The world’s food system needs a radical rethink, with George Monbiot

on the very edge of starvation. Back in the nineteen sixties, widespread famine was averted by the Green Revolution, a transfer of agricultural technology to developing countries that massively increased farming yields across Asia and South America and lifted hundreds of millions out of hunger and poverty. The population in the nineteen sixties was just three billion, now at eight billion people, and still our food system has managed to keep up.

In twenty nineteen, the production of primary crops things like cereals, fruits, vegetables, reached nine point four billion tons globally. That's fifty percent more than in the year two thousand. But all that food production comes at an enormous cost. Agriculture is a major driver of global greenhouse gas emissions, and almost forty percent of the Earth's surface is used for farming. That's something that my guest today, environmental journalists and campaigner George Monbio,

argues is a disaster for our planet. The crucial environmental commodity which we should be paying more attention to than any other environmental metric is land, because every hectare of land we use for an extractive industry is a hectare not being used for wild ecosystems. In his new book, ReGenesis, George argues that the global food system needs a radical rethink. That system can sound abstract, but picture it as every business and relationship that exists to bring Ukrainian wheat to

Pakistan or Brazilian beef to a butcher in Paris. This conversation is about the difficulties facing that system, but it is also about solutions, the technologies that George hopes can fix a system in crisis and lead us to another greener revolution. We join George surrounded by birds and bees in his community orchard in Oxford, where his book and his examination of the global food system begins. George, welcome

to the show. Thank you very much. You open your book sitting in this orchard, pulling out a spit of soil, and then you examine the food system through the exploration of what's in the soil. You write about these systems being in crisis, and you'll then explore solutions to some of the crisis. Let's start with the crisis. Where does the crisis and the food system really begin. It begins

with the world food system. In fact, the biggest problem the world food system faces is the world food system, and it's beginning to look rather like the financial system in the approach to two thousand and eight, which is not a good place to be. There are a number of huge, superdominant companies which have become too big to fail. So on one estimate, four companies control ninety percent of

global grain trade. And as their operations have become more efficient and streamlined, which might be good for each individual business, it makes the system as a whole less resilient. And to understand this you really have to grasp systems theory and a complex system, which is what the global food system is, and indeed what most of the important things on earth are is a system composed of nodes like the knots in an old fashioned fishing net, and the

links between them. And if those nodes become too big and too strongly connected to each other, you lose the four elements of systemic resilience. One of those is redundancy spare capacity that's been more or less stripped out of the food system. Everything has become super efficient, just in time delivery. Another one is what's called modularity, the degree

to which the system is compartmentalized. Well, that's all been stripped out as well, as we've switched towards a global standard farm supplying a global standard diet, using the same seeds, the same chemicals, the same machinery everywhere. Then there's circuit breakers, where are the points at which shocks which pass through that system can stop being transmitted. Well, those have all

gone as well. And then there's the backup systems. Where are the entirely different systems which you could switch into if you encounter a crisis. They're virtually non existent now. And so, through this global homogenization, which seems to make sense every individual step towards it makes sense, we see a system that has become systemically fragile. Now, complex systems they don't respond to change in linear ways. Right, they're

not complicated. I mean it's not complicated more than complicated exactly. So an engine is a complicated system. It's got lots of moving parts, but they behave in predictable and linear ways. Whereas a complex system is composed of billions of decision points randomly stochastically interacting with each other, but has this weird property of being self regulating within a certain range

of stress. But then if you push it beyond that stress range, those self regulating circuits within the system becomes self amplifying. And this is the same you know, whether you're looking at the global food system, global financial system, ecosystems, the atmosphere, the oceans, the human brain, the human body. This is how complex systems consistently behave. And so they'll absorbs and self regulate and maintain an equilibrium state up

to a certain critical threshold. And you describe that threshold to be flickering that you will start to see signs of it breaking down. And are there signs you're seeing in the food system that respond to this sort of flickering in a complex system, Yes, you're quite right, So as a system approaches a tipping point, it's outputs begin to flicker and we see things which don't seem to make any sense. Just like in the approach of two thousand and eight, we saw these wild surges and fallbacks

in equity values, and so what's going on here? And then suddenly the whole system was on the verge of going down because of the subprime crisis in the US, which wasn't a big deal in terms of global financial flows, but it was the butterfly's wing which nearly tipped the whole system. Well, in this case, we're seeing those wild fluctuations in output values. Now, it should give us a few examples. So in twenty fifteen, something very weird happened.

