2. The rise of fossil fuels in our food

How did fossil fuels become so embedded in our food systems? We trace this journey from the industrial extraction of guano, through the game-changing Haber-Bosch process, to today’s globalized food system. Along the way, we uncover the hidden impacts on biodiversity, farmworkers, and our oceans—revealing the true cost of this reliance on fossil fuels.       

In Fuel to Fork, a new podcast series powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, we expose and explore the fossil fuels in our food, speaking to farmers, chefs, food industry experts, scientists and campaigners. Each episode delves deep into a different step of the food supply chain.         

Guests

• Jennifer Clapp, IPES-Food
• Darrin Qualman, National Farmers Union Canada
• Pat Mooney, IPES-Food and Etc Group
• Navina Khanna, HEAL Alliance
• Rashid Sumaila, University of British Columbia

Produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew

How did we get to the situation where fossil fuels are entrenched in global industrial food systems? Where would you start the story?

Darrin Qualman

I’d start the story in 1918.

Pat Mooney

I can’t remember the exact year, the 1880s.

Raj Patel

I think it’s going to be Christopher Colombus. Let’s start right at the beginning.

Jennifer Clapp

But when we talk about mechanization we usually start that story around the 1830s.

Darrin 

And that’s when they started replacing horses with fossil fueled tractors.

Matthew

The story of the rise of fossil fuels is the story of replacement. Replacing human labor with fossil-fueled machines, replacing natural substances that made up fertilizers and pesticides with fossil-fueled agrochemicals, replacing time spent in our kitchen with new types of food processing, replacing local seasonal foods with, “I think avocados are in season somewhere..”

Welcome back to Fuel to Fork, where we expose the fossil fuels in our food and imagine a future without them. This series is powered by TABLE, IPES food, the International panel of experts on sustainable food systems and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. I’m your guide Matthew Kessler.

Episode 2. The rise of fossil fuels in our food system. How did we get here and what are some of the impacts on health, biodiversity and foods from the ocean?

Matthew

When I asked the people I was interviewing for this series: “where should we start the story with fossil fuels and food?” The Haber-Bosch process probably came up the most. This process invented a way to literally take the nitrogen from the air, and turn it into a fertilizer. This was considered a scientific impossibility, and now it accounts for roughly half of the world’s fertilizer production. 120 million tons a year of nitrogen fertilizer. It’s a story about human ingenuity, feeding a growing global population and unintended consequences.

We’ll get there a bit later, but we’re going to start our story in the previous century with a different fertilizer.  Guano. The droppings of bats and seabirds. This stuff is packed with the nutrients that are good for farming – nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.

Jennifer 

Fertilizers used to be more natural substances, right? Wastes and bird dung.

Matthew

That’s Jennifer Clapp, professor and Canada research chair at the University of Waterloo.

Jennifer 

And I’m also a member of IPES-Food. The international panel of experts on sustainable food systems.

Matthew

From 1840 to 1870, guano wasn’t just any farm input—it was the world’s top-traded fertilizer and the most popular agricultural product in the United States.

Two key factors made this possible. First, there was the observation that applying guano to the soil significantly improved plant growth. Second, there was a shift in scientific thinking about how farms should be managed.

Jennifer 

The need for fertilizer as an amendment to soil. Really this idea goes back to the 1840s where, you know, when Justus von Liebig wrote about the importance of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium as important nutrients for plants.

Matthew

Von Liebig was a German scientist with a deep passion for chemistry. He revolutionized laboratory-based science education – though that’s a story for another time. For our purposes, his key contributions was that he:

Jennifer 

Raised awareness of these chemical nutrients that need to go into soil for better plant growth. And this is what gave rise, really, to the international guano trade. 

This work that Von Liebig did in the 1840s was in a way it kind of like – scientificized, if that’s a word. It turned this kind of thinking about soil fertility into a scientific formula. And this then freed people from thinking about it the way they used to think about it, which was referred to as the humus theory. And that was basically thinking that you need organic matter in the soil to create the kind of fertility. So farmers used to use local waste. It could be animal waste, human waste. It was usually waste that was  produced very nearby to where the farm fields were.

