food4future - Food for a Sustainable Future

How food4future contributes to meet the challenges for sustainable food systems on the occasion of this year’s World Food Day

16.10.2020

Providing a healthy and sustainable diet for all is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Even though new records in food production are being set every year, the demand for healthy nutrition increases due to a steadily growing world population and a progressing loss of arable land caused by soil degradation or the impact of climate change. food4future develops innovative solutions for sustainable food production to meet this challenge.

Today, billions are dependent on low quality diets - malnutrition is also prevalent in industrialised countries

To provide healthy and sufficient nutrition and a “clean” agricultural production are currently the most pressing challenges we are facing today, which drastically impacts humanity worldwide: two billion people still consume low-quality diets giving rise to micronutrient deficiencies not only in poor societies, but also in industrialized countries. This problem is amplified by mostly unsustainably produced food as well as food waste and loss along the food production chain. The United Nations expects that by 2050 the world population will reach 9.7 billion, which will in turn also significantly increase the demand for food¹. Connected with the increasing world population, there is a clear trend towards urbanisation. Since 2007, the number of people living in cities is higher than in rural areas, and forecasts anticipate that by 2030 60% of the world population will live in an urban environment - for Europe, urbanisation rate is expected to be even 80%².
The access to a sufficient amount of healthy, safe and nutritious food for all is negatively impacted by this urbanisation trend, by climate change effects, weather extremes, loss of arable land and unsustainable food production systems. Intensified food production is enforcing concentration on only a few cash crops with currently only nine plant species accounting for 66% of total food crop production thus promoting a loss in biodiversity³. These aspects combined with armed conflicts or economic shocks causing instability of societies have made the current food production systems less resilient. The current COVID-19 crisis only intensifies the situation and makes the vulnerability of the globalised interconnected food production chains more apparent.
Already before COVID-19, more than 2 billion people did not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food or were simply threatened by acute hunger. Today, more than 820 Million people suffer from hunger with the trend sadly increasing under the impression of the pandemic⁴. Acute hunger is one of the pillars of the “triple burden” of malnutrition we currently face: Industrialised countries as well as emerging economies are strongly impacted by food and nutrition-related diseases, i.e. micronutrient deficiencies and severe health problems caused by overweight and obesity, which represent still one of the biggest burdens in the health care systems worldwide.
Resilience against shocks,nutritional security and safety, disruptive innovations are desperately needed to transform our food system in order to achieve global food sustainability,. The innovative solutions must encompass the entire value chain, including production, processing, logistics, retail and, finally, the consumer. A shift towards a circular economy reducing food waste and loss along the food supply chains by cascade use of deployed resources is needed to “make more with less” in order to produce within the planetary boundaries.

silhouettes of four food4future organisms halophytes, macroalgae, crickets and jellyfish in circles of yellow, red, cyan and violet, arrows indicate the co-cultivation — The four food4future organisms

“To ensure a sustainable and healthy nutrition for a growing global population, food systems need to be re-designed”, says Prof Monika Schreiner, coordinator of the food4future consortium. “We need alternative, resource-conserving food sources - such as halophytes, macroalgae, jellyfish or crickets. By this, we are able to develop sustainable and resilient agri-food systems, which are less dependent on freshwater.”

food4future develops innovative solutions to improve food system resilience and sustainably secure a healthy and adequate nutrition

Foresight studies and future scenarios are tools to identify relevant gaps and challenges for a given system and - different to incremental improvements of a given strategy - enables the development of disruptive innovations. For food4future, two extreme future scenarios have been chosen as basis for new concepts in the agriculture and food system: No Land and No Trade scenarios are anticipating conditions where agricultural production and food access is limited by reduced arable land capacity (No Land) or by restrictions in the global trade market (No Trade). To ensure access not only to sufficient food, but also account for individual needs (personalised nutrition to counteract malnutrition and deficiencies) food4future develops closed, flexible cultivation systems for so-called Urban Bio Spaces to produce food from alternative, salt-tolerant organisms using the key technologies (UV-)LED and composite lightweight materials. Individual compartments are constructed where a variety of different organisms can be cultivated or even co-cultivated in accordance to their needs. These individual compartments can then be integrated into a production factory and flexibly adapted to different environments and conditions such as cellars, tunnels, marginal land etc., thereby avoiding to compete with already limited urban living space.

<p>The food4future vision</p> — The food4future vision

Halophytes, salt-tolerant plants, are traditionally part of the diet in coastal regions. They have a delicate, salty taste, contain important minerals and nutrients and are rich in bioactive ingredients. In food4future, cultivation in artificial spaces that do not compete with agricultural production areas and urban freshwater resources is to be tested. Additionally, food4future is also evaluating the efficiency of macroalgae, jellyfish (medusa) and insects as alternative food sources. Jellyfish is an uncommon example for the diverse dietary potential of aquatic animals and is assessed as a novel nutrient-rich aquatic food source while insects hold a considerable potential to close nutrient cycles and high conversion rates of residual materials.

Socio-economic research sheds light on transformation processes of food systems

Socio-economic investigations in food4future study whether these innovative solutions are able to contribute to the transformation processes in the agricultural system and in society. From the first models derived from the No Trade scenario, we already learn that isolation, be it EU-wide or as an individual nation, without a simultaneous change in consumer behavior, will primarily have negative effects on the climate due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, if isolation should be politically desired at some point, this would have negatively affected the climate balance without further intervention. Paradoxically, less trade leads to more pollution. By introducing a global trade regime, e.g. through the introduction of a CO₂ tax or a CO₂ border levy, and changes in consumption towards a plant-based diet this could at least partially offset the negative consequences on carbon footprint in future. However, eating habits are formed early on and are very difficult to change under normal circumstances. The extent to which people change their consumption behavior under suddenly changing, extreme environmental conditions has not yet been examined, but a large-scale study on the corona pandemic as the most recent example provides us with initial findings: the sudden lockdown and the associated sudden uncertainty occur in around one in ten people in Germany led to greater interest in self-sufficiency and growing vegetables at home.
For the implementation of sustainable future food systems, institutions are leverage points, but they are not silver bullets. Leveraging institutional change for the sustainability of our future food systems requires the recognition of plurality in institutions and the ability to navigate complexity in institutional systems.

Diversification of our diet by (re-)discovering alternative food sources, flexibility in our production system and smart use of resources as well as participatory approaches including all groups of our societies will support the mindful transformation of our food systems. All in all, diversity and flexibility seem to be the key to a sustainable food-ture.

Find more information on all food4future projects here:

f4f Projects

¹United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights.
²United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision: https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Report.pdf
³FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, 2020, http://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/ca9893en
⁴FAO 2019: The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World – Safeguarding against economic slowldowns and Downturns.

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