Codex Planetarius: Increasing global food sustainability and resilience

Rising food prices have caused plenty of shock over the last few years. But even these costs hide something more alarming: Food production has the largest impact of any human activity on the planet, causing 70% of global biodiversity loss, 78% of water pollution and 35% of greenhouse gas emissions. And with a rapidly expanding human population that is living longer, pressure to increase food production will build in coming years, further imperiling renewable resources, wildlife, and the climate.

To meet this challenge, we’ll need to scale back the negative impacts of food production even as we produce more. The big question is how, especially given climate change’s growing threat to production.

The Markets Institute at WWF is charting a new path forward with Codex Planetarius, a proposal for minimum environmental performance standards designed to reduce the key impacts of globally traded food by adopting minimum environmental performance levels.

Challenges of the global food trade

Food production has impacted the environment for millennia, but its modern footprint — which covers 19 million square miles (an area roughly three times the size of Russia) and includes large swathes of ocean — is incomprehensible. Food exports, which account for nearly a third of all food consumed, are similarly massive. Valued at $1.7 trillion, they have quadrupled over the last 40 years and are expected to continue expanding as changing climate patterns upend historical production.

These exports don’t come without consequences. U.S. demand for leather helps fuel deforestation in the Amazon. China’s hunger for seafood harms West African fish stocks. And the list goes on, spanning the globe in a complex web of supply, demand, and impact.

Despite the obvious problem, there are no global standards — no carrots or sticks — to address the environmental impacts of internationally traded food. Sugarcane produced with minimal impact on water resources is treated no differently than production that depletes or pollutes water systems. As a result, producers often harm water, soil, and other natural resources, while the companies that purchase these commodities don’t know what the impacts are or what incentives could improve production.

Obviously, food should be grown in more sustainable ways but attempts to overhaul the global food system over the last 30 years have largely failed.

These efforts, which focused principally on voluntary standards, led to partnerships with companies that had the financial means to reduce their environmental impacts by investing in improved practices and production systems, for example. But the least efficient food producers — those less likely or less willing to adopt voluntary standards — were largely overlooked and were not required by their governments or buyers to improve their performance.

Although less efficient performers represent only 10-20% of the producers of any commodity — and even less of the product — they account for 60-80% of the key environmental impacts of production. By simply maintaining the status quo, these producers nullify voluntary advances globally.

The lesson is clear: Enacting sweeping changes to global food production that involve absolute reduction of impacts is impossible without the participation of the world’s least efficient producers — and that is where Codex Planetarius will direct its focus.