Matthew

Of course farmers around the world already knew that using animal manures, byproducts and waste products on their farm would lead to better harvests. Blood and bone meal, fish scraps, wood ashes, even human waste. Now, they wanted access to guano, which had this fantastic balance of nutrients and was especially rich in nitrogen - the most foundational nutrient for crop growth. 

But where did this fascination with Guano start?

In 1802, German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, three years into his expedition across Latin America, encountered something that would change the world.

He observed Peruvian workers, unloading sacks of guano from the Chincha Islands.

Jennifer 

In the Chincha Islands off Peru, it was very rich in guano. Going back hundreds and hundreds of years, there was awareness that this particular bird dung was rich in nitrates.

Matthew

Fascinated, Humboldt took a sample back to Europe. Where they also observed its potential as a fertilizer. This would become the catalyst for a massive—and ultimately destructive—international frenzy: the mid-19th century "guano boom."

Soon, European and North American nations began extracting guano from Peru's coastal islands on an industrial scale, changing the course of global agriculture. This was based on a highly lucrative yet deeply exploitative trade.

Jennifer 

It took thousands of years for that bird dung to basically make a nice deep pile.

Matthew

How deep? In some cases the piles were documented to be 60 meters or nearly 200 feet deep.

Jennifer

That was then subsequently mined. And so, yeah, it was mined really quickly when you think about how long it took to develop it. And it's the same principle when we talk about fossil fuels. Millions of years for these fuels to basically form under the soil and then once they're gone, they're gone. 

Matthew

Another similarity with fossil fuels is that extracting these inputs exploited both natural resources and human labor.

Jennifer 

That trade was deeply problematic. It was using basically slave labor and indentured labor coming from Asia. Terrible working conditions, backbreaking work, people breathing in horrible fumes. And many, many workers fell ill. Others committed suicide, It was like a horrible experience. 

But also within like 30 or 40 years, the entire guano on the Chincha Islands was - it was gone. It was basically exhausted.

Matthew

So the search continued for other fertilizers across South America. And a significant nitrate trade emerged, with mining operations in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, but this operation wasn’t at the same scale of guano.

Jennifer 

These were exhaustible natural resources, and they also were subject to disruption in trade, especially because of, you know, politics, geopolitics, and war.  And so there was a huge desire in places, especially in Europe, to come up with a way to synthesize nitrogen because we know it's in the atmosphere.  That was like the Holy Grail to figure out how to do that.

Matthew

Why was it so important to figure this out? Let’s consider the conditions in the 1800s. There was a growing and urbanizing population in the United States and Western Europe. This removed people further and further from farm fields. At the same time there was a shift in how western scientists thought was the best way to manage soils.  From the humus theory of adding organic matter to the soil, to treating the soil as a patient that needs to be prescribed a specific set of nutrients. 

Jennifer 

And I would say that in the 1840s and 50s, the question of soil fertility. It was the top number one ecological problem that people were talking about. And suddenly when we had nitrogen synthesis by the early 1900s, people just stopped thinking about it. And it wasn't like, you know, the conversation everybody was having on a daily basis was no longer about soil fertility because we were basically creating this - to use a pun, we were “fixing” this problem with nitrogen.

Matthew

Coming up, how we “fixed” the problem with nitrogen and created a new one.

----

Matthew

There is a lot to learn from this guano story. It shows there is a long history of exploiting resources from outside of the farm. But you could start the story even earlier. Food has traveled and been traded for thousands of years. Basically as soon as humans found ways to preserve foods. And exploitation also has a much longer history. We could have started with the transatlantic slave trade or the Egyptian empire.

Next we’ll talk about the invention of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. A few things happened all at the same time. Around the world, there was a major increase in food, or calorie, availability; many farmers became locked-in to a particular way of farming, and it caused some devastating environmental problems. 

So let’s go back to Nitrogen fertilizer - and see how it all started. Because in this origin story, there’s some clues as to why the industrial food system looks the way it does today.

Jennifer

In Europe was sort of where we saw this rise of these intensive chemical industries that were emerging, BASF and Bayer.

Matthew

Jennifer Clapp again, setting the scene in the early 1900s.