Between the nineteen six and twenty fourteen, we saw a steady decline in chronic global hunger, fewer and fewer people going hungry. And then suddenly in twenty fifteen we saw that trend turn and we started seeing the number of chronically hungry people rising and that's continued ever sight. I mean, there's the pandemic that's made it worse, but the start forces long before. And the really weird thing about this is that between twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, food prices

fell dramatically. The global food price index in twenty fourteen was one hundred and fifteen. In twenty fifteen it was ninety three, and it stayed below a hundred right up until halfway through twenty three. Certainly there's more poverty and people kind of afforded. That's why there's hungry. Yeah, it's the opposite to what you would expect. You know, you'd expect food prices full, hunger fulls, right, but it rose.

And what has been happening here is that as the system has lost its resilience, shocks are more easily transmitted through it. So even something relatively small like a speculative surgeon one commodity, like an export restrict by one exporting nation, those shocks, instead of being damped down by a healthy system, get amplified by a system which is becoming fragile. We in the rich nations hardly notice that, because we've got

the buying power, we've got the hard currencies. It's a poor nations which are food insecure, which are buying food with soft currencies in a hard currency market, or at the end of that chain, and as the shock gets amplified through the chain, it lands on them. And so what you see is these sudden disruptions of supply in the poor nations which cause local price spikes. So even while the global price is low, the national price spikes, and that's what seems to have been driving chronic hunger.

So we have the pandemic and people say, oh, there's an issue with food supply here, and then we have Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ah, there's an even bigger issue with food supply, and people assume that that's what caused it. But actually those problems, which are real problems and have definitely exacerbated it, have revealed the systemic fragility. They haven't caused the systemic fragility. And in fifteen, of course, the

Paris Climate Agreement was signed. Yes it was. The world was point nine degrees salsius warmer than pre industrial times. We're at one point two almost now. Yes, and climate change is contributing to some of these problems. Well, a classic example was this year, after the invasion of Ukraine, India stepped forward and said, don't worry, we can fill the gap because we've got a bumper wheat harvest coming and there's going to be this massive shortfall of wheat

exports from Ukraine. We'll make up that shortfall. We'll become a super exporter this year. Literally just four weeks later, the Indian government came forward again and said about those exports, we're imposing a total export ban because we were hit by this massive heat wave which has shriveled the grain on the plants, and our weak harvest is going to

be much much lower than we thought. And so what we saw there was a climate crisis coinciding with a geopolitical crisis, and we're going to see more and more of that. And some of the predictions for how environmental change is going to affect the global food supply are really terrifying. Absolutely is staying awake at night sweating terrifying.

But we have to acknowledge and sit in this sort of discomfort that this food system than we've created has been able to supply food for the ever growing population. We had about two billion people at the start of the the twentieth century who were fed, and yes there was more hunger proportionally then, and now we have eight billion people. This year we crossed that threshold and we are still being able to feed them. Yes, hunger is going up, but it's still relative to where we were at a

much lower level. So the system that's allowed us to get here does have problems. But how do we sit with that discomfort? Yes, so it's kind of like the man falling out of the window and the top of the skyscraper saying, so far, so good. It has served as well so far, and we have been very fortunate. You know, we've seen this great surge in food production which is outstripped population growth such that we now produce

roughly twice as many calories as humans need to survive on. Now, a huge amount of that is wasted by being channeled through live start, by being used for biofuels. Some of it disappears in food waste as well, but we can turn out enormous volumes of food. Unfortunately, this system is now being hit by all these causes of fragility which we're just not attending to, and governments just don't seem interested,

