Farming Futures

“Four companies, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus, now control 90 per cent of the global grain trade; another quartet—Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and basf—have cornered two-thirds of the agricultural-chemicals market, and the same handful own over half of the world’s seeds”

“These multinationals have overseen a standardisation in farming techniques, crop varieties, chemicals, machinery and so forth, driven by the search for yield. As a result, national food production systems are becoming less modular and more vulnerable to global shocks—disease, drought, floods, their impact magnified by financial speculation or fragile supply-chain chokepoints”

“How, then, can the world’s population be fed without destroying the planet? Regenesis lays out a radical programme: Monbiot wants us to replace livestock farming with a form of fermented bacteria that can substitute proteins and fats in human diets, to concentrate remaining food production into high-yield enclaves and to re-wild the remaining land”

“Regenesis tackles protein and fats. While previous chapters considered alternative methods of farming, this one is entitled ‘Farm Free’. Travelling to Helsinki, Monbiot is enthused by the work of Pasi Vainikka, ceo of Solar Foods, who deploys a procedure pioneered by nasa in the 1960s to produce proteins through the ‘precision fermentation’ of micro-organisms that reproduce rapidly in vats without sunlight, so that ‘For the first time in human history . . . we will have a staple food that did not arise from photosynthesis.’”

“Such a counter-agricultural revolution would be hugely disruptive; governments would need to support those who need to find work elsewhere, hopefully in new industries that would be better employers than the meat industry. But the change would be an epochal one: ‘The age of Extinction could be succeeded by an age of Regenesis’.”