How to Nourish the World - Hans R. Herren rüffer&rub visionär

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that a better future for all on a healthy planet is possible. We are convinced that everyone of us can, through our own actions, be a part of the solution.

       Anne Rüffer, publisher

       A world without hunger and misery

      My vision of a sustainable food system for the world goes back a long way. I am a farmer’s son. My father was estate manager for the Domaine des Barges in Switzerland’s Lower Valais that was owned by the Burger und Söhne (Aargau) tobacco dynasty. The 40-hectare farm grew tobacco, potatoes and wheat.

      I experienced intensive farming at first hand: it meant spraying highly poisonous insecticide to control the caterpillars of the diurnal and nocturnal moths that feasted on the tobacco leaves. It was the use of fungicides to control imported fungal diseases. They not only destroyed the pests but also eliminated beneficial insects such as bees. When I was growing up I found it quite normal, even though occasionally I also wondered whether so much poison was actually good for humans or the environment. At the time, we knew no different and it seemed as though chemicals were an essential ingredient of modern agriculture.

      I spent two winters and a summer as a student at Valais Agricultural College in Châteauneuf learning what farmers needed to know about crops and fruit growing, vineyards and livestock management, i.e. that the use of agrochemicals guaranteed good harvests and a better life.

      Having matriculated with a baccalaureate, I embarked in 1969 on an agronomy degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, with plant protection as my main subject and plant breeding as my subsidiary. At ETH plant protection almost exclusively, with one exception, meant the use of chemical methods to control damaging insects, weeds and fungi.

      It was the era of the “Green Revolution”, the term used to describe the development that started in the 1960s of modern, high-performing and high-yielding crop varieties and their successful spread throughout developing countries. As a young ETH student I was seriously impressed by the higher yields that could be achieved with high-performing varieties and the massive application of agrochemicals. At the same time, however, I started to look critically at this type of agriculture and question it.

      My doctoral supervisor, “the one exception”, was Vittorio Delucchi, a professor of entomology. He was a pioneer in Switzerland for integrated and biological pest management, promoting the use of natural enemies and agronomic practices rather than synthetic insecticides to control pests. Entomologists had long known that you could control pests if you could find their natural enemies, i.e. the corresponding beneficial insects. However, it seemed too complicated and expensive for the conventional agricultural industry to find these beneficials, breed them in sufficiently large numbers for commercial use and to find a suitable way to release them into the fields—despite the fact that it had been known for a long time that the method worked.

      Vittorio Delucchi gave me an introduction to the research group of Robert van den Bosch at the University of California in Berkeley, which at the time was the mecca for entomologists in the field of biological pest control. In 1979, whilst at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, I had an opportunity to put into practice my knowledge of the biological control of the mealybug—a pest that devastated the cassava crops.1

      I remained in Africa for 27 years working in the field of biological pest control. This experience and the knowledge I gained made me realize that fundamental changes were needed to agriculture—in fact to the entire global food system.

      It is an ambitious aim: a world free from hunger and misery, where everyone enjoys the same right to live in freedom with one another and in harmony with nature. A world where the boundaries of Planet Earth are respected and violence and war are outlawed. Where the needs of future generations are at the very top of the political agenda; natural resources are regenerated and preserved on their behalf. A world where energy supplies are based 100% on renewable energy sources.

      In this vision, the food system plays a crucial role.

       1. Surfeit of hunger

      One in nine people go to bed hungry. According to a report on food security published in 2015 by the FAO, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, 795 million people—just under 11% of the global population—are malnourished. Although the figure has fallen by 216 billion since the beginning of the 1990s,2 it fails by some margin—more than half a billion—to achieve the goal set by the World Food Summit in 1996 to halve the absolute number of people without enough food between 1990 and 2015.

      One in seven children under five years of age is underweight. Malnutrition contributes to the deaths of 3.1 million children under five each year—that is more than 45% of all deaths in this age group.3 Africa, south of the Sahara, is the worst-affected region with 23% of the population currently malnourished; in the Caribbean it is slightly under 20%.4

      Some two billion people are deficient in vitamins and essential minerals such as iodine and iron, even though they consume enough carbohydrates and protein. This is partly a result of reductions in food diversity; monoculture systems are used to grow essential foodstuffs, which means that certain highly nutritional plants are absent from local diets. Similarly, those living in rich countries are often malnourished because they eat high-calorie processed foods that are low in micronutrients.

      Hunger is the greatest risk to global health. However, the reverse is also a problem: a total of 1.4 billion adults in the world are overweight and of these 500 million are obese.5 Excess weight is a major cause of diabetes, high blood pressure, strokes and many cancers. In 1980, obesity was already affecting one-quarter of all adults and by 2008, that figure had risen to more than one-third; increasingly it is also affecting developing countries and overall, about 50% of the global population eats too little, too much or the wrong type of food.6

      For many countries in the global South, hunger is a major obstacle to development. It is also a difficult one to overcome: If people have too little to eat, their productivity remains low and hungry children often miss school. It is also costly to treat the associated diseases. A study conducted in several African countries estimated that the cost of hunger in these countries is between 2% and 16% of Gross National Product.7

      A food system that puts both too much and too little healthy food on the table cannot be a model for the future. The following sections look in more detail at the various issues and demonstrate why the aim of the World Food Summit—to eradicate hunger—has so far been impossible to achieve.

       Waste

      At present, farmers produce enough food to feed more than 14 billion people; that is twice current global requirements. Unfortunately, not all food ends up being eaten by consumers. According to a study published in early 2003 by the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 30–50% of food intended for human consumption is lost.8 The main reason for this in developing countries is a lack of storage, processing and transport facilities.

      The situation is different in industrialised countries. For example, in Switzerland domestic households account for 45% of the loss.9 Special offers tempt shoppers to buy more than they can consume. In addition, expiry dates are calculated in such a way that perfectly good food is often discarded.

      Globally, about one-third of all food produced is currently not consumed. This causes not only a serious economic loss (US$ 940 billion per year) but also 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions. A study by Porter, Reay, Higgins and Bomberg from the University of Edinburgh found that the loss and waste of food accounted for 2.2 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalents each year, which is 323 kg CO2 per person and three times higher than 50 years ago.

      Champions 12.3, a coalition of more than 36 business and government representatives as well as those from civil society, published a report during the process leading up to the agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in autumn 2015. It provided a progress report on the fight against food waste and loss. Although the international community had made

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