How to deliver a better world of food and farming for all

The world has become dependent on a food industry machine that is hardwired for intensive farming and increasing production to feed the world’s growing population. But this giant global system cannot meet the essential need for food and nutrition security and environmental sustainability. How can such a deep-rooted dependency on intensive production be overturned without damaging food supplies? Professor Shonil Bhagwat is leading a new project to deliver practical pathways to a better, more human future for food and farming.

Alternatives to the established global food system come and go, but the influence of large agribusinesses and corporations on food and farming remains. Small farmers, local food schemes and markets aimed at offering more choice, more diversity of foods and more nutritional offerings, tend to be swallowed up by the big players in the globalised food system. Important issues such as the environmental impact of intensive farming, the nutritional value of foods and the importance of local food traditions, are all sidelined.

Shonil Bhagwat, Professor of Environment and Development, is leading the CATAPULT project (Catalysing transformative food futures for global sustainability) to set out clear ways forward for transforming the global food system and to explore how it can be achieved in practice, working closely with leading thinkers, international organisations and UN agencies to influence strategy and challenge the status quo.

While previous research has been based around a single focus of attention, land use or food supply or nutrition, the Open University (OU) project — funded through the Open Societal Challenges programme — looks across all the core issues to provide a more integrated pathway for a future of food that will lead to better lives for more people.

CATAPULT covers three inter-related themes:

1. The better management of farming landscapes

Working with organisations such as the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission in the UK to establish best practice and principles for managing farmland, highlighting the efficiency, value to the environment and contribution of smallholder farmers compared with industrial agriculture, and influencing food and farming related policies formulated by government agencies such as DEFRA, and put into practice by large landowners.

2. Diversification of the food system to include a wider range of species

Focused on how there are hundreds of thousands of species suited for human consumption but the great majority of food comes from just a dozen or so plant and animal species. The OU team is building on their collaboration with the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens to identify the full range of edible plant life, developing case studies in India and Kenya, and planning an open access resource on food diversity and forgotten foods.

3. Better use of neglected and underutilised species, varieties and cultivars of plants, and breeds of animals, in the food system

Using ‘agrobiodiversity’ — the natural product of selection and breeding over thousands of years — as an alternative to genetically modified organisms. CATAPULT involves a collaboration with Bioversity International, working up international case studies, developing a dashboard for agrobiodiversity for farmers and a reference website showcasing neglected and underused varieties of plants and breeds of animals.