FAO says food responsible for 31% of all greenhouse gas emissions, but that’s not the whole story

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) published a new study on the greenhouse gas emissions originating from the global food system. The study concludes that almost one third (31%) of human-caused climate emissions originate from the world’s agri-food systems, farm to fork. The total emissions from the food system increased almost one-fifth since 1990.

The FAO estimate is in line with a report published earlier by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change that had put the emissions from the global food system between 21% and 37% of all emissions.

According to FAO, almost half of the emissions come from on-farm activities themselves: crop and livestock production, including on-farm energy use. A bit more than one-fifth comes from practices related to deforestation and land use changes. And surprisingly, almost one-third of the emissions come from what FAO calls ‘pre- and post-production processes’: manufacturing of fertilisers, food processing, packaging, transport, retail, household consumption and food waste disposal. These food supply chain activities are fast becoming the main factor in the growing emissions from the global food system, according to FAO.

What the FAO doesn’t say, however, is that these food supply chain activities are almost entirely caused by industrialisation of the food system under control of large agribusiness and food corporations through globalisation. This is where the bulk of increased food emissions are coming from.

Let’s consider some of the elements of the food system where the emissions have grown most since 1990 (see table below). The top growth in emissions can be found in the retail sector: a massive 631%! Linked to this are the increased emissions from household consumption which in many countries are growing. Emissions from the production of chemical fertilisers increased by a whopping 168%, while emissions from their use grew by 42%. Then there are the emission increases in other core components of the industrial food system: transport (+79%), packaging (+87%) and processing (+21%).

The difference in emissions from ‘pre- and post-production processes’ also become clear if one looks at the regional picture. In regions like Europe and North America where the industrial food system has penetrated most, the pre- and post-production processes make up more than half of all emissions from food and farming while in Africa and South America they merely make up just 14% and 12% of the food system emissions.

So the ‘news’ is not that the global food system is responsible for 31% of the emissions. It is that the growth in food-related climate emissions over the past decades is almost entirely caused by corporate globalisation.

There’s no way around it. If we want to lower the climate emissions from the global food system, we need to cut the corporations out of the picture and turn to local markets, food sovereignty and agroecology instead.

Source: Francesco N. Tubiello et. al. “Pre- and post-production processes along supply chains

increasingly dominate GHG emissions from agri-food systems globally and in most countries” Preprint. November 2021 https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2021-389/