Jennifer

One of the first processes that was actually developed was in Norway. This is nitrogen synthesis, it was called the Birkeland -Eyde process. And that was named for Christian Birkeland and Sam Eyde who basically realized they had to create this reaction with the atmospheric nitrogen and they reacted it in this instance with oxygen using hydropower energy from waterfalls. And this is actually the origins of the firm today, the big firm, Yara, the fertilizer company. 

Matthew

Norwegian Physicist Christian Birkeland and Engineer Sam Eyde established Norsk Hydro, which eventually became Yara - one of the world’s biggest fertilizer producers today. Today Yara brings in more than 15 billion dollars in revenue each year. But going back to 1903, they were actually the first ones to make a chemical fertilizer derived from atmospheric nitrogen.

Jennifer

Really around 1910 when we saw the sort of early origins of what we call the Haber-Bosch process of nitrogen synthesis, which is a little bit different chemical process. And this process of nitrogen synthesis was using natural gas to reach really high temperatures to react with hydrogen, with the atmospheric nitrogen to create ammonia.  

German chemist Fritz Haber came up with this process, and then it was purchased by BASF, the chemical company, which put Carl Bosch in charge of figuring out how to make this commercially within the firm.  And so this became known as the Haber-Bosch process.

What's really interesting to me anyway is that while we had these two early processes to synthesize nitrogen, one using a renewable energy source of water, hydropower, and the other using natural gas, it’s interesting to me that when you read all of these books on the history and chemistry of nitrogen synthesis, they say, well, the Haber-Bosch process became the dominant one because it was more efficient. And it raises questions for me about efficient for whom, etc. Because you might think from an ecological perspective it’s more efficient to use hydropower. 

Matthew

Okay. So that’s some backstory. Now I’m trying to think of how can I stress enough how much this fertilizer changed our relationship that we have with food and even with this planet?  And completely divided people on whether this is a net positive or negative?

For a living I speak with different experts about the future of food. And for me, it can be a revealing question to ask them “what do you think of haber-bosch?” 

Some are really quick to point out that, that across the 20th century, Nitrogen fertilizer helped create enough food to feed an additional 3.5 to 4 billion people. While that’s true, much of this additional output from cheap fertilizers and subsidies has been used for livestock feed. ⅓ of global cropland is dedicated for this use, making possible the industrial animal production system we have today

.

Meanwhile, others see Nitrogen fertilizer as the driving force for shifting us from a farming system that had to be clever about cycling most of its nutrients from the farm -  to a system dependent on companies for synthetic fertilizers, made from fossil agrochemicals.

Pat Mooney

None of it was bad or evil.

Matthew

Pat Mooney, co-founder of the Etc Group, and member of IPES-Food.

Pat Mooney

In the sense that development of synthetic fertilizers solved a major problem of a kind, which is that the guano in the Pacific had been mined very heavily, and there was a great demand for more fertilizers. You could argue that we shouldn't have had a demand for more fertilizers. You can argue that we shouldn't have had a demand for more fertilizers, we should have been other forms of agriculture that wouldn't have required the mining of the soil in the way that our industrial system has been mining it. But still, the need was there and it was, I don't think anybody would have seen it as a major problem. 

Matthew

The problems arose from overuse. From an addiction to Nitrogen fertilizers. This fertilizer helped bring about a new way of farming that reshaped entire landscapes, ecosystems, and even though this sounds extreme, nitrogen fertilizer changed the way nutrients flow or cycle throughout the planet. And it certainly changed entire farming systems.  Let’s unpack how this plays out, where we first look at what it was like on farms in the central prairies of Canada 100 years ago.

Darrin

Yeah, so I grew up on a farm and I grew up spending a lot of time on my grandparents farm. 

Matthew

Darrin Qualman, Director of Climate Crisis Policy and Action with the National Farmers Union in Canada. 

Darrin 

And when I think of my grandparents' farm, when they started farming in the early 20th century, virtually everything that went into farming came out of farming. They produced their own energy supplies. You know, the fodder and grain for the horses came from the local fields. They produced their own fertility. They cycle fertility locally through manure and crop residues etc. And they produce their own solutions to weed problems etc. So if you run time forward from there over the last hundred years, in a number of steps we slowly replace those on-farm biological sources of energy and solutions with fossil fuel derived replacements.

Matthew

Darrin would start the fossil fuel story just over a 100 years ago in 1918.