They don't even seem to understand what's happening here. And it is like the financial system before two thousand and eight, where it looked great, it looked really healthy. You know, equity values are really high, the bank shares were soaring. It was all looking great and then suddenly boon and it required this massive bailout. Now, the thing is that you could bail out the financial sector before it completely collapsed by drawing on future money. You can't bail out

the food sector by drawing on future food. What is it that got us to this point? There are you know, the ability for us to be able to make food for eight billion people? What were the steps that led us to this point? And then where in those steps did we go wrong? Sure, the answer is the same to both questions. That's a curious and paradoxical thing here. The answer really is a green revolution which moved towards these very high yielding, very successful new varieties which respond

very well to a particular formula of treatment. You know, it's the same seeds, it's the same fertilizers, it's the same machinery. You'd roll it out worldwide and you're producing a huge amount of food. And as somebody who grew up in India, that was tremendously valuable because we were on the verge of facing hunger in levels that we'd

never seen before. No question, no question at all. In all the predictions were we were going to see unbelievable and horrendous famines, and that system saved the lives of huge numbers of people. But it has these inherent instabilities for all those reasons that I mentioned, And and it's apparent health today, like the apparent health of the financial system becomes ever more illusory as time goes on because

of the problem of systemic fragility. And so there's concentrated agricultural system that's feeding the world right now, how exactly is it contributing to climate change? Well, food production as a whole is responsible for roughly one third of all

our carbon emissions or greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we eliminated all other sources of greenhouse gas emissions, if we don't tackle that, by the end of the century, it will exceed by between two and three times the amount of greenhouse gases we can safely produce just the food system alone. But there's an even bigger issue, which is

the carbon opportunity costs. So those greenhouse gas emissions I'm talking about, you could think of those as a current account, current climate account, but the capital climate account is the carbon opportunity costs, which means what you could be doing

otherwise if you weren't doing this particular thing. So, for instance, if those emissions that are generated are coming from the fertilizer production, from changing the land use, or you're deforesting, and from the manure that's coming from livestock, and all those things produce greens. So the livestock themselves produce methane, the manure produces nitrous oxide. These are both very powerful

greenhouse gases. But the biggest question of all is is capital account that land might otherwise be harboring, for instance, forests or wetlands, both of which are very high carbon habitats, And if the forests and wetlands are allowed to come back, they will draw down a great deal of the carbon dioxide we've released into the atmosphere. In fact, we now know that decarbonizing our economies is no longer enough. Clearly, we have to decarbonize them as quickly and as effectively

as we possibly can. But even if we did that, we would almost certainly exceed two degrees of global heating. We need to draw down some of the carbon diots that we've already produced. If we bring back forests and wetlands in particular, they turn CO two into C into solid carbon, and in doing so they could determine whether

or not we get through this century. Yes. Yeah, In fact, it's very hard to see how we're going to sustain our life support systems and less as a mass restoration of wild ecosystems like forests and wetlands, and the biggest impediment to that is livestock keeping. In your book, you mentioned this statistic which is stunning, which is that we

produce twice as many calories as humans consume. But of course that's because last majority of those calories are not being fed to humans, they're being fed to livestock, and that creates us a set of problems. Yes, indeed, so we have this grossly inefficient system that we've created of

eating animals, and it divides into two categories. There's the intensive animal production, which involves these gigantic factories with tens of thousands of chickens or thousands of pigs, all these giant feed lots with loads and loads of cattle kept in horrendous conditions, massive animal cruelty, being fed on grain often shipped from the other side of the world. Particularly sawyer growing in the Sahardu and the Amazon in South America,

with devastating ecological consequences. And then when they've eaten those that food, there's a huge amount of nutrients comes out the back end of those animals, and there's nowhere for those nutrients to go. They can't easily be transported because they're very low value and high volume, so farmers spread them on the surrounding fields of fields can't absorb them.

All the surplus washes off into the rivers and the rivers die, and all over the world now we're seeing the global standard river being created by intensive livestock farming, which is overfertilized, which means you get these blooms of micro algae which when they respire at night, suckle the oxygen out of the water and kill everything else, and so they're turning into sewers, effectively are beautiful rivers. And this is happening all over the world. So that's the

intensive livestock farming. And everyone says, oh, we hate that, and they say so, the answer then must be extensive livestock farming. In other words, crazy, exactly happy farming. And we see all the images and We've got this long Bucolic pastoral tradition of the shepherd with their flocks or the cowboy with the cows, and we think that's the answer. But if there's one thing worse than intensive livestock farming,

it's extensive livestock farming. And the reason for that is that, by definition, extensive farming means using more land to produce the same amount of food. That's the definitional quality of it and the crucial environmental commodity which we should be paying more attention to than any other environmental metric is land. And the amount of land you use is the key determinant of whether our life support systems survive or not.

