How do we combat climate change? For most people, the obvious answer is to create more renewable energy, or switch from gas to electric cars. But the agriculture industry actually has a large role to play. About 17% of the world's greenhouse gases come from farming. Everything from cow burps to fertilizer create the pollutants that are warming our planet.
Professor Meredith Niles, dually appointed at Brown’s Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and School of Public Health, has been working at the intersection of food and climate change for decades, trying to find ways to help farmers reduce those emissions. But lately, she's reached a realization: In this effort to make agriculture more sustainable, maybe we should talk a little less about climate change and a little more about public health.
There are many techniques farmers can use to reduce their farm’s climate impact. But your research shows they are not being adopted fast enough, mainly because environmental concerns aren’t top of mind for farmers or consumers.
Niles: We do social science research, so we talk to farmers to figure out if they're motivated to implement these practices and to figure out how consumers would purchase or change their behavior.
Data from our dairy farmer survey tells us that the top priorities for most dairy producers are animal welfare and productivity. They are small businesses trying to make money. They care about the environment, but it's not usually their top priority.
Many consumers say they care about the environment. But the evidence shows only about 4% of U.S. consumers actually purchase something for its environmental and sustainability footprint. Data shows that people tend to be more concerned with how healthy the food is and how much it costs.
So I think on both sides—the market side and the farmer behavior side—we've reached the point where environmental framing will no longer work, in my opinion.
How should we reframe these sustainability issues?
I don't think it means that we should stop talking about the environmental benefits of sustainable practices, but I think we should start talking about the public health benefits as well.
Many of the sustainable practices that make agriculture better for the environment can also bring public health benefits. For example, growing rice with less water reduces methane. But it also reduces heavy metal content in the rice: lead, arsenic, cadmium, other things that are really not great for human health.
The evidence does show that consumers are much more motivated by health in their purchasing. So while only four percent of people might actually purchase something for sustainability, over half say they purchase foods because of the health aspects of the food or the food production.
So from my perspective, we should be talking about both. I think the public health community has, for a long time, not engaged in agriculture very much at all and we should recognize that many of these practices have tangible public health benefits.
If we can build the evidence base to show that some of these practices can reduce heavy metal content, for example, there might be other more unique ways that would give access to people in more low-income households to those products.
A great example would be the Women, Infants, and Children's (WIC) program, which serves half of all babies born in this country. If that program, for example, started to allow for purchasing of rice products that were grown with practices to reduce heavy metal content, now we're talking about greater access and equity for people all across the income spectrum that might want to purchase sustainable food.
