How to Feed 1 Billion More People by Tweaking the Global Food System

A record 345 million people worldwide are currently facing acute food insecurity, the United Nations World Food Program reported this year – or as program director David Beasley grimly summed it up, “marching to the brink of starvation”. And this critical food shortage has only increased in urgency.

Although food security has been declining for decades, recent crises have exacerbated the decline.

COVID-19 has severely disrupted food supply chains, classifying 35.5% of the population as food insecure for the first time – particularly low-income families. Droughts caused by climate change dry up agricultural land. The war in Ukraine drove up the prices of fertilizers, cooking oil and grain by blocking important exports.

It’s a complex mess that will ultimately require a range of interventions to fully fix – but last week scientists presented an intriguing way to lessen the burden.

They say it might be wise to redirect some resources we use to feed livestock, like grain and fish fit for human consumption, back into our food pool. The team thinks these animals might instead eat certain food by-products that humans would normally throw away. Things like sugar beets, citrus pulp, and crop residues. And after modeling such adjustments, the researchers calculated that it’s possible to increase our collective food supply by up to 13% in terms of calories and 15% in terms of protein content.

That’s enough to eat a trillion more people.

“More efficient use of food system by-products and residues can reduce competition between food and feed and increase global food supply without increasing consumption of valuable natural resources,” said Vilma Sandström, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University and first author of a study this concept published in the journal Nature Food.

However, this type of food manipulation isn’t exactly a new concept. Scientists have gone back and forth over whether livestock consumables can be reused for years, with some arguing that such competition is no big deal.

In fact, a separate study from 2017 found that 86% of dry cattle feed, including residues and by-products, is currently inedible to humans, so forage loss from feeding animals is minimal. However, according to the team’s new study, that remaining 14% could be somewhat pliable to benefit the overall food supply system. Also, a previous study developed by Sandström and colleagues – on reducing food loss through supply chain management – outlines how we can increase food supply by about 12%.

“Combined with using by-products as feed, that would be about a quarter more food,” said Matti Kummu, associate professor at Aalto University and co-author of the study, in a statement.

Perhaps small steps like these will eventually make a big dent in the food crisis.

Is this safe for animals? For us?

Two questions naturally arise from the team’s proposal.

First, is it ethically wrong to take fresh cattle feed and replace it with crop residues and by-products derived from food intended for us? Second, is it healthy for us to feast on things traditionally given to animals?

“By-products and residues from the food system are already used extensively in animal feed around the world,” Sandstrom said of the initial concern. “We propose to increase this usage in regions where there is potential for increase.”

She also considers another potential setback: some by-products could be of lower nutritional quality or contain compounds known to reduce animal productivity. However, the team’s study was careful to model a scenario that takes this caveat into account, noting that “particularly in cattle nutrition, it is possible to formulate diets entirely based on non-food-competing feeds, even at very high levels animal production levels.”

Regarding the second concern, Sandstrom acknowledges that a paradigm shift would be required if we are to introduce new dietary options to communities. This is because most fish typically used as livestock feed, for example, are small, bony species that we may not be used to eating. But perhaps, she suggests, these fish can be canned, cured, dried or processed in special ways that could prove great, inexpensive, and highly nutritious options for people who don’t necessarily have access to more expensive fish.

Nonetheless, the team believes its new global food system plan is a viable way to help a wide range of people in need. Also, its blueprint does not require additional resource mining. It only requires a bit of reframing, which is why the team also calls it a sustainable solution.

“Currently, the global food system is one of the main causes of environmental degradation,” Sandstrom said. “It occupies more than a third of the earth’s surface, consumes 70% of all freshwater withdrawals and causes 20 to 30% of total climate change emissions.”

complement with politics

Even if Sandstrom’s and other researchers’ idea comes to fruition, it is unlikely to be a stand-alone answer to the pressing problem of global food insecurity.

The team’s theoretical food surplus would be unevenly distributed across the world. It would most likely seep through to the developed world in the first place rather than the developing world with greater needs.

For example, the study states that in North America nearly 20% of cattle feed competes with human food supply, while in Europe it is about 16%. In Africa the proportion of food-grade feed in animal nutrition is less than 4% and in Latin America it is 8%.

Therefore, it is important to combine a change in animal nutrition with other policy measures such as improved trade flows and dietary changes, which is why the study’s researchers began to analyze every aspect of how the societal food web works in the first place.

They are looking for loopholes, gaps and missed opportunities.

“This was the first time anyone had collected and combined the food and feed streams in this detail from both terrestrial and aquatic systems worldwide,” said Kummu. ‘This allowed us to understand how much of the food by-products and residues are already being used, which was the first step in determining the untapped potential.’