Darrin

That's the year following the first world war. There was industrial capacity. They learned how to make machines in large quantities. And that's when they started replacing horses with fossil fueled tractors. And that was the first place in the agricultural system where they started injecting fossil fuels.

So instead of the farms being fueled from their own landscapes, they were then fueled by distant fossil fuels. Fast forward to post -World War II, a real increase in petroleum based chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, et cetera. 

And key is really to understand that the ever increasing output of food energy coming out of our farms is a direct function of the ever increasing inputs of fossil fuel energy going into our farms. We take natural gas, turn it into nitrogen fertilizer, inject it into the system, and that pushes a whole bunch of extra food out the other end. 

Matthew

In short, the more you put in, the more you get out. But there’s only so much that a system can handle.

Darrin
We have gone so far in terms of the nitrogen fertilizer addiction. The people that do work around planetary boundaries in the safe operating space for planet earth, they tell us that we've tripled the tonnage of nitrogen that's flowing through terrestrial biospheres. We've tripled the amount of nitrogen that flows through the land compared to the pre-industrial period. And we're far, far beyond the safe operating space for planet Earth when it comes to that nitrogen flow. So we really have to figure out how to produce sustainable food systems and enough food for everybody while dialing back those nitrogen flows that are far outside of planetary limits and causing very visible problems like dead zones in oceans where the rivers move some of that nitrogen into the ocean. 

Matthew

So not only is this fertilizer heavy on the fossil fuel front - it’s also polluting. Dead zones are actually as horrible as they sound. This is where excess fossil Nitrogen fertilizers run off of farm fields and into the surrounding streams and rivers and flow out into larger bodies of water. All these extra nutrients in the water triggers these algal blooms. And when these algae die and decompose, they consume oxygen. And when all that oxygen is sucked out of these aquatic ecosystems, other marine life can’t live. If you collect all these dead zones across the planet, they make up a body larger than the whole United Kingdom. These dead zones also contaminate surrounding drinking water, and has been linked to people experiencing respiratory issues, skin rashes, and gastrointestinal problems.  

So part of this story is it has created an addiction to these fertilizers. You don’t need to be a farmer to realize how that might make sense. You have fertilizers, you apply them to your fields, and your crops grow bigger, at least in the short-term. That’s a pretty easy sell. But it’s not so simple. It’s not just a synthetic fertilizer that you one time add to your system. 

This is where we transition from meeting all your farm’s needs with what you could access locally - into a more industrial input dependent farming system. 

Jennifer Clapp describes how the rise of tractors and mechanization paired with the rise of agrochemical fertilizers and pesticides made for a complete transformation. 

Jennifer

Basically, it allowed farmers to farm larger and larger tracts of land, which then  demanded more of these other inputs. Because once you were farming a large tract of land, you were then typically growing crops in a monoculture fashion. This made them more susceptible to pests. And it also exhausted the soil more efficiently because plowing was very disruptive to the soil. And then it led to a need for more fertilizers to be added to the soil. So these three inputs are deeply connected to each other in terms of their locking in this suite of technologies.

Matthew

It’s important to know how we got here. Understanding that is helpful for knowing exactly how to get us out of this mess. Another way to explain the dominant fossil fueled food system is to look at the industries and the profit models maintaining it. 

Jennifer Clapp has tracked the history of how a few industrial titans that respectively run the fertilizer, pesticide and farm machinery sectors, shape the future of food.

A handful of firms have accumulated enormous power in our food systems. They use this power to lock farmers and our food into modes of production that rely on fossil fuels, and to lobby policy-makers to protect that status.

Companies like Nutrien and Yara, who manufacture fertiliers; Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, and Corteva who produce Pesticides; and John Deere, Kubota, CNH Industrial, manufacturers of farm machinery,

Jennifer says they exercise their power in three key ways: market power, technology power, and political power.

First market power: 

Jennifer

Firms that can control different aspects of the market, different parts of supply and demand. They basically can generate excess profits because they can control supply and demand in a way that allows them to raise prices and reap those higher profits. And this is common when you have high degrees of concentration in the sector which we have today across all of these inputs. 

Matthew

For a few recent examples of this, fertilizer companies had raked in enormous profits during the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If the argument is that supply chains were disrupted so prices had to be higher - that doesn’t explain why they profited so much more during this time.  In 2022, agribusinesses were able to hike fertilizer prices and secure profits 500% above 2020 levels.

