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Soil policies should be driven by science—not agrochemical companies.

The last time soil health was perceived as a pressing public concern was at the peak of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Now, for the first time in nearly a century, it has once again piqued policymakers’ interest as awareness grows that the ground beneath our feet is a crucial carbon sink, making the soil a potentially powerful tool to fight the climate crisis. Speaking at an Earth Day summit last month, President Joe Biden said, the “soil of our Heartland [is] the next frontier in carbon innovation,” reflecting the momentum behind an idea known as “regenerative agriculture.” But just as the nation is waking up from its long slumber about the importance of soil, new research shows that the pesticides so commonly used in American agriculture are devastating the very organisms that ensure dirt becomes healthy soil and not just dust. 

As a set of chemical poisons, pesticides pose an undeniable hazard to the life of soil. This new study—from Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the University of Maryland—is the first comprehensive review of the impact of pesticides on soil organisms. Researchers (including one of us) analyzed nearly 400 studies focused on the effect of pesticides (a term that includes insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides) on 275 species or groups of soil invertebrates, from beetles and earthworms to mites and ground-nesting bees. In 71 percent of cases, pesticides either directly killed the organisms being tracked or significantly harmed them; for example, by impairing their growth and reproduction or decreasing their abundance and diversity. These findings parallel previous research that illustrates pesticides’ impact on vital soil microorganisms like bacteria and fungi. 

Other research reveals troubling trendlines: A recent study found that pesticides’ toxic impact on many invertebrates has nearly doubled in the past decade because of the increasing use of two specific classes of pesticides: neonicotinoids and pyrethroids. Some neonicotinoids are 1,000 times more toxic to bees than the infamous pesticide DDT, and they linger in the environment for months or years, creating a compounding toxicity in the environment. Another study found that since neonicotinoids were first introduced in the 1990s, US agriculture has become 48 times more toxic to insect life. Scientists warn that the loss of invertebrates threatens the collapse of ecosystems—and that biodiversity loss is a crisis on par with climate change.

The findings of this new study should alarm us not only because they further underscore the starring role pesticides play in the decline of insect populations, but also because the life of soil is at the heart of its ability to capture and store carbon. What do we mean by the “life of soil”? Plants breathe in carbon from the air, then store it in their bodies and exude it through their roots. Hidden from our view, a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms transfers carbon from roots to soil. Invertebrates such as earthworms and springtails feed on fallen plants, breaking them down and excreting carbon-rich casts and feces, mixing organic matter into the soil as they go. 

The aliveness of soil also bolsters farmers’ resilience in the face of climate-change-driven weather extremes like droughts and floods. Invertebrates are ecosystem engineers: With their tunnels and burrows, they craft soil structures, enabling the flow of nutrients, air, and water below ground. This allows the land to readily absorb water during intense rains and retain it during times of drought, much like a massive sponge. 

In short, healthy soil is living soil. So it should be no surprise that chemicals designed to kill are at odds with the objectives of regenerative agriculture. Research shows that the very farmers who are not using hazardous pesticides are among the most successful at capturing carbon. Organic farmers—who are expressly prohibited from using over 900 agricultural pesticides and who have long championed regenerative approaches like cover cropping, crop diversification, and composting—can sequester up to 25 percent more carbon in soil and achieve deeper and more persistent carbon storage than farmers using chemical approaches. 

Yet some of the loudest voices in the national conversation on soil are the companies behind the world’s most toxic pesticides. Last month, pesticide giants including Bayer-Monsanto and Syngenta were among the prominent backers of the reintroduced Growing Climate Solutions Act (GCSA), a bill that would channel interest in regenerative agriculture into soil carbon markets. 

That means farmers would be paid to sequester carbon—and then those “carbon credits” would be sold to polluters, allowing them to keep polluting. There’s no doubt that farmers should be supported in shifting to regenerative methods. But the evidence shows that using carbon markets to do so is an oversimplified and dangerous approach that will “let big polluters off the hook and fail the needs of family farmers,” says the National Family Farm Coalition. Carbon markets have repeatedly failed in their primary goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They have been plagued by fraud, and in many cases they have worsened pollution in low-income communities and communities of color, even resulting in human-rights abuses across the globe. Moreover, measuring soil carbon in a uniform way to ensure integrity in soil carbon markets will likely remain an elusive goal because soil carbon fluctuates based on the seasons, and samples taken even from the same field can lead to very different results. 

