What the World’s Farmers Can Teach Us About Climate Resilience

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Amy Scott: Hello. Amy Scott here. So far on this season of how we survive, we've been looking for climate solutions here in the US, but the stakes are much higher in poorer countries, and farmers around the world are already making changes to adapt to a hotter planet and more volatile weather. So today we're zooming out for a global view.

We're going to spend this episode in a conversation with someone who's reported all over the world for The New York Times, Somini Sengupta. We talk about lessons we can learn from small-scale farmers, why coffee prices are shooting through the roof, plus some fascinating solutions like agroforestry, and why the biggest solution of all could be the simplest one. Let's get into it.

Somini Sengupta: My name is Somini Sengupta. I'm the international climate correspondent for The New York Times, which means I write about human beings coping with life on a hotter planet. I'm also the personal chef to a ravenous teenager, so I care a lot about food.

Amy Scott: That must be interesting. I kind of relate. I would love to talk about how you cook at home, but let's start with your reporting. You've worked all around the world. I read you've reported in more than 50 countries. You've covered a lot, but you know, after all that reporting, what would you say are the most pressing food challenges that you've seen that people are facing in terms of climate change?

Somini Sengupta: Yeah, I've reported from now 52 countries and counting. And when you ask me about growing food in the era of climate change, I immediately think back to a woman I met in Malawi. Her name was Judith Harry. She used to grow corn and tobacco, like her parents. They were both cash crops. They used a lot of chemical fertilizers, and she was a fairly small land owner, you know, a few acres of land, but she realized that droughts were coming with punishing regularity. There are now cyclones in in Malawi. They used to be really rare. Fertilizer became expensive, and so she just had to grow food in a totally different way, and she had to change what she grew and change what she ate, so she began planting pigeon peas to give her her soil some extra shading, so that that the soil didn't heat up and dry up as fast. 

Amy Scott: And what are pigeon peas? 

Somini Sengupta: So pigeon peas are a legume. They're really tasty. They're high in protein. They fix the nitrogen in the soil. And they are really good because they grow in bushes close to the ground, so you can grow them under a taller plant, like maize. Maize is a staple grain in much of southeastern Africa. So they shade the ground. They are a really good strategy to protect your soil in increasingly drier climates. And I should stop here and say Malawi has both regular droughts and extreme rains, so they're being battered left and right. They don't know what is coming. And this is not just in one country. This is what I have seen in country after country. The patterns of weather have changed and they are no longer reliable. And farmers need to know when the hot season is coming, when the dry season is coming, when it's going to rain, when it's going to rain heavily, those things are no longer certain. That is true for farmers all over the world. In poorer countries, it's just a lot more catastrophic. They can't afford to give up, they don't have crop insurance. Giving up means you don't have food for your family.

Amy Scott: So when it comes to scaling up solutions, you know, to feed a growing population on a hotter planet, what do you think you know larger industrial farms can can learn from what you've seen small farmers doing?

Somini Sengupta: That's a really good question. One thing that I have learned is that modern industrial farming often means monocropping. It means growing one thing on a really big patch of land and. And it means using a lot of chemical inputs. That is what the world started doing, you know, several decades ago, that was called the Green Revolution, that happened in poor countries and in rich countries, and it's credited with preventing widespread hunger. But now, that kind of monocropping in many places is proving to be really, really risky. 

Let me give you the example of coffee. So coffee is concentrated in two countries, Brazil and Vietnam. So if a drought strikes both those places, well, the entire global coffee price, you know, is thrown for a loop. 

Amy Scott: Yes, I have noticed. 

Somini Sengupta: We're noticing that right now. It's not just coffee. The same is true for, say, rice. Rice is concentrated now in a handful of countries. So not only do you have mono-cropping, that is to say, farmers growing one thing on a big patch of land, you also have certain parts of the world, certain countries, growing large quantities of that one crop, that also results in our diets becoming more and more concentrated. That is proving to be increasingly risky in the era of climate change. So one of the things that I'm seeing communities trying to do, and also countries trying to do, is experimenting with different kinds of crops. So instead of mono-cropping, planting a variety of crops. 

Amy Scott: Well, you mentioned rice, and that's one of the crops that we haven't really touched on this season, but it's hugely important around the world. I think you've written that it's the staple grain for 3 billion people. Can you talk about how climate change is affecting rice production, and what solutions you're seeing?

