We are farming our planet to death. Half of the world’s habitable land has already been colonised to produce our food. Nature, the many millions of other species, is forced to survive in the polluted, overhunted, degraded fragments of what remains. Extinction rates are around 1,000 times the natural background rate, largely because wild land has been lost to agriculture or polluted by it, or because of conflict with farmers. In spite of it all, around 800 million people go hungry, with 150 million children under five suffering from stunted growth.
In the coming decades, we will need to feed more people more food – at least doubling today’s food production by 2050 – at a time when all the best lands have been taken and during an escalating climate crisis.