In light of this new study’s findings, another fundamental flaw of carbon markets is particularly concerning: They can be gamed by powerful players. Hence, the support from pesticide giants. Bayer, for instance, is pushing the passage of GCSA because the company stands to win big. If the bill passes, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) would facilitate farmers’ participation in private schemes like the new Bayer Carbon Initiative. Farmers would enroll in Bayer’s digital agriculture platform, Climate FieldView, and implement certain practices—dictated by Bayer—to receive compensation. Bayer would then sell credits for farm-sequestered carbon to polluters. But programs like Bayer’s are designed to accommodate the largest industrial-style farms and depend on use of the company’s patented seeds and toxic pesticides like glyphosate, a weed killer with known impacts on soil organisms like earthworms. Even more perverse, Bayer may pay farmers in the form of credits to be redeemed in the Bayer PLUS Rewards Platform—credits that are most efficiently spent on more Bayer products. 

While we celebrate that the conversation about soil and climate change is becoming mainstream, it’s imperative that the resulting policies are driven by science, not by the interests of agrochemical companies. The successful conservation programs that emerged from the Dust Bowl era can show us the way. Rather than spend billions of federal dollars creating market mechanisms that will enrich pesticide corporations and further entrench their power at the expense of family-scale farmers, the environment, and our health, we can invest in long-standing but under-resourced programs like the USDA’s Conservation Stewardship Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and National Organic Program. And, we can update these programs to facilitate equitable participation of BIPOC farmers and to reflect the latest science on ecologically regenerative practices. 

During the Dust Bowl, the crisis was visible: Plumes of dust from the plains swept across the country and darkened the skies in Washington, DC. Today, the soil story is hidden in the ecosystems beneath our feet, but the crisis is just as pressing. This study is an urgent missive that the renewed national interest in healthy soil must result in policies that support truly regenerative efforts that build healthy, living farming systems. 

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By Tanya Kerssen

Journalist George Monbiot threw down the gauntlet in his recent Guardian oped, “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.” You read that right: enviros should celebrate the demise of farming and rise of food “neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.” In this techno-utopia, “farmfree foods” will relieve the planet of soil eroding, water-guzzling, carbon-emitting agriculture. 

Civil Eats contributing editor Twilight Greenaway penned this important intervention writing, “Agriculture isn’t something to dismiss; it’s one of the most important ways that humans interact with the natural world.” Indeed, the world’s more than 500 million sustainably-scaled farms produce more than just calories, they contribute to employment, culture, rural economic vitality, stewardship of forests and wildlife, carbon sequestration, water filtration, dietary diversity, preservation of seed genetic material, and the list goes on.

Monbiot “booed to the rafters” by farmers in the UK.

GM Watch also wrote this detailed response to Monbiot, concluding, “We all know what’s needed to start to mend the damage we’ve caused—and it cannot entail turning our backs on the land that feeds us.” Our own Anna Lappé gave Jeff Goldblum’s Jurassic Park character the last word in her piece about tech solutions to agricultural challenges: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

The big problem, though, is when lab-based food begins to dominate the narrative, suck up resources, and eclipse tried-and-true solutions. We should be looking to the world’s best agricultural problem-solvers who are already modeling climate-resilient food production: mainly, Indigenous people, women, and people of color. While their daily practice may not make for such grabby headlines, substance, not flash, is the stuff food sovereignty is made of.

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by Kendra Klein and Anna Lappé, The Guardian

More than 50 years ago, Rachel Carson warned of a “silent spring”, the songs of robins and wood thrush silenced by toxic pesticides such as DDT. Today, there is a new pesticide specter: a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. For years, scientists have been raising the alarm about these bug killers, but a new study reveals a more complete picture of the threat they pose to insect life.

First commercialized in the 1990s, neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, are now the most widely used insecticides in the world. They’re used on over 140 crops, from apples and almonds to spinach and rice. Chemically similar to nicotine, they kill insects by attacking their nerve cells.

Neonics were pitched as an answer to pests’ increasing resistance to the reigning insecticides. But in an effort to more effectively kill pests, we created an explosion in the toxicity of agriculture not just for unwanted bugs but for the honeybees, ladybugs, beetles and the vast abundance of other insects that sustain life on Earth.

