“We now know that if you bring people out of poverty, if you provide them with education, especially for girls, then human population fertility goes down.
“So we can now intellectually think about a time when humanity’s demands on the planet to produce food will plateau and even go down.”
In particular, there were challenges about feeding an ageing population, Godfray said.
“Old people demand a different type of food than the younger people.”
Addressing protein deficits and improving diets, particularly in low-income countries, was another challenge facing the food sector with the “fetishisation of protein” in recent years.
Godfray said high- and middle-income countries like New Zealand had to avoid the “hypocrisy” of lecturing lower-income countries on how to manage this in a warming climate.
He thought it likely the world would begin to see more extreme events associated with climate, so that the effects of the food system on the climate and the climate on the food system would become “undeniable”.
“We need to have proper conversations about livelihoods and just transitions and how sectors can transform.
“When we talk about the challenges of milk and dairy in high-income countries, we must be very careful not to transpose those worries onto low-income countries, especially low-income countries where animal-based agriculture [is] so important.”
Godfray said it was possible that ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, may become an important tool in addressing these challenges.
“There will be challenges in the global food system that may require foods that would be categorised as ultra-processed foods.
“If you think that UPFs are just the devil and can never be improved, then that is, to me, worrying, because we will need these foods to address, for example, environmental things.”
While many contained “a lot of fat, a lot of sugar, a lot of salt” and were designed to be eaten very quickly, thus making them “energy dense” and increasing the risk of overconsumption, he said more work was needed to better understand their possible benefits as well as the harm they can cause.
Food producers had also yet to grapple with the consequences of the rise of GLP-1s - a medication that mirrors our natural hormone GLP-1 to suppress appetites and regulate blood sugar levels.
Godfray said figures suggested about 15% of people in the US were using GLP-1s, and food companies like Nestlé were starting to develop products tailored to these needs.
- RNZ