Second, you have technology power: 

Jennifer:

Because there's just a few companies dominating the market, they really are able to shape technological developments in a way that gives them this kind of role of gatekeeper of what technologies end up being mass marketed to farmers. They're picking the technologies that make them the most money.

Matthew

And last, you have political power: 

Jennifer

And they do this through lobbying and other forms of influence like funding research studies.

Matthew

So through these three kinds of power, market power, technology power, and political power, these firms 

have a big influence on the way that industrial farming looks today.

So, like I said earlier, these are some of the ways you can understand how we got here. But the effects of a fossil-fuel-driven food system aren’t felt the same way everywhere.

In the final part of this episode, we’ll explore how people and regions are  impacted differently around the world. We’ll take a closer look at farmworkers, biodiversity, and  the oceans.

Navina

My name is Navina Khanna and I’m the Executive director of the HEAL Food Alliance. HEAL stands for Health, Environment, Agriculture and Labor.

Matthew

Heal is a national alliance of organizations across the United States. Navina Khanna talks about  the social and health impacts on farmworkers and laborers, both in where her family is from and where she lives now.

Navina

Even just thinking about the region that my family is from in Punjab, right, which was the experimental birthplace of the Green Revolution where the first chemical pesticides and fertilizers were used and they were used to quote unquote, you know, save people from a famine and to boost yields. 

Matthew

The Green Revolution, spanning the 1950s to the late 1960s, involved advancements in agricultural technology that significantly boosted food production in some countries. Farmers were introduced to patented high-yielding crop varieties to replace the seeds and varieties that were grown locally. To achieve these yields, farmers had to buy expensive inputs like synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and install costly irrigation systems.

Navina

Punjab is named for its five rivers, right? It's considered the agricultural breadbasket of that region. It's been known for like really fertile soil, really rich, fertile brown soil. And most people in Punjab historically identify as agricultural people. 

And so in the 1930s, post the advent of the chemical pesticides and fertilizers, a lot of which we saw come up post World War II. People in Punjab were given these fertilizers, pesticide, seeds to use, and what that meant was it increased yield in that moment. And what that meant is that the soil was also depleted from its own production of the nutrients that are needed in order for it to be in abundant soil. And what it meant was people no longer using the practices that they had used to maintain healthy soils, agroecological practices, closed loop systems. 

And over time what’s meant is the soil is completely depleted there. The water is actually poisonous there. The rates of cancer that people are experiencing in Punjab are skyrocketing to the point that they call the train that takes people to the nearest hospital, the cancer train. That's what we see in Punjab.

In Punjab and that mirrors very much what we see in a place like California where I live, right? Where in the Central Valley, there's huge amounts of those same chemical pesticides and fertilizers being used. There's, you know, if we're talking about just general emissions, there's these mega dairies in the Central Valley. And similarly, we see people lacking access to clean drinking water. We see super high cancer rates in the Central Valley. We're seeing all of the same impacts on the farm working and rural communities in that area, as you see in a place like Punjab.

Matthew

Next we talk about biodiversity with Pat Mooney, who is now retired after nearly six decades of working around food, biodiversity and human rights issues. He co-founded the Etc Group to bring awareness to and to protect agricultural seed diversity.

Pat

Well, certainly there was the Green Revolution.  And Norman Borlaug, when he developed the semi-dwarf varieties, in wheat and then eventually in maize and rice. When he developed those, he saw it as a short-term solution. He didn't see it as a long-term solution. It was something to be done immediately to solve an immediate concern in Asia - not in Latin America and not in Africa, but in Asia,  to address the food crisis that was there.

Matthew

I was excited to speak to Pat to help understand what’s really difficult to put numbers to, which is how has biodiversity declined on farms over time? And how is that connected to the rise of a fossil-fuel driven food system?  I first asked how genetically uniform is the food system today.

Pat Mooney

Well, it's incredibly uniform. I don't think we've even fully understood how uniform it really is. When I first got into this work in the 1970s, my concern was about the genetic uniformity of plant varieties. So it was a genetic uniformity that there was only a handful of wheats and rices and maize that were being grown in most parts of the world, the semi dwarf types.

