To help feed the world, eat less sugar and meat

Nearly all the world's population could eat well from food produced within their countries’ borders — if countries wasted less food and ate less meat and sugar, researchers have found. In Canada, we would need less than a sixth of our farmland to feed everyone in the country a healthy and climate-friendly diet.

Recent years have seen a cascade of disasters — from droughts and floods to Russia's invasion of Ukraine — disrupt food systems across the globe. That has left many low-income countries starved while wealthier ones like Canada and the U.S. deal with massive amounts of food waste, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Reducing meat and sugar consumption in wealthy countries and growing more diverse foods locally around the world could help reduce some of these discrepancies, explained Nicholas Navarre, a food systems researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands ​and the author of a study published in the journal One Earth in January.

"If you produce things nationally, you're more in control of the supply chains. You can control what's happening from production to consumption, whereas on the international markets, if something happens across the world, you can't do anything about it and you have to find an alternative."

To reach their conclusion, Navarre's team evaluated United Nations data on the foods each country in the world produces and how much arable land they have against the EAT-Lancet diet. The EAT-Lancet diet was developed in 2019 by climate and health experts and lays out a diet that is good both for people and the planet.

The findings show that most countries could meet all their food and nutritional needs solely with food grown within their borders, Navarre said. Some might have minimal variety, such as cold countries like Norway, but most would have no issues.

However, achieving this would require major transformations in people's diets worldwide, he said.

Wealthy countries like Canada and European nations would need to drastically cut back their meat and sugar consumption. Meat production demands lots of land to grow feed for animals, meaning it couldn't be used for food production. Sugar has a similar issue, with export-oriented sugar plantations often reducing the amount of land available to farmers growing a diversity of foods for local markets.

"For lots of countries, to use all your available land for crops that are going to be fed to (livestock) is just hugely inefficient in terms of land use," he explained.

In lower-income countries, the biggest gains can be made by reducing the amount of food lost on farms and in transport as a result of factors like bad refrigeration or slow transportation. Making the supply chain linking farms to consumers in these regions more efficient "was a far more valuable intervention" than reducing their already lower meat consumption. Instead of wealthy countries dumping their excess commodity crops like corn or soy on lower-income countries — a long-standing practice — supporting these kinds of initiatives could go a long way to help improve food security and resilience globally, he said.

Still, Navarre said his findings should trigger reflection but aren't necessarily a call for all food production to occur within each country's borders. The type of industrial farming and food supply chains that dominate in many parts of the world — including Canada — have contributed to an unequal distribution of food while reducing countries' climate resilience.

Instead of moving food around the world, "sharing (agricultural) knowledge and making food production closer to home can give more access and maybe help farmers in countries across the world to produce foods that their populations can afford," he said.