Because every hectare of land we use for an extractive industry like cattle ranching, for example, is a hectare not being used for wild ecosystems such as forests or wetlands or savannahs or natural grasslands. And so we're seeing this is the biggest driver of all of habitat destruction. I mean, agriculture is the worst thing we've ever done to the planet, right, big oil? Oh yeah, well yes, because of the full

spectrum assault on the planet. I mean it causes a massive amount of climate breakdown, more than global transport does, for example, considerably more. But it also is the greatest cause of habitat destruction by a very long way, the greatest cause of wildlife loss, the greatest cause of extinction again by a very long way, greatest cause of soil degradation, greatest source of cause of fresh water use, one of the greatest causes of water pollution, of air pollution, and

of climate breakdown as well. And the lion's share of a cow's share of that is caused by livestock farming. And the more extensive that livestock farming is, the more damaging it is because of the sheer amount of land it requires to support it. There was a study in the United States saying, what if we did what all the food is and chefs and some environmentalists say we should do, which is the switch from grain fed cattle production to pasture fed cattle. And it looked at it.

In fact, oh, yes, we would have to raise the amount of land used to keep cattle by two hundred and seventy percent. That would mean more than the entire surface area the United States. You'd have to demolish the cities. You'd have to cut down all the forests, you'd have to water the deserts, you'd have to digizette. The National parks called all the golf course, they get all the golf courses, Yes, the worst of all. And you would

turn the whole US surface into a cattle ranch. And then you can still need to be importing loads of your beef from the Amazon, which incidentally they're already doing and calling it pasture fed. It's an absolute environmental catastrophe. The most damaging of all the farm products is organic pasture fed beef. And the reason for the organic bit of that is that organic needs even more land and

produces even more greenhouse gas emissions. There's a stunning start in the book which said we use twenty eight percent of the land on the planet to create one percent of protein that humans consume. Yeah, the land issue is so interesting and so important. Right. We all hate urban sprawl, right, and we're right to hate urban sprawl because it's very bad for the countryside and it's also very bad for

our cities. But the entire urban area that humanity uses, whether in towns, village, is what ever is one percent of the terrestrial planet's surface. Right, much of the rest of the world is ice cap, desert, rocky mountains, which you know, we can't really use for extractive industries, and about fifteen percent is protected area. Forty percent is used for agriculture. But of that forty percent, the twelve percent is used for growing crops, right, and roughly half of

that of those crops are going into livestock. But then what about the twenty eight percent. That twenty eight percent, the biggest thing, the worst thing we do to the planet is entirely for pasture fed animals. Of that from the animals which get their food from grazing alone, they produce just one percent of our protein one percent. This is the most wasteful, profligate, destructive way of producing our

food you could possibly imagine. And you might ask yourself why in the twenty first century are we using a neolithic means to produce our protein rich foods. After the break, George discusses the technologies that can help bring farming and protein production into the twenty first century. I want to move to the solutions part of the book, because there are different solutions. There is growing meat and labs, there's insect protein, there is using AI for farming. But the

solution that you put forward are much more radical. It's to do away with the farm entirely. You call it the techno ethical shift. What is it? So I'm not calling for an all farming. I am calling for an end of all livestock farming. I think that we just can't afford to indulge this way of feeding ourselves anymore. It is an indulgence that the planet cannot accommodate anymore. There's just not the space for it. If we're going to get through this century, we have to stop livestop farming.

It really is as simple as that. Yeah, you like your steak, but I quite like a habitable planet or state habitable planet. Tough choice. So what I'm calling for, yes, is the end of livestop farming. And we are incredibly fortunate because just as we need that shift, we have the means of doing it far more effectively than ever before. At this point, I would go, you're talking about lab

grown meat, right, Yeah, except I'm not. I thought I thought when I started research for this book that lab grown meat was going to be a big part of the answer. This cultured meat where you can actually like grow your steak, or grow your lamb chop, or grow your tune and fill it in a flask in a factory,

in a bioreactor. I think there are now just too many technical and financial barriers to doing that at scale, not least because you need to maintain clinical standards of hygiene to do it, which is very expensive, because if you don't, the issue is at mammalian cells double every twenty four hours, Well, bacterial cells double every twenty minutes. So unless you've got clinical standards, you're going to have

a bacterial culture, not a mammalian culture. And that is where actually the answer comes in bacterial cultures, because bacterial cultures are really really easy to grow and super productive and much much cheaper, not just than cultured meat, but in fact, any protein rich food that we produced today, well they've had three billion years on this planet evolved and become efficient. That's right, And I feel very privileged.