Matthew

Farmers across the world were growing thousands of different varieties of rice, maize or wheat. We’re not talking about different crops. Just different genetics of the same plant. Now, these were being discarded in favor of a handful of high-yielding varieties.

Pat Mooney

So we're in a world now where we have politely 12 crops that make up almost everything we eat around the world, Really three crops that make up about half of everything we eat - wheat, rice and maize. And you add on potatoes and you're up higher again. 

Matthew

So 12 plants - Maize, Rice, Wheat, Sugar cane, Soy beans, Potatoes, Palm oil, Cassava, Sorghum, Millet, Ground nut, and Sweet potatoes and 5 animals Chicken, cattle, pigs, sheep and goats - make up around three quarters of our diet.  Meanwhile there are almost 7,000 different domesticated crops that aren’t being used, at least not commercially. 

Pat

And that's tragic. The loss of species, the loss of genetic diversity. 

Matthew

So this is tragic if you think about the fact that when each plant variety goes extinct or becomes endangered, we lose not only biodiversity, but our future resilience to weather extremes. Right, think about how local varieties have adapted over time to different regional ecosystems. They’ve been able to thrive without the reliance on fossil fuel inputs. And we lose our cultural connection with these plants.

Pat

Then beyond that, we didn't recognize. Now only starting to recognize that we've created a microbial desert as well. Really, the food desert that we really have is the one in our gut. The development of ultra -processed foods and the narrowness of the food system. That we pretty well wiped out the genetic diversity in our own guts, the species diversity in our guts. The implications of that in terms of human nutrition, in terms of long-term health, in terms of even mental health are again just being explored now. So we've had those three erosions or destructions or wipeouts of our food system genetics. In the field, in the pasture, and the microbiome.

Matthew

Last, but not least - we take a deep dive into the oceans.

Rashid

I started right from my grandfather. He was somebody who was very conscious of nature. He knew plants that could heal people. I mean, so he was a pharmacist in his own way, right. And he would tell us - when you walk on earth, walk as if it feels pain.

Yeah, I am Rashid Sumaila. I'm a professor at the University of British Columbia. I'm also a Canada research chair in interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economics.

Matthew

Can you talk a little bit about what are the connections between fossil fuels and the food that we get from the water?

Rashid

Yeah, lots of connections really. So in the first place we use fishing vessels to catch fish. So the more you over fish that means the more you use fuels, more than you should. And if you go far off and you fish, because you’ve depleted the coast like increasingly we are going into the high seas. You're going to go out in the open ocean, search for fish and that needs a lot of energy. 

Matthew

Blue foods are the foods we get from aquatic sources like fish, seaweed, shellfish. And they’re made up of two components.

Rashid

You also have fish farming agriculture. Like salmon and shrimps. They need to be fed with fish meal and oil. And that demands a lot of energy. First, you have to catch the wild fish and then you ground it and all this needs energy. So that is another channel, right.

The third one is the fish value chain. In some cases, fish is caught say in Alaska - Pollock, it is shipped to China to be processed and then shipped back to North America. Pumping CO2 transporting it back and forth. So there are so many ways. And the gear we use to fish, if you use bottom trawlers, you are going to use more energy and therefore pump out CO2 to more than other gears and so on and so there are many ways that blue foods are connected to fossil fuels.

Matthew

There’s a lot to unpack there. First you heard that right.  Fish can be caught in Alaska, shipped to China for processing, and sold all the way back to North America. This makes no sense if you consider the transportation fuels and the emissions it causes, but it is a more cost effective solution for companies to do this.

And Rashid mentioned bottom trawlers. What are those exactly?

Rashid

Some have actually described it as clay cutting. It's like going in with a big bulldozer and just knocking things down. That is, so you go to the seafloor, you know, and start just looking for what you want without due consideration to the complicated ecosystem that is there. So trawlers use large heavy nets kept open by doors weighing as much as several tons each, many of whom drag across the large areas of the seafloor to catch fish that live on or near the ocean floor. 

Matthew

How different is the landscape and the culture around fishing and the relationship with nature? How different is it now to when it was when you were growing up? 

Rashid

Oh my god, it's changed a lot, especially the fish. You know, you go to the coasts of West Africa, you know, and people will tell you and you will feel it. The size of the fish is shrunk. The different types of fish they used to catch are all gone, right?  