What we now know is that neonics are not only considerably more toxic to insects than other insecticides, they are far more persistent in the environment. While others break down within hours or days, neonics can remain in soils, plants and waterways for months to years, killing insects long after they’re applied and creating a compounding toxic burden.

“Neonics can remain in soils, plants and waterways for months to years, killing insects long after they’re applied”

The new study, published in the science journal PLOS One, designed a way to quantify this persistence and combine it with data on the toxicity and total pounds used of neonics and other insecticides. For the first time, we have a time-lapse of impact: we can compare year-to-year changes in the toxicity of US agriculture for insects. The results? Since neonics were first introduced 25 years ago, US agriculture has become 48 times more toxic to insect life, and neonics are responsible for 92% of that surge in toxicity.

Looking at this toxic time-lapse, another interesting detail emerges: there’s a dramatic increase in the toxic burden of US agriculture for insects starting in the mid-2000s. That’s when beekeepers began reporting significant losses of their hives. It’s also when the pesticide companies that manufacture neonics, Bayer and Syngenta, found a lucrative new use for these chemicals: coating the seeds of crops like corn and soy that are grown on millions of acres across the country. These seed coatings now account for the vast majority of neonic use in the US.

Neonics are “systemic”, meaning they are water soluble and therefore taken up by the plant itself, making its nectar, pollen, and fruit – all of it – toxic. Only about 5% of a seed coating is absorbed by the plant, the remainder stays in the soil and can end up in rivers, lakes and drinking water with its runoff causing harm to wildlife and, as emerging evidence shows, to people.

This study comes on the heels of the first analysis of global insect populations, which found 40% of species face extinction, with near total insect loss possible by century’s end, driven in part by pesticides, with neonics a particular concern.

“An analysis of global insect populations found 40% of species face extinction, with near total insect loss possible by century’s end”

For all of this harm, farmers get few, if any, benefits from neonic seed coatings. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, they provide “little or no overall benefits to soybean production”, though nearly half of soybean seeds in the US are treated. Similar analyses have found the same for corn, yet up to 100% of US corn seeds are treated.

All this risk without reward has led some regulators to take action. The European Union voted to ban the worst neonics in 2018. But the US government has so far failed to act. Chemical company lobbying can explain much of this inaction. Bayer, maker of the most widely used neonics, spent an estimated $4.3m lobbying in the US on behalf of its agricultural division in 2017.

Not only has the EPA stalled scientific review of neonics, last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service reversed an Obama-era ban on use of these dangerous insecticides in wildlife refuges. Congress could change this. Democratic Representative Earl Blumenauer’s Saving America’s Pollinators Act would ban neonicotinoids and other systemic, pollinator-toxic insecticides. The bill has 56 co-sponsors, but faces a major hurdle clearing the House agriculture committee given that the chairman representative, Collin Peterson, a Democrat from Minnesota, counts Bayer and the pesticide industry’s trade association, Croplife America, among his top contributors.

Beyond a ban, we need a concerted effort to transition US agriculture away from dependence on pesticides and toward ecological methods of pest control. We already know how to do this. Research shows that organic farms support up to 50% more pollinating species and help other beneficial insects flourish. And by eliminating neonics and some 900 other active pesticide ingredients, they protect human health, too.

More than five decades ago, Rachel Carson warned that the war we are waging against nature with toxic pesticides is inevitably a war against ourselves. That is as true today as it was then. For the sake of the birds and bees – and all of us – this war must end.

Originally published in The Guardian

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In the beginning—1926—Agribusiness created corn, or so it proclaimed. It hadn’t, of course: 7,000 years earlier, the Mesoamerican gods had beaten them to it. What Agribusiness actually created thousands of years later was hybrid corn, and it declared that hybrid corn was the only corn that mattered. And Agribusiness saw that it produced a lot and, most important, farmers had to buy it every year. And it was good, for Agribusiness.

On the second day, Agribusiness separated the land from the water, expanding drainage tiles under millions of acres of farm-belt swampland. And the land was good, especially for long straight rows of hybrid corn.

On the third day, with way too much corn, Agribusiness created pigs and commercial feed made up of corn and soybeans. Agribusiness saw that more corn and soybeans were good, and that meat was even better, because it took five (or even ten) pounds of grain to create a pound of meat. 

