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Review | Food without farms – a blueprint for feeding the world and saving the planet by George Monbiot, environmental activist

  • George Monbiot’s prediction that the global food system would break down came true when Russia invaded Ukraine. He has some ideas for what should replace it
  • Modern farming is destroying land and harming soil fertility, so move most food production to factories and let nature recover, the environmental activist says

Reading Time:4 minutes
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A tractor prepares farmland in England for sowing crops. Environmental activist George Monbiot says our current, large-scale, tillage farms – fuelled by fertiliser overkill – are killing soil fertility and aren’t the solution to feeding the world’s growing population. Photo: AFP
Peter Christie

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot, pub. Penguin Books

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The week Russia invaded Ukraine, bread prices in Yemen jumped 35 per cent. In Lebanon, flour-deprived bakeries were suddenly forced to close, and cooking oil in Kenya all but disappeared from store shelves.

The war – in a region that supplies about a third of the world’s wheat and three-quarters of its sunflower oil – hit the pause button on the global food supply, and billions around the planet felt an ominous pang like the stab of impending hunger.
“When I wrote the book describing how the global food system would break down, I really had no idea,” says George Monbiot about his latest book, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. “I was shocked to see the speed at which it now seems to be happening. I didn’t set out to position myself as the Doctor Doom of the global food system.”
A fragment of a rocket from a multiple rocket launcher is seen embedded in a wheat field in northeast Ukraine. A drop in grain and oil supplies from the country because of Russia’s invasion will cause millions in poor nations to starve, George Monbiot says. Photo: AFP
A fragment of a rocket from a multiple rocket launcher is seen embedded in a wheat field in northeast Ukraine. A drop in grain and oil supplies from the country because of Russia’s invasion will cause millions in poor nations to starve, George Monbiot says. Photo: AFP

Monbiot is a long-time columnist for Britain’s Guardian newspaper and well known for his alarming but clear-eyed descriptions of a planet nearing its environmental limits. For more than a quarter of a century, his columns have tried to lift the science of climate change, species extinctions and other environmental calamities from the obfuscating murk that seems to paralyse policymakers. The result is both lucid and – with distressing regularity – scary.

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