By William Park

作者：威廉·帕克

Five food and agriculture experts share their plans for safeguarding our crops for future generations.

五位粮食和农业专家分享了他们为子孙后代保护农作物所作的计划。

With queues at food banks, produce rotting unpicked in fields and empty supermarket shelves, the Covid-19 pandemic has shown both that too many people live below the breadline around the world and our food networks are stressed to their limits.

新冠病毒疫情期间，食品银行门口排起了长队，农产品在田地里腐烂，超市货架空空如也……这一切表明世界上有太多的人生活贫困之中，同时也表明我们的食品网络面临着压力。

Last year was incredibly difficult for those working in the food industry. But, where there is uncertainty there are also opportunities, and the pandemic has encouraged many of us to take stock of what we do. If we could reimagine our global food system, is there a way to make it more resilient should there be another global crisis? And if so, can we fix some of the other problems with agriculture, like mitigating its climate impact, at the same time?

去年对于那些在食品行业工作的人来说是非常困难的一年。但是，有不确定性的地方也暗藏机遇，流行病鼓励我们许多人应该对我们所做的工作进行反思。如果我们可以重新构想我们的全球粮食系统，是否有办法在可能发生的另一场全球危机中使它更有弹性呢？如果可以，我们能否解决诸如减轻农业对气候的影响等农业的其他问题呢?

Those were the questions we posed to five experts and industry leaders in the fields of food security and sustainability. They identified a common theme – farmers, and the choices we make alongside them as consumers, will have a meaningful impact on climate change. And in turn, better farming will improve global health.

这些是我们向粮食安全和可持续性领域的五位专家和行业领袖提出的问题。他们确定了以农民以及我们作为消费者与农民一起做出的选择作为共同的主题，这一主题将对气候变化产生有意义的影响。反过来，更好的农业也将改善全球健康。
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Farmers are important custodians of much of the world’s land. They manage “almost three-quarters of the land in England, producing food for people today and protecting land for the next generation”, says Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the UK’s Environment Agency. Globally, half of the world’s habitable land is currently used in agriculture. “A lot of responsibility for managing these issues falls on their shoulders, they need more support from wider society to make good decisions and keep going.”

农民是世界上大部分土地的重要保管人。英国环境署主席艾玛·霍华德·博伊德说，他们管理着“英格兰近四分之三的土地，为今天的人们生产粮食，同时更是为下一代保护着土地”。 从全球来看，世界上一半的可居住土地目前都用于农业。“管理这些问题的很多责任都落在了农民的肩上，他们需要更广泛的社会支持才能做出正确的决定并继续前行。”

Howard Boyd identifies extreme weather – being made worse by climate change – as an example of how farmers are pushed to the limit. The UK, for example, experienced its wettest February on record in 2020, followed by the sunniest spring. In California and Australia, wildfires decimated enormous areas of parched land.

霍华德·博伊德指出农业因为气候变化而变得更糟。极端天气是农民被逼到极限的一个原因。例如，2020年英国经历了有记录以来最潮湿的二月份，接着是最阳光明媚的春天。而在加利福尼亚和澳大利亚，森林大火烧毁了大片干旱的土地。

“The climate emergency will increasingly shift us from one extreme to the other, and water, whether too much, too little, or its quality, will be a big concern,” says Howard Boyd.

“气候突发事件将越来越多地把我们从一个极端转移到另一个极端，水无论是太多还是太少还是质量优劣都将是一个大问题。” 霍华德·博伊德这样说道。

While the effects of drought on soil quality and risk of wildfires are more obvious, too much water brings its own problems. Increases in rainfall contribute to more pollution from farms washing into the wider environment, particularly in the dairy sector. The solution, says Howard Boyd, needs to be multidisciplinary, including financially incentivising sustainable farming practices, creating habitats for nature recovery and establishing new woodland.