This is a pure vanity thing. But when I went to Helsinki to look at a company which was one of the early movers in this field, it's called Solar Foods, and it's producing this protein rich flour from a hydrogen oxygenating bacterium found in the soil, which whose feedstock is hydrogen. It doesn't eat any photosynthetic product. In fact, it turns hydrogen into it. It's useful energy and creates itselves that way.

And we can make hydrogen by splitting water using sunlight anywhere on Earth, well particularly places which are hungry, which tend to have a lot of sunlight. And so you've got this enormous potential. So anyway, I was the first person outside the lab, and this is where the vanity comes in to eat a pancake made from this bacterial flower, a small flip for man, and amazingly, it tasted just

like a pancake. You had to dilute it because normally, you know, if you're making a Western style pancake, you start with your wheat flower, right, and that doesn't have enough protein and fat to make a proper pancake, so you add eggs and milk. But in this case, because the bacterial flower is like sixty percent protein or about thirty percent fat, you have to dilute it. Otherwise you'd make an omelet and mix it with wheat flower, bring the wheat flowering, mix it with the wheat flower, and

it was just uncanny. This is a pancake. It's just an ordinary pancake. Now, obviously they're not just in the business of making kicks, because what you can do is to produce the exact mix of proteins and fats and things that you need a to replace animal products very very cheaply, eventually, and with a tiny fraction of the land footprint, the water footprint, the nutrient footprint, all the

key elements of what it takes to make food. That's even after you account for the solar farms and the wind turbines and the electrolyzers that would split water absolutely

would be needed for all the hydrogen. So on my estimates, you could if you wanted to do it all in one place, and I very strongly advocate that we don't, that it should be a highly distributed system, but you could produce all the world's protein in an area the size of Greater London well, and that then gives us this tremendous ability to release land for ecosystems, for rewilding, to bring back the forests and the wetlands and the savannahs and the natural grasslands on which we depend on

which our entire life support systems depend I mean, if we can't restore much of what we've destroyed on this planet, the entire Earth system is going to reach its tipping point. I mean that again, seems clear. You know, we're seeing the flickering. These wild weather events that are hitting us more and more look very much like the flickering in a complex system that precedes a tipping point. Right. Well,

so you're looking at the food system. You're saying, Okay, we need proteins and vitamins and carbohydrates and fat, and the protein and the fat could come through this system. But we've had vegetarian diets. I grew up in India with a vegetarian diet for a very long time. They are not being adopted more widely. So why do you think people would turn around and say, yes, George, you've made a really good point. That's just solve flip overright now. It's not going to happen like that. That's not how

change happened. I mean change that the margin happens. Yeah, I've got a plant based diet. You know, a small percentage of people in Europe have plant based diets, but that's no way catching up with the tremendous speed of expansion of animal farming, so we can't rely on that moral suasion to get people to change. It's partly going

to be on price. That these new technologies have steep cost curves and is not going to be long at all before they undercut even the cheapest form of plant protein, which is soil, which is a lot cheaper than any animal protein. So they'll compete very well on price, but also on quality. I mean the plant based substitutes for me, a lot of them are not great, and it's because they are dealing with these big, complex ingredients which have to be broken down and extracted. There's a lot of

processing involved. You have to disguise some of the flavors, particularly if using coconut, often the fats are greasy rather than juicy. You've got a whole lot of issues, and these can be much more easily tackled through precision fermentation, where you're making the exact proteins and components that you want, and so you have much less processing, much healthier products,

