Everything is Connected – Our Food

Note: We want to share these blogs which have been adapted from “Our Common Home,” a joint initiative of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development along with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). This is the fifth in a series of eight blogs.

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home

Our Common Home/SEI: A joint initiative of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) has produced an excellent guide for caring for our living planet. This guide aims to inform, inspire hope and stimulate debate and action as it sets out essential facts and solutions on key topics, along with advice on how communities can respond.

It is inspired by Pope Francis’ second encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, which explore our ecological crisis and its roots in over-consumption and current models of economic development.

Using this guide as a resource, the Climate Change Task Force/Laudato Si’ Action Platform Team presents a series of blogs that cites what needs to change and practical examples of how to take action that is SMART. This fifth of the series focuses on our food.

Our Food (Adapted from Our Common Home/SEI)

“There is a great variety of small scale food production systems which feed the greater part of the world’s peoples.” (Laudato Si’ 129)

The way we produce and consume food is intimately connected with the living world around us and with climate change, biodiversity, water use and pollution.

Agriculture also increasingly provides raw material for industry and infrastructure. As the world population grows, we need to ensure food security for all as well as safeguard the ecosystems that are the very foundation of agriculture.

Intensive Agriculture has Reshaped the Planet

The growing demand for food in the second half of the last century led to massive changes in agricultural practices around the world.

This new model of industrial agriculture was largely driven by mechanization, new breeds of crop, and synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.

Initially, these methods brought large increases in yields for some, but in many ways the system is now unsustainable.

Intensive agriculture has had widespread and devastating environmental and social impacts. Many unique foods and crop varieties have been lost, and with them bonds of culture in which food plays a vital role.

Agriculture in Crisis, People and Planet at Risk

Acute hunger is rising in more than 50 countries, while a third of all food goes to waste. Intensive agriculture largely relies on fossil fuels. It has turned rich forests into farmland and is responsible for around one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.

Intensive farming methods erode and deplete fertile soil and surrounding biodiversity. They undermine the ability of future generations to grow adequate food.

As local and indigenous farmers are displaced, we are fast losing the deep reserves of skill and knowledge they hold.

What Needs to Change?

A hotter world will harm crop yields and ecosystems, so we must act on climate change. Avoiding food waste would ease pressure on land and water and feed more people.

Choosing diets with less dairy and meat would also reduce pressure on land while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

In only a few years, ecological farming methods can restore degraded land, provide space for nature, protect soils and drawn down carbon.

Small farms still produce the bulk of the world’s food and this diversity is vital. Local and indigenous producers hold unique knowledge that is key to the future of agriculture.

Let’s Take Action