On the fourth day, Agribusiness created animal prisons, which it called hog farms even though they were factories. It moved the animals into the factories. The new feed companies could buy all the cheap corn and soybeans, and the factories could buy the feed, creating two commercial transactions where before there had been none. And they would spread far and wide, and so would the millions of gallons of their concentrated manure. And Agribusiness held its nose at the putrid odor and said it was good, proclaiming its own genius for creating such a costly commercial nutrient cycle from the natural one it had destroyed by moving animals off the farms.

On the fifth day, Agribusiness created an army of lobbyists, and it would be called the “farm lobby” even though it lobbied for corporations. This army persuaded the US Congress to outlaw government measures to ensure fair prices for farmers, decent prices for consumers, and controls on production so supply would not exceed demand and agricultural land would not be farmed to exhaustion. And it was good, for Agribusiness: the high production was good for seed, chemical, and other input-suppliers; the low prices were good for animal factories and other processors.

On the sixth day, laden with way too much corn fetching rock-bottom prices, Agribusiness created ethanol to power our cars. And it commanded that the fuel be made from corn, even though corn was the least efficient crop to make it from. And it was good, for Agribusiness.

On the seventh day, with corn prices at record highs and wreaking havoc with poor people overseas, and with every inch of even marginally farmable Iowa land brought into production, Agribusiness rested. Agribusiness surveyed its good works and ordained that a temple should be anointed to honor its wisdom and good fortune. And so the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates was transformed into that temple, with offerings from the faithful. Forevermore, they would gather, on World Food Day even though they no longer produced food, for an annual ritual of worship and adoration.

Now, so deep into such a profound devolution, it was difficult to say which part of that genesis story was the real problem. For many Iowans, the immediate problem was their polluted drinking water. To defend themselves from the toxic effluents of Agribusiness’s creations, they created the world’s largest de-nitrification plant to protect Des Moines’ drinking water from the nitrates, E. coli, and potassium-laden sediment that flowed downstream. These flowed all the way down the Mississippi to a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey in which all the sea life created on the Hebrew God’s fifth day had been asphyxiated.

This piece is an abridged excerpt from the book Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food by Timothy A. Wise (The New Press 2019), our July selection in the Real Food Reads book club. Listen to our interview with Tim on the Real Food Reads podcast. 

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By Anna Lappé, Earth Island Journal

2009. That was the last year there was any significant legislation on the table to confront the climate crisis barreling down on us. The Waxman-Markey Bill passed in the House and failed in the Senate. And that was it: Over and out. Fossil fuel companies helped kill that bill and anything else aimed at regulating the industry, spending an estimated $2 billion since 2000 alone.

These billions have landed blow after blow to the environmental movement and, in turn, to the planet. Now, a new Congress and reenergized environmental movement is breathing fresh life into the idea of comprehensive climate change policy — and food and agriculture could, and should, play a starring role. The Green New Deal is what it’s being called, which The Hill characterizes as “a climate change initiative that aims to fight carbon emissions by transitioning the country to 100 percent renewable energy use.”

Few around the country had even heard of it just a few months ago. But in last year’s mid-term elections a number of the winning candidates, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on a platform that included the Green New Deal. A week after those elections, the youth-led Sunrise Movement occupied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding a select committee on the Green New Deal to hash out just what this bold vision could look like. By December 2018, a whopping 81 percent of all registered voters in a George Mason and Yale University poll — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike — either somewhat or strongly supported the idea of a Green New Deal. Said Saikat Chakrabarti, chief of staff for Ocasio-Cortez, “We thought it would take a year to get a movement going around the Green New Deal … [Instead] it took weeks.”

While a select committee with teeth was replaced with a climate-focused committee that has more limited powers, the conversation has shifted and popular imagination has been ignited. As bright minds dig into the details, and movements continue applying pressure, it’s critical to keep food at the forefront, not least because our food producers are so vulnerable to the crisis. As Renata Brillinger from the California Climate and Agriculture Network notes: “Farmers and ranchers are on the frontlines of the impacts of climate change, facing drought, wildfires and record-breaking weather extremes.”

But food and agriculture should also be central to a Green New Deal because food producers can play a critical role in climate mitigation and adaptation. As Brillinger adds: Farmers and ranchers “are also on the frontlines of delivering powerful solutions that cut emissions and — importantly and uniquely — sink carbon by improving soil health.”