Somini Sengupta: Climate change is affecting my pantry. I eat a lot of rice. I'm one of those 3 billion people. So in countries like India, Vietnam, Pakistan, big rice growing countries, it's again, these extreme swings of weather. Some years there's just not enough rain to sustain the rice crop. Some years there's too much heat, some years there's a flood at exactly the wrong time, and, you know, a region's entire crop is washed away. Some countries are shifting their planting schedule, so maybe they're planting a little bit earlier to hedge their bets, or they're experimenting with new varieties of seeds that grow a little bit better when the fields flood. Another thing that I'm seeing taking off in different places is this idea of agroforestry, and basically that means, don't just cut down the forest to grow one crop. For example, Brazil's grasslands and forests have been mowed down significantly in the last, you know, 30-40 years to grow soybeans to feed chickens and pigs. And the idea of agroforestry is to cultivate crops within a forest. Now those are only certain kinds of crops. Coffee can be grown in a way that follows the principles of agroforestry, other fruit trees can be grown in that way, even some limited livestock grazing can happen in a forest without, you know, totally cutting down the trees and letting it become just pasture land. And then the third category would be a very vague notion that I've heard described as regenerative agriculture. And you'll see this like popping up even on your cereal boxes in the United States, right? Generally, it means taking care of the soil better, and I'm seeing a lot of food companies take on this strategy. It's a little unclear to me, you know, like, is it really leading to improvement? Is it really leading to better soils, less water pollution? I don't know. I think the jury is still out, and I'm a little skeptical of the green-washing potential of these labels.

Amy Scott: Yeah, and there's been some reporting that the carbon sequestration you can achieve through better soil health has been overstated. As you said, it does seem the jury is still out. And then there are some other problems with, you know, this approach in terms of, you know, smaller farms, lower yields. If we're going to feed more people, we need to do it with less land.

Somini Sengupta: Yeah, and so there are two arguments that I hear that I think we both need to keep in mind: Growing population, we need to grow more food on less land. Yes, though, the population is really not growing as fast as many would have thought years ago, the rate of population growth has slowed. We're at 8 billion now. We might get to 10 billion in, you know, another couple of decades. But here's the other thing, we are not eating all of the food that we grow, right? An estimated 30% of the food of crops that are grown go to waste, either at the farm level, because whatever, the tomatoes aren't the right size and shape, or because a farmer has just grown, you know, too much cabbage. Or, as I heard from someone in Nigeria just the other day, because the farmers don't have a place to actually refrigerate their crops, they might not have access to cold storage, and so the crops just rot before they can even get to the market. And then there's the food that's lost because we buy too much and it rots in our fridge. Or our portion sizes in the United States are so large that we often, you know, throw away parts of what's on our plate. So food loss and waste is such a big problem that, if that could be addressed, perhaps just food production wouldn't have to increase so much. Of course, the big growers, the big food companies, would have you believe—why would they not?—that we need to increase production, and so therefore we need to use, you know, more chemical additives and more land and more water. So I think it's important to note that if the world got better at actually eating the food that it grows, that would go a long way in reducing deforestation, degradation of the land, pollution of soil and water, and frankly, the biggest problem of all, hunger: which is growing, which is shameful, right?

Amy Scott: And you wrote that hunger is a problem of plenty in the modern era, not scarcity. How do we begin to address this problem of waste or growing? Maybe not the right things in the right places in terms of where they're needed? 

Somini Sengupta: Yeah, I mean, we've known for many, many years that hunger, food insecurity, famine is not a question of like not having enough food in the world. It's a question of the very poor not being able to access food, and now increasingly, it's a question of not being able to afford or access nutritious food. That is a problem—not in far away countries, that is a problem in the United States. Food waste is part of the problem, and I'm seeing really interesting efforts, including in the United States, channeling food that could go to waste to people who actually need it. So there's food rescue going on in a lot of places around the country. In some states, I think it's only about five or six states, there are state laws that require big producers of food, restaurants, supermarkets, you know, wholesale companies, to actually not send edible food to the landfill. So they're required to figure out ways to get that food to people who need it, or to get it to compost, or to get it into a bio-digester facility. I went to Massachusetts to write a story about Massachusetts state law, you know, and I found that it's kind of a mixed bag. It's working, yes, to reduce the amount of food that goes into the landfills, but it's also pretty hard to enforce, and enforcement is still weak.

Amy Scott: We gotta talk about meat.

Somini Sengupta: Oh yeah.

Amy Scott: That’s after the break. 

Amy Scott: We've done a lot of reporting this season about meat and its contribution to the climate problem. First of all, I know that you've written about cultivated meat. What's your take on that as a solution?