虽然干旱对土壤质量的影响和野火的风险更明显，但过多的水也会带来自身的问题。降雨的增加导致了更多的污染，因为农场的污染会被冲刷到更广阔的环境中，这在乳品行业更为严重。霍华德·博伊德说，解决方案应该是跨学科的，甚至在财政上也应该鼓励可持续的农业实践，为自然恢复创造条件，同时建立新的林地。

“When we think about innovation, we usually think about new technology, but I’m hoping to see a more integrated approach with the natural resources we already have,” says Howard Boyd. “The Environment Agency works with farmers to tackle the root causes of pollution and to help environmentally sustainable, and profitable, agriculture.”

霍华德·博伊德说：“当我们想到创新时，我们通常想到的是新技术，但我希望看到一个通过利用我们已有的自然资源设想出的更综合的方法。环境署与农民共同协作解决污染的根源，并帮助构建环境可持续、有利可图的农业。”

For those farmers working in drier climates than Britain, climate change is resulting in land degradation – the quality of the land being farmed is decreasing. Land degradation affects almost half of the world’s population, as soil erodes away and nutrients are depleted. The challenge for farmers is to reverse this trend while feeding a growing population.

对于那些在比英国更干燥的气候下工作的农民来说，气候变化正在导致土地退化，更确切地说是正在耕种的土地质量正在下降。由于土壤侵蚀和养分枯竭，土地退化影响到了世界上几乎一半的人口。在这种情况下，农民面临的挑战是在养活不断增长的人口的同时扭转这种趋势。

“We are still degrading more land and we are still harvesting more water, so where are we going?” asks Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

“我们仍然有更多的土地正在退化，我们仍然在渴求更多的水，那我们将何去何从?”联合国防治荒漠化公约执行秘书易卜拉欣·提乌问道。

“There is no continent in the world that is spared by climate change, by land degradation, by drought and by degradation of ecosystems,” he says. “Africa is probably the largest continent in terms of the amount of land that is affected by land degradation. But if you go to Asia, because of the size of the population, you have more people in Asia affected by land degradation than anywhere else in the world.”

他说:“世界上没有一个大陆能幸免于气候变化、土地退化、干旱和生态系统退化。就土地退化所影响的土地数量而言，非洲可能是受影响最大的大陆。但在亚洲，因为人口数量巨大，亚洲的土地退化影响的人口比世界上任何地方都多。”

The good news is that there are solutions to land degradation, too, says Thiaw. “We can still restore degraded land into productive land.” Thiaw is inspired by high-tech offerings in other sectors, including the use of blockchain to track goods across the world, but believes land degradation could be solved with the comparatively low-tech “regenerative agriculture”.

提乌说，好消息是人类有解决土地退化的办法。“我们仍然可以将退化的土地恢复为肥沃的土地。“ 提乌是受到了其他行业包括使用区块链追踪全球商品在内的高科技产品的启发，但他认为通过技术含量相对较低的“再生农业”就足以解决土地退化问题。

This style of agriculture encourages the use of cover crops ensuring the land is covered with one crop or other the whole year, both of which help to prevent soil erosion by wind or rain, maintain water and help to sequester carbon in the ground through their deep roots.

这种农业方式鼓励使用覆盖作物，确保土地全年覆盖一种或另一种作物，这两种作物都有助于防止土壤受到风或雨的侵蚀，同时土地还保持水分并有助于通过其深根固存地面的碳。

“We don’t think it is enough to sustain the topsoil that we have now – we think we need to regenerate it because the world has lost about a third of its topsoil,” says Jeff Harmening, president of food producer General Mills. “And only the first few feet of soil on the Earth are responsible for all the food we produce.”

“我们认为这不足以维持我们现在拥有的表层土，我们觉得我们需要对土壤进行再生，因为世界已经失去了大约三分之一的表层土了。”食品生产商通用磨坊总裁杰夫·哈蒙宁说。“地球上只有最表层几英尺的土壤是我们生产的所有食物的营养来源。”
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General Mills has set a target of transforming one million acres of farmland (an area a little larger than Yosemite National Park) using regenerative agriculture by 2030. It might sound like an enormous area, but there are 915 million acres of farmland in the US alone. For regenerative agriculture to have a transformative effect, it will need buy-in from masses of farms.