This food-friendly Green New Deal can take a page from the Golden State, learning, for instance, from the work done by Brillinger and her network, which has helped to pass a suite of agriculture programs that have moved more than $200 million to farmers to incentivize storing carbon, saving water and energy, reducing methane emissions on livestock operations, and permanently protecting agricultural land. This precedent-setting policy could inspire one comprehensive food and agriculture component of the Green New Deal.

It’s impossible to predict what happens next. One thing we do know: Sitting on the sidelines will only help ensure nothing does. Putting our voices behind a big and bold vision, and including food at its heart, could just made the Green New Deal a reality.

Header photo by Sunrise Movement

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Filmed at the World Organic Congress of the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements in Istanbul, Turkey. October 2014.

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Dig into our Food MythBusters resources and citations from the script:

• Script and citations: English | Español
• Screening Guide and companion reading materials

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Voices of an Organic Planet from Real Food Media on Vimeo.

Can organic farming feed the world?

Ask that question to a chemical industry executive and you’ll hear a resounding, “No!” Ask farmers around the world, who’ve got a grounds eye view of food production, and you’re likely to get a very different answer. That’s just what we did when we traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, for the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) World Organic Congress. Voices of an Organic Planet captures just some of the voices of the more than 1,000 delegates that gather every two years for the IFOAM international convening.

So why don’t more farmers transition to organic? And why isn’t the market for organic food growing even faster? Many farmers are benefitting from organic farming, and consumers are clamoring for organic food, but farmers around the world are finding it difficult to meet the demand for a number of reasons, including: shortages of organic seeds and breeds required for organic production; laws that privatize seeds as intellectual property and criminalize seed saving and sharing; and a lack of funding for research on open-pollinated seeds, varietal development, and traditionally-bred livestock.

Globally less than 1 percent of research dollars for agriculture, public or private, goes into developing and improving organic methods.

Through our conversations with farmers, researchers, and scientists, we heard loud and clear that together we can feed the world—and that supporting inputs, subsidies, and research for organic and agroecological farming is the only path to sustainably feed ourselves in the future.

Read our report from the Congress in Al Jazeera.

After filming Voices of an Organic Planet, we turned to the situation in the country where we live, partnering with the Organic Farming Research Foundation to launch a petition calling on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to help farmers meet this growing demand. Though support for organic farmers grows every year, the USDA still directs only a fraction of its research budget toward open-source seeds and livestock breeds suitable for organic production. We applauded the USDA’s introduction of programs to support organic farmers and urged them to continue to help farmers meet this consumer demand by at least doubling its annual investments toward the development of open-source, publicly-available seeds and breeds suitable for organic production systems. Our petition stressed that organic and conventional farmers need access to the most up-to-date non-patented genetics and breeds capable of thriving in a range of farming regions and called on the USDA to help support this vital research.

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Last month, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to demand action to prevent catastrophic climate change, I was 30,000 feet in the sky, the jet-fueled irony not lost on me. I was heading to Paris to talk food and climate change with 260 scientists, civil society leaders, and advocates from 40 countries at a meeting hosted by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. The overarching message was clear: If we want to address climate change, we have to talk about food.

What we eat is responsible for a whopping one-third of all atmospheric warming today. Global meat and dairy production together accounts for roughly 15 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, making the livestock industry worse for the climate than every one of the world’s planes, trains, and cars combined.

At the meetings, Christine Figueres, who led the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, reminded us that climate stability requires limiting warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius. To do that, we need to start reversing current emissions trajectory, start a downward turn, by 2020. Yes, 2020. That means engaging every sector, food included.

“We must all swallow the alarm clock,” Figueres said. “We cannot give it to the next generation. We must solve this.”

You might be thinking, “But we have to eat. We don’t have a choice the way we do for (ahem) flights to Paris.” Except we do. If we’re lucky, we choose what we eat three times a day. And we make choices as societies all the time when we decide what research to fund, which farms to subsidize, and what foods to serve in our schools and institutions.

So how do we change food and farming to help prevent catastrophic climate change? First, we need an absolute reduction in methane and nitrous oxide—gases with as much as 298 and 36 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide respectively—and food is key. To do this, we’ll have to slow, then reverse, the spread of the industrial livestock model into new markets around the globe.

