Grain and large-scale mechanized agriculture have their place in food systems, but they’re far from the only way to grow food. Feeding the world in a sustainable manner means diversifying beyond today’s food system, which is built on a few regional breadbaskets such as the Black Sea, the North American grain belt, and Brazil’s soy-producing states. A truly efficient food system would look quite different.
Agroforestry—or using orchards, groves, and managed forests to grow food—is a viable option for large-scale food production. Today, most people tend to consider trees a source of fruit and timber instead of staples such as starch, oil, and protein. But around the world, people have used oak, breadfruit, plantains, mesquite, oil palms, and other high-yielding trees for staple calories for millenniums.
Cherokee, Catawba, and other Indigenous farmers in Appalachia combined maize, squash, and bean farming with chestnut forestry. Each chestnut tree dropped 50 to 100 pounds of starchy nuts per year, and there were 3 billion to 4 billion of these trees before a fungal disease drove them to near extinction in the 20th century. Chestnut forests yielded around 3 trillion to 4 trillion calories per year, or enough to provide the carbohydrate needs for today’s U.S. population about twice over. By comparison, the U.S. corn industry grows about 6 trillion calories per year. What’s more, chestnut trees mostly grew in Appalachia: hilly, thin terrain that industrial agriculture considers “unfarmable.” Indigenous communities managed these enormously productive forests with little labor and no fertilizer industry.
Despite the blow that the de facto extinction of chestnut trees dealt to the Appalachian economy in the early 20th century, little effort has been spent on bringing these trees back. Had we started crossbreeding American chestnuts with blight-resistant Asian chestnuts when the blight began, we would have chestnut forests today. But we didn’t. In an echo of how food dependency works in international affairs, failure to invest in chestnut forests has kept Appalachia hungry, dependent on food imports, and locked into coal mining to pay for them.
Properly tended fisheries, another example of local food systems, are also powerful. Many nations dependent on food imports, such as Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Algeria, have coastal fisheries—but not ones that play a major role in national food security. This is because of centuries of pollution and unmanaged fishing, including industrial-scale poaching by international fleets. These nations have few resources to enforce fishing quotas. They have even fewer resources to invest in hatcheries, cleaning up pollution, and other proactive measures to rebuild fisheries.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Aquaculture can be a powerful food security tool for arid coastal nations. For instance, managed seaweed stands can provide food or industrial feedstocks similar to sugarcane and maize now. And rather than pollute watersheds as land crops can do, seaweed removes nutrients and oxygenates the water—providing for human needs, rehabilitating the environment, and strengthening fisheries at the same time. In fact, seaweed and seagrasses can remove enough carbon dioxide from seawater to counteract acidification in their area, allowing corals and shellfish to thrive. Oysters, mussels, and other filter-feeding shellfish were once cheap staples: abundant, non-polluting protein. With proper investment and stewardship, they could be again.
