The Covid-19 recovery requires a resilient circular economy
The Covid-19 crisis has disastrous human and economic consequences...
COVID-19病毒引发了全球健康大流行,导致经济衰退和全球粮食体系的重大破坏。尽管大流行揭示了农业体系的现有挑战,使人们面临破坏和饥饿,但它也揭示了某些社区的非凡弹性,从而增强了食物与任何其他商品不同。
Whilst preventing a potential hunger crisis requires coordinated and urgent actions, a longer-term proposition emerges: a circular economy for food that offers greater resilience for society and the economy in the face of future shocks, including health and climate risks.
The huge impact of the Covid-19 outbreak and the lockdown measures imposed by national governments have had unprecedented consequences for the global economy with entire sectors almost completely halted. The construction, automotive, and travel industries have faced levels of financial losses never experienced before. Comparatively, the agriculture and grocery retail sectors have weathered the crisis better as people have prioritised spending on food. A number of companies have even seen their revenues increase — as demonstrated by the Swiss food giant Nestlé, which reported in March its best quarterly sales growth in nearly five years — as people have reallocated disposable income usually spent on out-of-home experiences.
However, a more nuanced picture has emerged as it has become clear that food supply chains have been hugely disrupted by the sudden slump in demand from professional kitchens due to the closure of restaurants, hotels, workplaces and schools. For farmers and meat producers unable to shift sales to retailers or losing profit margins where they have been able to, this has led to significant financial losses and increased food waste. In the US, notably, we have seengrowers destroying their crops,dairy farmers throwing milk away, and the culling of unsold animals, all while lines outside food banks, often of the newly unemployed, have lengthened. At the retail end of the supply chain, consumers have experienced empty shelves in supermarkets due to panic-buying.
In many parts of the world, restrictions on the movement of people and goods have exposed the vulnerability of food supply chains and triggered warnings about food security from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Vietnam, India, and Cambodia have indicated they will hold on to their rice crops,while Kazakhstan has banned flour and wheat exportS,引起邻国的担忧。
As the crisis has deepened, governments in France, Germany, and the UK have urged their citizens to help farmers harvest crops this summer to replace theflow of foreign workers, which is expected to dry up drastically due to new border controls。This has shed a light on the importance to the food system of low-paid foreign seasonal workers facing precarious situations and clear health risks. Towards the end of April, as the pandemic spread among food supply chain workers in the US, concern grew about overall food supply,in particular of meat. In early May, one of Ireland’s biggest beef companies shut down its abattoirs and meat-processing plants as employees were deemed at risk of infection.
尽管Covid-19危机的影响揭示了我们当前食品系统的结构弱点,但呼吁变革的呼吁正在受到关注。搬到循环经济中的食物中提亚博足球分析出了一个有吸引力的模型,可通过再生实践,设计食物浪费并创造透明的价值链来提高供应链的弹性和多样性。
Applying circular economy strategies would help build resilience at all levels and respond to some of the existing vulnerabilities presented above. In the midst of the pandemic, food safety has become paramount for consumers and streamlining global supply chains — developing, for example, direct relationships between retailers and farmers to gain better food standards — can help build trust in the food we eat.
Improving global flows needs to be balanced with more localised production to create greater supply chain transparency. As stated in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation reportCities and Circular Economy for Food: “Using more local ingredients would likely increase the traceability of food and therefore potentially its safety.” Across Europe, demand for community-supported agriculture (CSA) and direct sales through farmers’ markets have soared during the pandemic, especially in France, Poland and Spain. Whilst this type of family-scale farming using agroecological practices that provide surer and healthier solutionshave performed wellduring the crisis, these approaches now need to become more widespread.