通用磨坊公司已经制定了这样一个目标:到2030年他们要利用再生农业技术改造100万英亩的农田(面积比约塞米蒂国家公园略大)。这听起来可能是一个巨大的区域，但仅在美国就有多达9.15亿英亩的农田。再生农业要想产生变革效应的话，需要大量农场的支持。

“One company the size of General Mills is big enough to make a difference but it is not big enough to make the difference,” says Harmening. “It is just a start but it is a good start and a big start to prove the theory of the case. If we do not get started now we are not going to like the result. We really can’t wait.”

哈蒙宁说:“一家像通用磨坊这样规模的公司足以做出一些改变，但还不足以改变现状。这只是一个开始，但这是一个良好的开始，也是证明这一理论的一个重要开端。如果我们现在不开始，那最后可能就无力回天了。我们真的不能再拖了。”

Future global pandemics, similar to what we are living through now, could be more likely because of some existing farming practices. “The intensification of agricultural production has come with unsustainable exploitation of natural resources,” says Pierre Ferrand, an agroecologist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the Asia-Pacific region. “This combined with the increasing impacts of climate change and global uncertainties, exposes communities to more hazards. Large-scale livestock production has been driving natural habitat loss and has pushed the agricultural frontier into wilder and less-arable lands, potentially contributing to creating the conditions for viruses circulating, mixing and spreading to humans.”

因为一些现有的农业现象，我们现在所经历的全球性大流行病在未来很有可能再次发生。联合国粮农组织(FAO)驻亚太地区的农业生态学家皮埃尔·费朗解释说: “农业生产的集约化伴随着对自然资源不可持续的开发, 再加上气候变化和全球不确定性的影响日益增加，这些使社区面临着更多的灾害。大规模的牲畜生产导致了自然栖息地的丧失，并将农业边界推到了更荒凉和更少耕地的土地上，这可能为病毒的传播、混合和向人类传播创造了条件。”

Agroecology is the specialism of looking at farming’s place in the natural world to reduce its impact on biodiversity and improve the quality of crops. Ferrand says it is getting more and more traction in the Asia-Pacific region – mostly because it has already experienced past zoonotic disease outbreaks such as the Sars outbreak in 2003 and the H5N1 bird flu in the 2010s.

农业生态学是着眼于农业在自然界中的地位，以减少农业对生物多样性的影响并提高作物质量为目标的专业。费朗德说，农业造成的病毒在亚太地区的影响越来越大，这主要是因为亚太地区过去已经经历了人畜共患病的事件，例如2003年的非典和2010年代的H5N1禽流感。

The Asia-Pacific region is home to nearly 75% of the world’s small-scale family farmers, fishers and livestock producers, who between them generate 80% of the region’s food. “It is very important to acknowledge it since they have been playing a critical role during the pandemic as ‘front liners’ supplying fresh food to urban centers,” says Ferrand.

亚太地区拥有世界上近75%的小规模家庭农民、渔民和牲畜生产者，他们生产了该地区80%的粮食。费朗德说:“承认这一点非常重要，因为作为向城市中心供应新鲜食品的‘前线’，它们在大流行期间发挥了关键作用。”

Family farmers will continue to play a very important role in the future, he says. “Family farmers are about much more than just production, they are also about stewardship – stewardship of the soil, seeds, biodiversity and human-animal interactions that make up a family farm – which is a fundamental dimension to consider in order to prepare for the next global food crisis.”

他说，家庭农民在未来将继续发挥非常重要的作用。“家庭农民不仅仅涉及生产，他们还涉及管理，他们管理组成家庭农场的土壤、种子、生物多样性和人与动物的相互作用等，这是为下一次全球粮食危机做准备的一个基本方面。”
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However, there is a problem looming in the not-too-distant future if we keep putting so much responsibility at the booted feet of farmers: farming is an increasingly unfashionable job.