Cheaper products. First of all, can replace the great majority of the meat wheat, which is the meat that comes from factory farming, that is in all the chicken nuggets, and the burgers and the sausages and stuff, and then you can start moving up that value chain. But even more importantly, I think we're going to see a great flowering of new diets of things we can't even conceive of any more than the first Neolithic farmers to capture

a while cow. We're thinking about cammbert right. There's going to be a whole load of products emerging from these new technologies which we haven't imagined. There was an ad that came in two thousand. I don't know if you've seen it. A spaceship in the form of a Coca Cola bottle lands on Mars. It shoots such straws, and all the aliens Martians come and sip on the Coca cola and finish it up, and then they form a message on the planet that says send more. That is

a kind of aspiration that sells clearly. Yeah, do we need a send more or cook version for this new form of eating. Well, it certainly needs a publicity boost because a lot of people will say, oh, I'm not eating bacteria, and I say, well, hang on a moment. First of all, you eat bacteria. That's right, In fact, worse than that you're composed to a large extent of bacteria, and we deliberately add live bacteria into some of our food. I mean, I mean, let's let's think about cheese, right, Okay,

So cheese. You start with the mammary secretions from from another species called a cow, and you mix those traditionally with a chemical extracted from the fourth stomach of a nursing calf called rennet, and you mix that up with

the mammary secretions. You create this wobbly mass of fat and protein rap and then you inject bacteria into that, and the bacteria digests that wobbly mass, and then they're excrements turn into this yellow, stinky stuff and if you leave it long enough, it gets really nice and stinky and moldy. And then we eat that and people say, bacteria, no, no, no, yeah, hang on, they know what we're looking at. What's coming out the end of this process. It's basically a flower.

It's just a protein rich flower, that's what it is. It happens to be made from bacterial cells. But you wouldn't see the difference between that and any other flower, except it's incredibly high in protein and fat. And you just smell it in thing. Oh well, that's nice, you know, because we've got a very strong attraction to protein right

as humans. And then you can turn that into anything without all the cruelty, without the epidemics of disease, without all the slaughterhouse and the blood and the guts and the gore and stuff. And do you think microbial food is disgusting? So the other solution, if you solve protein and fat with these precision fermentation thats is to try and address the crop problem. And you look at perennials, yeah, those, So this is I think a really exciting way forward here.

The great majority of our grain crops come from annual plants. In how the words plants which live and die within one year. And now large areas covered by annual plants are quite rare in nature, and they generally only occur

in the wake of a disaster. So where there's been a landslide or a fire or a volcanic eruption and it clears the ground, and the annual plants are our specialists in colonizing bare ground, and so they'll quickly colonize it, they'll reproduce very fast, dominate for a couple of years. And then the longer lasting plants are perennials, which live more than one year. They then come in and swallow up that space and push the annuals out. So almost all our grain crops are annual, and that means that

to grow them we need to create a disaster. Every year. We need to clear the land, and we do it either by plowing or by spraying, and then we carry on spraying to kill the competition and to kill the pests which might eat these very tender little shoots which are coming up. And then we have to splash on the fertile and use loads of water and really pamper them to get them going, and it's a catastrophic system. Now.

For the past one hundred years or so, some scientists have had the dream of replacing these annual crops with perennial crops because they see the enormous difference that could make in terms of environmental damage but also potentially food security. And finally, at last that dream is being realized, driven primarily by this group called the Land Institute in Selena

in Kansas. One of the crops has gone all the way now and is fully commercialized and it's a variety of rice which they've developed with Unan university in southern China. Already there's many thousands of hectares of this rice being grown. In some cases it's been harvested for six harvests continuously and is still producing the same meals as annual rice produces, and the farmers are desperate for it. A because there's much less soil erosion involves. You don't have to plow

every year. I mean, eventually you have to replace the crops, but after several years rather than every year. And secondly that they're desperately short of labor because a lot of the young people have moved to the cities. And of course you don't have to plant every year. So I've eaten this rice. It's just the same as any other short grain rice. You know, I really would could not tell the difference. And then they're developing a whole series of other grain crops now types of wheat or related

species to wheat, barley, sorghum, sunflower, beans, peas, lentils. Not all of them have gone very far down the line. Some of them are progressing faster than others, but they're tremendously exciting, not just because you create less environmental damage in growing them, but also because they appear to be

