Why is today’s industrial food system unhealthy?

Inequitable distribution

We live in a time of unprecedented plenty. There has never been so much food. Yet 820 million people, and rising, still go hungry. Billions more – estimates are as high as half the world’s population – are malnourished in other ways.

A focus on profit over nutrition

Food production chains are designed to supply vast volumes of cheap, processed food to global markets. They rely on just 12 plant and five animal species, a fraction of the 2.1 million varieties of 7,000 plant species that farmers have bred over time. The result: a rapid rise in diet-related diseases, like cancer and type 2 diabetes.

Increased exposure to toxic chemicals

Industrial agriculture came with a dramatic rise in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides since the mid-1990s. The World Health Organization said that one of the most widely used chemicals, glyphosate, probably causes cancer in humans. These substances find their way into our food and drinking water, causing cumulative negative health effects on humans and wildlife. Farmers and their families are the first to suffer from the devastating impacts. 

Disempowered farmers

Mental health issues and economic injustice arise from treating food as a commodity, and farmers as cogs in an industrial system. As eaters, we lose a sense of connection to each other and to the land when we can’t know where our food comes from, or who grew it. As farmers, falling incomes, increasing debt and stresses inherent to the job take a heavy toll. Practising agroecology, the science and know-how behind sustainable agriculture, not only benefits farmers’ physical health – it empowers them and their community, too.