然而，如果我们继续让农民承担如此多的责任，那么在不久的将来就会出现一个问题:务农会越来越不受欢迎。

It’s one thing making farmers custodians of our land, but what happens if no one wants to do the job? “I think that farming has a very, very bad image problem,” says Kimbal Musk, co-founder of urban farming company Square Roots. “If you’re talking about corn, if you are talking about soybeans no one wants to do that – it’s a really miserable business.”

让农民管理我们的土地是一回事，但如果没人愿意做这个工作怎么办? “我认为农业有一个非常非常糟糕的形象问题。如果你谈论种玉米或大豆，没人想这么做，这是一个非常悲惨的行业。”城市农业公司平方根的联合创始人金巴尔·马斯克回应道。
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Musk hopes that he can make farming more attractive to young people by answering two of their major concerns with the job: firstly, that farming is remote and labour-intensive work and secondly that much of it is done unsustainably. Corn, for example, is one of the most important agricultural products in the US, yet 40% of the harvest goes towards biofuels in the form of ethanol. Biofuels, already a niche fuel, will soon be replaced with electric motors, says Musk. The rest of the harvest largely goes towards animal feed with only a small fraction making its way into the diets of Americans (in the form of high-fructose corn syrup – hardly a healthy food).

马斯克希望通过解决年轻人对农业工作的两个主要担忧来让农业对他们更具吸引力:首先，农业是一项远程且劳动密集型的工作，其次，很多农业工作都是不可持续的。例如，玉米是美国最重要的农产品之一，但40%的收成都用于生产乙醇等生物燃料了。马斯克说，生物燃料已经是一种利基燃料，不久将被电动马达取代。剩下的收成大部分用于动物饲料，只有一小部分(以高果糖玉米糖浆这种不太健康的形式)进入了美国人的饮食。

Young people are motivated by meaningful jobs, says Musk, and at the moment agriculture doesn’t seem to offer that. “If you are a young person and you want to work in farming that’s just a terrible, horrible, horrible job,” he says.

马斯克说，年轻人的动力来自有意义的工作，而目前农业似乎无法提供这样的工作。“如果你是一个想在农场工作的年轻人，那对你来说只是一个非常非常非常糟糕的工作。”他说。

But Square Roots is offering an alternative in the form of indoor farms in the centre of Brooklyn and Grand Rapids Michigan. At Square Roots, young farmers are given their own modified shipping container in which they can grown healthy foods, like kale, herbs and salads. Much of the work can be done from home using an app that upxes the farmer in real time with information about the climate inside their container. Younger farmers much prefer this lifestyle, says Musk.

但平方根公司提供了另一种选择，该公司在布鲁克林和密歇根州大急流城的中心地带开设了室内农场。在平方根农场，年轻的农民会被分配到他们自己的改装集装箱，他们可以在里面种植如羽衣甘蓝、香草和沙拉等健康的食物。很多工作都可以在家里通过一款应用程序完成，该程序可以向农民实时更新容器内的气候信息。马斯克说，年轻的农民更喜欢这种生活方式。

“We have 10 positions for young farmers and I think we have had over 2,500 applications over the past couple of years for those positions,” says Musk.

马斯克说:“我们有10个招聘年轻农民的职位，我想过去几年已经有超过2500人申请这些职位。”


Whether it is high-tech, app-powered, urban farms, or family businesses handed down through generations, the people who produce the food we eat have an opportunity to arrest climate change, and consumers, in turn, can shape that through the choices they make. If we all make the right choices, we might avert the next global crisis.

无论是高科技、应用程序驱动的城市农场，还是代代相传的家族企业，生产我们所吃食物的人们都有机会阻止气候变化，而消费者反过来也可以通过他们所做的选择来塑造这一趋势。如果我们都做出正确的选择，我们可能会避免下一场全球危机。

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