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George MonbiotApril 10, 2025 at 2:22 AM EDT

1. Yesterday I wrote a thread about the dire warnings from food professionals on the state of supply chains. Comfortable folk might find it impossible to imagine an end to the current abundance. But we'd better start imagining it fast. THIS thread is about solutions - false ones and sound ones. 2. False solutions abound. They fall into two broad categories: A. Tech will save us, B. Anti-tech will save us. They’re equally mistaken. False solution A is exemplified by Bill Gates and his cohort: people can be very clever in some respects, amazingly naïve in others.

3. I see Gates and co (Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Oded Galor …) as “politics deniers”: people who believe the transformations necessary to prevent systemic collapse can happen without political pressure or political change. monbiot.com

4. But the pressures on food systems, like the pressures on all Earth systems, are deeply enmeshed in power relations. Better approaches are ignored or blocked by the power of incumbency: commercial interests profiting from current models and influencing government. Politics, in other words. 5. Just as disastrous is the anti-tech fantasy, highly fashionable in some green circles: we can abandon high-yield farming and global supply chains and revert to local, low-tech self-reliance. Hello famine, my old friend. monbiot.com

6. Gates and co are naïve, but the anti-tech fantasists are deluded. These two forces, the yield revolution and global trade (hedging against local harvest failure), have not only prevented widely-predicted global famine, but greatly reduced regional famine. assets.ourworldindata.org

7. BUT ... the current model is running out of road, as a result of a. environmental impacts, b. corporate greed and concentration and c. a loss of systemic resilience (the least understood but arguably most important of the three): monbiot.com

8. This is a hell of a mess, and, let's face it, it might not be soluble. But if it is, the answers will lie in a combination of science/tech and political change. They include: A. Far more investment in soil science and understanding of the relationships between plants and microbes 9. B. Taking some food production out of agriculture, to create a back-up system operating on different principles and less susceptible to environmental crisis. I’m thinking in particular of precision fermentation: the brewing of edible microbes. theguardian.com

10. C. Developing more resilient crops, with lower water and nutrient demands: the work on finding/breeding perennial grain crops by the Land Institute and others should be attracting much more public support. landinstitute.org

11. D. Breaking up the big corporations, desynchronising their operations and releasing their grip on the food chain. Anti-trust laws should be strong and intellectual property rights should be weak. 12. E. Countering the regulatory capture that extends all the way from local agencies to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. theguardian.com

13. F. Pressing for a worldwide switch away from animal-based diets, which exert disproportionately high pressure both on Earth systems and on supply chains. 14. G. Developing strategic food reserves and ensuring that good food is not diverted out of the human food chain (which means addressing milling standards, ending biofuel subsidies etc). theguardian.com

15. I could go on, but this thread is long enough already. There’s no guarantee of success. But let me spell this out again: *Both the “Tech Will Save Us” and the “Anti-Tech Will Save Us” pathways create an absolute guarantee of failure.* The thread on one page: skywriter.blue