ADVERTISEMENT

Big Food Rethinks Farming To Fight a Lack of Crop Diversity

Big Food Rethinks Farming To Fight a Lack of Crop Diversity

(Bloomberg) -- The world’s biggest food crops are too similar, which could jeopardize the entire food system in a pandemic or crisis. Big food companies say they are ready to start fixing the problem now.

Danone is leading some of the world’s biggest companies in food and beverage, personal-care and luxury to join forces to push for regenerative agriculture, a holistic method of farming that rebuilds resources instead of depleting them.

Google Inc., Nestle SA and L’Oreal are among the 19 companies in the newly-formed coalition, Danone Chief Executive Officer Emmanuel Faber said at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on Monday. Other companies participating include Mars Inc. and Kellogg Co., as well as Dove soap maker Unilever, Gucci owner Kering and specialty chemicals maker Royal DSM NV.

The move comes a year before the United Nations is set to update its strategic plans for improving biodiversity from 2020 to 2030. While concerns have mounted on the impacts of climate change, the spotlight has mainly been on reducing plastic waste and carbon emissions, and not biodiversity, Faber said in an interview.

“The way we’ve created the food system over the last 50 years has been to focus on driving economies of scale and simple solutions, but it’s over-simplistic now,” he said. “We have a complete loss of diversity.”

Faber pointed to the U.S. dairy sector, where some 99% of the cows are Holstein cattle, and to big, mono-cropped agricultural farms that house significantly fewer worms per hectare (2.5 acres) than in natural, healthy soil. And just nine out of the 6,000 plant species that are cultivated for food account for more than half of the world’s crop production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Big Food Rethinks Farming To Fight a Lack of Crop Diversity

“We are in a very risky situation from a resilience standpoint if anything happens to any of these species,” Faber said.

The group, dubbed “One Planet Business for Biodiversity,” seeks to provide a UN meeting in China next year with achievable targets for 2030. Those set a decade ago have not been met.

Members of the group plan to work with farmers that supply them to promote regenerative farming. They also will lobby governments to introduce incentives for farmers to ditch chemicals and promote organic matter in soil.

The rise of flexitarian diets, which include plant-based meat and non-dairy milk, is already naturally improving the variety of crops that are grown, according to Danone, which became one of the biggest players in that market when it bought WhiteWave Foods Co. for $10 billion.

The coalition will aim to introduce more diversity of crops into their products and even use satellite monitoring to keep a steady check on how agricultural practices improve over time, Faber said.

“We need to reintroduce biodiversity within agriculture itself, ” Faber said. “If the 2030 targets aren’t properly set and missed, the whole food system will be at risk.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Corinne Gretler in Zurich at cgretler1@bloomberg.net;Emily Chasan in New York at echasan1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Thomas Mulier, Marthe Fourcade

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.