We’ll also have to halt the growing demand for meat and dairy that’s sending soy for feed production soaring. And, we’ll need to dramatically reduce industrial farms’ use of synthetic fertilizers, the overuse of which releases significant nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

We also must stop agribusiness from encroaching on forests and carbon-rich peatland, as it is with palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. As the processed foods industry increasingly turns to this relatively cheap palm oil, production is rising. Palm oil is now nearly ubiquitous in cookies, granola bars, and other processed foods. (Like your peanut butter pre-mixed? Thank palm oil). We need to reduce demand—for us consumers that means going for less processed fare—and call on suppliers to source only from sustainably harvested palm.

Christine Figueres noted that we also must also cut—by half—the amount of food we waste, which stands at a staggering 30 to 50 percent globally. This means those emissions associated with wasted food are contributing to the climate crisis while conferring no social benefit, but it also means food is adding up in landfills, where as it decomposes converts to the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

In fact, food is the single largest component of solid waste found in municipal landfills, according to the NRDC. That means addressing waste at home, ensuring that farmers have access to markets, and ending our obsession with picture-perfect produce. Like the recent consumer campaign launched in France says, we need to embrace fruits et légumes moches.

And, we’ll need to manage farm and ranchland to maintain carbon in the soils. “Carbon is like real estate,” Figueres said. “It’s all about location, location, location. Carbon in the atmosphere is your enemy. Carbon in the soil is your friend.” At the meetings outside of Paris, experts shared research on how agroecological farming practices and managed grazing can promote greater soil organic matter, AKA carbon, and how these practices might enable us to sequester a significant portion of atmospheric carbon, especially in the short term, when we need it most.

At the heart of these solutions are farmers. By 2050, there will be 750 million peasant farmers—and they’re vital to securing a resilient food supply and ensuring that we store carbon in our soils, stressed Dr. Sonja Vermeulen, a leading food and climate expert who spoke at the summit.

I also met with Elizabeth Mpofo, the international coordinator of the global peasant movement, La Vía Campesina. With 164 member organizations worldwide, La Via Campesina’s 200 million members are on the frontlines of the fight against catastrophic climate change. As Mpofo reminded us, we can’t have a sustainable food system without small-holder farmers.

Protecting indigenous communities is also key. Phrang Roy of the Indigenous Platform for AgroBiodiversity, who I also interviewed, has said, “Seventy-five percent of the world’s biodiversity today is located on indigenous people’s lands… The loss of this land could mean the loss of planet Earth as we know it.”

Meanwhile, those of us living in the United States and much of the industrialized world must radically change our diets, shifting away from diets filled with processed foods and loaded with industrial meat products toward whole foods and plant-centered fare. For those who eat meat, it means eating less and better: grass-fed beef, for instance, and organic-certified poultry and pork.

And so, there is a kind of glorious coincidence: Every one of the bold actions around food is also a step forward for farmers, communities and our health. Oh, and these changes can be delicious, too!

Today, the global food sector is an extractive industry destroying forests to make way for commodities (think: corn, soy, and palm fruit) plantations. It relies on polluting natural gas or gasifying coal to generate nitrogenous fertilizer. It devastates topsoil and dries up aquifers—irreplaceable in our lifetimes. Instead, we need a regenerative food system—and we already know many of the pathways to get us there.

Thankfully, this message is resonating. Ten years ago, when I was starting to report on my book Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork, I found virtually no food advocacy groups running a major climate campaign and few environmental groups turning their attention to agribusiness. Now, many are.

Ten years ago, policy responses to food’s impact on climate were barely a blip on the radar. Today, there are groups like California Climate and Agriculture Network that has real policy in play to encourage farmers to embrace more climate-friendly practices. And at the last climate negotiations in Paris, 38 countries and provinces signed the “4 per 1,000” commitment to increase soil fertility through a focus on carbon sequestration in soils.

Summits like the ones I attended near Paris are bringing experts together to explore real action; global leaders are taking note. In President Obama’s first public presentation abroad since leaving office, his remarks zeroed in on how food will be impacted by climate change and how agriculture contributes to the crisis, noting the sector is the second-largest contributor to emissions after energy—and those emissions are going up. And this week, I joined with more than 200 others to co-sign a letter published in The Lancet calling on the World Health Organization to confront factory farming.

I’m heartened. I am also frustrated to the bone. We don’t have the luxury of time. To date, the major global climate negotiations—known as COPs—have largely ignored tackling food sector emissions. The next COP will take place in Bonn, Germany this November. Hopefully, food will finally be on the menu. It has to be. The clock is ticking.

Originally published in Civil Eats

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