Somini Sengupta: Well, let me just say, I guess … how do I put it? Food isn't just a problem of emissions and climate stuff, right? It's not just an industry. What we eat, how we eat, with whom we eat, says so much about who we are. It says so much about the tribe we belong to, about our identities. And meat is maybe like the most important signifier, right? So one of my frustrations is that we tend to sort of sanitize this, our discussions of food and climate change and the environment, as if it doesn't like matter to us emotionally, it really does. Food is like so visceral, and meat is perhaps the most visceral of all. The thing about meat is that there are very few people in the world who get to eat a lot of it. There are some countries in which we eat a lot of meat. The United States is at the top of that list. Australia and Canada are up there too. In most parts of the world, people don't eat a lot of meat because it's expensive.

Amy Scott: Yeah.

Somini Sengupta: Or because, you know, the cuisine is like having a little bit of meat in the main stew or the main soup, not having only a big chunk of meat on the plate. And by the way, Americans eat much more meat than we did “traditionally,” like even 30 years ago. So Americans meat consumption has gone up very, very dramatically, particularly chicken consumption. So again, like the problem of meat and its environmental impact is fundamentally a problem of inequality. There are some of us who get to eat a lot of meat, and there are most of us who don't.

Amy Scott: Well, two responses to that, and one is that as people get access to more resources, as people get wealthier, they do tend to want to eat more like Americans, in terms of meat consumption, right?

Somini Sengupta: Not necessarily, not necessarily. 

Amy Scott: Correct me if I’m wrong, but we hear that a lot. And then the other thing is that just our beef consumption is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. So if the world wants to eat like that, how are we going to keep doing it? Or can we? Is there such a thing as more sustainable meat?

Somini Sengupta: Well, it's not the case, necessarily, that as people become wealthier, they want to eat exactly as much meat as Americans do on average, because Europeans, very wealthy countries, do not consume as much meat, on average, as Americans, Canadians and Australians do. So you know, there are some cultural differences here. And one thing to bear in mind, it's not just the emissions of beef and lamb, which are very high. Growing meat takes up huge swaths of land and water to grow the crops that feed the animals. You know, there's a whole debate about, like, to what extent are more sustainably grazed animals, is that better than factory farms? Well, it depends on what you think is better, right? Factory farms, small, concentrated places with animals, particularly cattle feeding from feed lots may actually take up less land, and thus less water. It may not be so great if you care about animal welfare, so you have to weigh many things. It's not really that easy just to say, oh, one kind of meat is better, growing meat this way is better than growing meat another way. There are dilemmas that have to be weighed. One potential fix to all of this is emerging, and that is cell-grown meat. You know, you're essentially growing the chicken without the wings.

Amy Scott: Right. We have tried it. We have an episode that's all about cultivated chicken. And I know you've tried it too. What was your take?

Somini Sengupta: Well, my take was, look, if you're into like, sort of mass-produced, kind of over-seasoned meat, fine. It tastes just like, you know, the industrially grown chicken. I am kind of fond of a bit more interesting meats. I like bison. I've had alligator, I've had kangaroo. I love bivalves of all kinds. It's not meat, but it's, you know, scallops, mussels, clams, and wait, there's one more oysters. Like, that's my jam.

Amy Scott: Other than reducing our meat consumption as Americans or Canadians or Australians, what changes can we make to our diets to help, you know, protect the planet?

Somini Sengupta: The two biggest changes that Americans like me can make on food is, yes, eating less beef and lamb, in particular, if you care about emissions. And yeah, eating a little less meat if you care about all the environmental impacts of meat production. The other thing, is probably like the easiest thing to do, is not to waste food. Like that, to me, is low-hanging fruit. But apparently it's not really low-hanging fruit, because it's been a really hard problem to solve.

Amy Scott: Somini Sengupta is international climate reporter with The New York Times. Thank you so much. It's been great to talk to you.

Somini Sengupta: Thank you. 

Amy Scott: That's it for this episode of How We Survive. Next week, we travel to our nation's bread basket to see how a dry season in Kansas can have global implications.

Richard Seager: Climate change in the central US is of enormous importance to food security across the world.

Amy Scott: We want to know what questions you have about food and the climate crisis. You can send us a note, or, even better, a voice memo to survive@marketplace.org and we're going to try to answer as many of your questions as we can in an upcoming episode. I'm Amy Scott. Emma Condon produced this episode. Hayley Hershman is our senior producer. Caitlin Esch is Deputy Managing Editor. She also edited this episode. Scoring, sound design, and mixing by Brian Allison. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Bridget Bodnar is director of podcasts. Kelly Silvera is news director. Joanne Griffith is Chief Content Officer, and Neil Scarbrough is the vice president and general manager of Marketplace.