more resilient to environmental crisis. So to give you an example, the Land Institute is developing this very promising perennial sunflower and it's been growing it's blocks of perennial sunflowers alongside blocks of annual sunflowers. And one year it was hit by a major drought, completely wiped out the annual sunflowers, and the perennials just sailed through. And the reason for that is their roots are down deeper, their structures above ground are tougher and more robust, and yeah, they just

shook the drought off. Well, now, the solutions you are suggesting may take the same industrial route that some of the solutions that are now problems have taken. So you might get consolidation, you might get these limited varieties being grown. You know, just like we have big agriculture, we might have big fermentations. And so would that be okay? Well no, I mean we have to be constantly on our guard against these tendencies, the tendency towards concentration, the tendency towards monopoly.

There was a time when governments were they had strong antitrust laws, they had weak intellectual property laws. But it's turned on its head now and we now have weak antitrust laws and strong intellectual property laws, and that creates consult aidation, drives the process and mergers and acquisitions as corporations try to concentrate intellectual property in one place, and that is deadly. It doesn't matter which sector you're looking at.

It's harmful to competition, it's harmful to human welfare, it's harmful to workers right across the board. This is bad news. And we've been given this great gift to humanity, which is precision fermentation, which has come along just when we need it most. Are we going to squander this by allowing a few big corporations to control it? Well, no, we must fight that. You know, the problem is not the technology. It's the same with all of these issues.

It's the control of the technology. It's the ownership of the technology. And that is something we need to get ahead of. And instead of just sort of sitting there and waiting for it to happen, we need to be campaigning vociferously to ensure that we have a distributed food system rather than a concentrated food system, because that's one

of those elements of resilience. If it's still got its backup systems and circuit breakers and the modularity within the system, which which a distributed and diverse food system can give you, then it's much more likely that the system as a whole is resilient than with this kind of situation we've got today. Now, capitalism has its problems, yeah, but one thing it does is while it's concentrating capital, it also makes things more efficient. And some of the solutions you're

suggesting need to become more efficient. And so how do you split the problems that capitalism brings with the advantages that it does have is a very good question, and the answer always is regulation. I mean, I would love to see much more public ownership. Incidentally, and I don't just mean state ownership, but community ownership. I mean this orchard where we are today is part of a commons which is managed collectively by the two hundred and twenty

plot holders who run this allotment system. Now, you can have a commons with technology, and Linux is a classic example of a technological commons. You can have it with open source technology, you can have it with creative commons. Licensed technology, and I want to see far more of

our economy directed into the commons. But even within the capitalist economy, which is a totally different economy to the commons, we need to see far more regulation, far more response to the generalized needs of humanity rather than just the needs of shareholders. And with food that is more of an issue than in virtually any other sector, because well, we all kind of depend on it. Yeah, if there was a billboard outside of your house, what message would

you put on it? Ah, that's a good question. Private sufficiency public luxury explainer. Yeah, there's enough ecological space on Earth and enough physical space for us all to have wonderful public parks and public technis courts and public swimming pools and public transport networks to have luxurious public domain which we share. But there's simply not enough for us all to have private luxury. Yeah, some people have private

luxury only because other people don't. I mean, if everyone had their own swimming pool and tennis court and the rest of it, London would be the size of England, ling that would be the size of Europe. Where would everyone else live? And there's not enough ecological space as well, so we can have our own private sufficiency, our own small domain at home where our basic needs are met. But if we want luxury, we do it together. That was a fascinating conversation. Thanks for coming on the show.

It was a total pleasure. It's really great you asked all the right questions, sir. Thank you. Food is such an integral part of our lives, but we rarely think about how it's produced, and it's stunning impact on the planet. If the numbers in our conversation didn't already blow your mind, I'd highly recommend reading George's book ReGenesis. The solutions he lays out may seem fanciful, they can work, and they're not the only technologies we have to tackle this problem.

Thanks for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate, review and subscribe, Tell a friend or tell your favorite farmer. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic or something you just want us to look into, get in touch at zero Pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Riskell. Our theme music is composed by Wonderlely. Many people help make the show a success this week.

Thanks to summer. Sadi a podcast producer in London who makes sure that the growing podcast team always has food to eat. I'm Kshatrati back next week.