great extinction in its tracks. It could save Earth's systems. It could draw down vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Moreover, it could be the only chance some countries have of breaking their dangerous dependency on export.
from distant places. A lot of the countries which are most at risk of mass starvation, they don't have enough fertile land and water to produce the food they need from farming. But they have plenty of something else. sunlight, which is what you need to sustain a food production based on hydrogen. Now, these technologies are yet to be fully commercialized, but companies like Solar Foods have applied for permission to release their products onto the market.
I hope that when they do, innovative chefs will step up to design the new diet, the new cuisine that the technology promises. And I would love to see a microbial brewery in every town, run by small local companies, producing protein-rich foods tailored to local markets. For that to happen, we have to stop the disastrous corporate concentration we've seen in the rest of the food chain. Intellectual property rights should be weak and antitrust laws should be strong.
We have the possibility here of solving two of our great existential crises. with the same strategy, by shifting the production of protein-rich food off the farm and into the factory. we could help solve these great predicaments of hunger and extinction. Thank you.