They tell me, look, Rashid, a few decades or a few years ago, we go out in half a day, we fill our boat. But now we'll go for a week and we can get half of our boat.

And plastic wasn't a problem then, right? When I was growing up in West Africa again, we used banana leaves and corn leaves to wrap our food. Now you go there, your heart will jump out of your body. You see plastic everywhere. You know, half of it buried in the ground, half of it sticking up. Very ugly, and they end up in the ocean. Messing up the ocean and poisoning the fish and therefore us.  There have been huge big changes since I was a kid.

Matthew

There’s also the impacts of climate change on the sea, which is driving ocean acidification. As the seas absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they disrupt marine ecosystems. This rising acidity weakens coral reefs, threatens shellfish populations, and destabilizes the entire food chain.

And you’ve documented, right, some of these changes to the fish populations, to the size, to the amount of species that are thriving across different seas. 

Rashid

I have this beautiful map. If I had a slide, I would show you - where we estimated. You know, I call myself an interdisciplinary oceans and fisheries economist. Because I work together with ecologists, with mathematicians, with lawyers, because we all believe that. My collaborators, we all believe that no single discipline can do this. Together we have mapped out the state of the fisheries in northwest Africa. 

So we color it, you know. The more green it is, that means there's more fish in the ocean and then it becomes red. If you do that decade by decade from 1950, you will be blown away. There's virtually no green color anymore. The fish are gone, scientifically. So these are real data and model estimates of what is in there.

And this happens throughout the world. There is an estimate that half of the fish stocks are overfished and this is only the commercial, the things that we know. All the bycatch species are not even counted so it's far more than half. So really there's been big changes scientifically and otherwise.

Matthew

How’d we get to this state of the oceans being like this? It’s a similar story to what we’ve heard on land. Population growth and rising incomes increase demand. Technological innovation has increased supply. 

Rashid

When humans started fishing with harpoons, I mean, and then with your line and hook and so on, this has now become massive industrial enterprises. They can scoop the fish people used to take in a year in just a few days, right?

Matthew

Add in massive subsidies to the fishing sector to find and harvest more fish.

Rashid

Fish is not something you can conjure, it's nature. You have to take care of it, nurture it, you know. Take it carefully. We sap it out and then we give subsidies, taxpayer money, for them to go further and deeper. So the fish has no place to hide. That is also a factor. So a combination of many things. And then you have climate change. Climate change, we're pumping CO2. The fishing sector is part of it.

And that is leading to ocean warming, acidification, you are having deoxygenation, less oxygen in the ocean. And we know that oxygen is life. So you have all these things coming, multiple stresses on the ocean and the fish and all this is leading us to turning the green into the danger zone, the right empty oceans, you know.

Matthew

Does the food system on land and water feel hopeful or bleak to you right now?

We’ve heard about human ingenuity in action - technological advances, new solutions to feed a growing population. But in the process, our industrial food system has become deeply dependent on fossil fuels - for its energy, and for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. This dependence has dramatically changed how we farm and what we eat today.

We've also heard a story about the ripple effect - about some of the broader impacts of fossil fuel driven food systems on oceans, on biodiversity, on human health, on how nutrients flow throughout the planet! 

So what can we do? In the rest of the series, I talk to more brilliant people trying to figure this out. 

Next episode, we investigate fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides, and ask 

Jennifer Clapp

Do we really need agrochemicals to feed the world? Obviously different people are going to have different answers to that question.

Christine 

This is a bit of a mathematical answer.

Swati

Farmers don’t do farming. It’s the microbes who do farming. 

Jennifer

There are growing numbers of studies saying that we actually can produce sufficient calories to feed the world using these other methods.

Matthew

And onto the credits:

This podcast was made by possible by IPES Food – the international panel of experts of sustainable food systems, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, and TABLE. The series was produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. The episode was edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Special thanks to Robbie Blake, Chantal Clement, Jack Thompson, Jackie Turner,  Tamsin Blaxter, Tara Garnett, Anna Lappe. 

We’ve received funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Cover art and design was done by the Ethical Design Agency.  Music by Blue dot Sessions. 

Talk to you next week.