除了建造较短的供应链以确保安全粮食供应并保证为农民提供体面的生计,支持和发展与自然而非自然合作的再生农业实践,这是必不可少的。与传统的基于化石燃料的农业相反,再生农业可以增强和恢复土壤的健康,提高其生产率,有助于隔离碳,并提供更大的健康饮食粮食生产多样性。这些做法,包括保护耕作,作物轮作和覆盖作物,构成了丰富而有弹性的土壤,可以更好地承受重复的气候变化影响,例如洪水和干旱。
Regenerative agriculture is crucial to curbing the negative environmental effects of our current food system. A circular economy applied to the way we produce and manage food resources could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 by5.6 billion tonnes CO2e,corresponding to a 49% reduction in projected ‘business as usual’ food system emissions.
While the pandemic has exposed problems in both production and supply, revealing the many weaknesses of our highly globalised agriculture system, it has also acted as an accelerator of some positive trends that have the potential to accelerate the transition.
Alongside regenerative agriculture, designing out food waste and keeping organic materials in use are the two other main drivers of a circular economy for food. During national lockdowns, a combination of people cooking at home when they would otherwise have eaten out, seeing their incomes reduced or at risk, and perceiving food to be more scarce has led to a reduction infood waste。这种趋势是否会继续下去。但是,随着大多数食物最终结束的地方,城市可以同时减少食物浪费并创建更具弹性的食品系统发挥关键作用。
目前,莱斯s than 2% of organic waste in cities is used as feedstock for food production. However, by establishing effective collection systems and pure waste streams, cities can ensure inevitable food by-products are transformed into valuable new products, including compost for regenerative food production in lieu of synthetic fertilisers. This is an important method to increase resilience in the system and develop thriving bio-economies around cities.
During the pandemic, consumers have also paid more attention to where their food is sourced and how it is produced, with retailers across the globe experiencing increases inorganic food销售量。同样,对新鲜食品和植物性蛋白质作为肉类替代的需求增加了。这种趋势在亚洲, where consumers have become more conscious of their diet due to the suspected link between animals and the pandemic.
这些新的消费趋势仍然很脆弱,需要进一步的支持来推动实际的系统更改。但是,正如我们看到食物腐烂是由于锁定而腐烂的,而全球南部的更多人发现食物更加困难,许多人呼吁对我们的食品系统进行紧急重新考虑。
Local and small-scale production systems are gaining a lot of traction from governments and international agencies. In March, the Director-General of the FAO, Qu Dongyu, recommended that G20 countriesstrengthen local production and shorten food supply chains。欧洲农业专员Janusz Wojciechowski认为,当前危机的主要教训之一是,欧洲需要种植自己的农作物,以减少其对外部来源的依赖并提高其粮食安全。这些是明显的步骤。
Civil society, farming groups, and businesses are also calling for a long-term transformation in favour of greater resilience and food security. For example, CEOs of major food brands, including Unilever, Danone, and PepsiCo, have signed the Food and Land Use Coalition’s call to action for world leaders to invest in resilient, sustainable food systems and scale up support to the most vulnerable.
Another important step is the EU’sFarm to Fork strategy, launched on the 22nd of May. With the vision to reconcile climate and biodiversity targets with goals on nutrition, the ambition — within the next decade — is to halve the use of chemical and hazardous pesticides, reduce sales of antimicrobials used in livestock farming and in aquaculture, and for a quarter of agricultural land to be farmed organically. The objectives also include a reduction of nutrient losses by 50% which implies reducing the use of synthetic fertilisers by at least 20% by 2030. These are ambitious measures and, as further legislation will be needed, uncertainty remains over how they are to be met. What is clear is that applying circular economy principles to the food system can play a crucial role in all efforts to move towards a more positive model.
A shift to a circular economy for food is now more relevant than ever since it helps create a system that is resilient to shocks while meeting global demand, delivering healthy food, and providing good livelihoods for farmers. This transition would provide positive outcomes for the environment, human health, and biodiversity, as well as contributing significantly to the fight against climate change. The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the problems of our current food system. While some positive trends have emerged in response, it is now crucial that they are built on.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation works to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. We develop and promote the idea of a circular economy, and work with business, academia, policymakers, and institutions to mobilise systems solutions at scale, globally.
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