When
Food
Systems
WHAT DO WE DO WHEN THE STATUS QUO
JUST ISN’T CUTTING IT? WE NEED TO THINK OUTSIDE
THE BOX — AND GO INSIDE THE LAB
In 2017, 165 Holstein dairy cows were packed onto a Qatar
Airways cargo plane and few from Germany to Doha,
bringing an all-too-literal meaning to the term ‘catle class’.
The cows landed and headed of to their new Qatari home:
a purpose-built dairy farm where they were shorly joined by
a few thousand more airlifted bovine compatriots. The cows
were unwiting paricipants in Qatar’s efors to circumvent
embargoes placed on the country by Saudi Arabia and its
other Gulf neighbours, from which Qatar impored around
80% of its dairy needs. With the embargoes frmly in place,
Qatar didn’t have enough milk for its population, so it swiftly
few in an emergency cohor of milk producers.
Today, Qatar produces all the milk it needs in-country,
and then some. The cows did the job! However, the
situation only served to highlight Qatar’s heavy reliance
on a fragile and unstable food system — one that could
quickly fail if anything were to change.
“Our global food system emerged from the 1970s and
‘80s and is very, very linear”, agrees Jack Farmer, Co-
Founder and Chief Scientifc Ofcer of LetUs Grow, an
aeroponic farming company based in Bristol. Jack is quick
to emphasise the simplistic, and hugely wasteful, ‘grow it,
ship it, waste it’ nature of our global food chain — one
that applies far more widely than just in Qatar.
“You grow everything where it grows well, ship it to the
consumer, they eat it and they waste loads of it. The
inherent assumption is that nothing major will ever go
wrong. It’s not at all resilient, and global instability such as
a confict, climate crisis or political shift can cause it all to
fall over.”
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Nicky Jenner, Science Editor