The Path to Sustainable Food: 2024 Outlook

Health Focus Triggers Demand Shift in Food Industry

2023 revealed the dramatic influence of health-focused pharmaceuticals on consumer food choices. Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly’s Tirzepatide (Mounjaro)¹ layed pivotal roles. By highlighting the health consequences of certain foods in diabetes management and weight loss, they spurred a notable decline in demand for unhealthy food products. This shift impacted traditional food and animal-agriculture based companies’ share prices, aligning with our investment approach that excludes investments in such firms.

COP28 Spurs Pivotal Global Food Initiatives

COP28 marked a significant turn in addressing food systems within climate action. Key highlights included the Global Stocktake acknowledging food’s critical role in climate response and the launch of the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF²) led by countries like Norway and Brazil. These initiatives underscored the urgency of sustainable agricultural practices and climate-resilient food production.

UN FAO’s Transformative Roadmap

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s roadmap, unveiled at COP28, is set to revolutionise agrifood systems, targeting their transition to carbon sinks by 2050. By focusing on areas like livestock and crop practices, the plan aligns with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree limit and aims to eradicate world hunger.³

Netflix’s ‘You Are What You Eat’ Catalyses Consumer Awareness

Netflix’s documentary ‘You Are What You Eat’, released in January 2024, highlights the significant impact of diet on health and environment. Featuring an experiment with identical twins, it vividly demonstrates how different diets affect physical and mental health. This series is expected to amplify consumer awareness in the US and globally, encouraging a shift towards sustainable food choices. Its alignment with the FAO’s roadmap symbolises a key moment in progressing towards sustainable, health-focused food systems.⁴

Understanding the Large Environmental Impact of our Food

To understand why we need to transition to a sustainable food future, it’s important to gain knowledge and understanding of the challenges faced with our food value chain as it exists today.

The visualisation below shows a summary of some of the main global impacts of food and agriculture⁵:

• • Food production accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions
  • Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Habitable land is land that is ice- and desert-free
  • 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture
  • 78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication is caused by agriculture. Eutrophication is the pollution of waterways with nutrient-rich water
  • 94% of non-human mammal biomass is livestock. This means livestock outweigh wild mammals by a factor of 15-to-1.4 This share is 97% when only land-based mammals are included.
  • 71% of bird biomass is poultry livestock. This means poultry livestock outweigh wild birds by a factor of more than 3-to-1.5

Tackling what we eat and how we produce our food, plays a key role in tackling climate change, reducing water stress and pollution, restoring lands back to forests or grasslands and protecting the world’s wildlife.

Benefits of Reducing our Meat Consumption

As we explored above, meat production has a number of large negative impacts on the environment, wildlife and our health. Viewed from the other side, this means that the benefits of reducing meat consumption are large. Here are some of these benefits:

• • Less land use for agriculture and more biodiversity: The use of land for agriculture is the main driver of biodiversity loss. Today, almost half of the world’s ice- and desert-free land is used for agriculture and most of this land is used by livestock. The total global land use for meat and dairy production sums up to 37 million square kilometers,⁶ an area as large as the entirety of the Americas — from Alaska in the North to Cape Horn in the South.
  • Benefits for the world’s climate: Reducing global meat consumption would also help to address climate change: it would reduce direct emissions from burping cows and nitrous oxide from manure, but also reduce emissions from deforestation and land use change
  • Less antibiotic resistance: Reducing the world’s meat consumption would decrease the use of antibiotics in livestock farming, a practice that contributes to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This reduction could preserve the efficacy of existing antibiotics and the health of people around the world.
  • Lower risk of pandemics: Many infectious diseases originate in other animals. The high-density conditions in many meat production facilities create ideal environments for the mutation and spread of pathogens. Reducing global meat consumption would reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases and the risks of suffering another pandemic

We think this future is possible

If we are serious about tackling climate change, we need to reduce emissions from food production. There are several interventions for reducing emissions, including high crop yields through improved genetics and management, reducing food waste, adopting diets that maintain a healthy weight, implementing the best farming practices and shifting towards plant-rich diets.