UN expert Bernard Lehmann in an interview

Bernard Lehmann, last week you were in New York to address the UN on the global food crisis. How is the situation?

War is just the last straw that broke the camel’s back. We had a food crisis before that. We have very sensitive just-in-time systems for eating, Welthungerhilfe supplied 153 million people even before the war. You have to ask yourself: is this normal at normal times?

Times weren’t normal. We had the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, 800 million people suffered from lack of access to food. When the virus came, that became 1 billion. Day laborers have lost their jobs and with them the money to buy food. Hunger is a question of poverty, increasingly also one of the climate. Statistically, hunger has been increasing again since 2017, during which time dry periods have also become more frequent. Then came the war, Ukraine could no longer supply wheat. It was a cascade.

Now Ukraine can deliver again. A deal with Russia that the UN negotiated should enable the export of 20 million tons of grain. How important is that?

We calculate that 47 million people are missing grain because that from Ukraine was blocked. This number will decrease if the deal holds.

Many doubt the deal will hold.

i am optimistic Ukraine will stick to the deal because it needs to get rid of stored grain to make room for the new crop. Russia is also exporting again. Western buyers have long stayed away from Russia for fear of violating sanctions. Now prices have fallen and prices are a good signal for assessing the situation. I assume that two thirds of the harvest will come out of Ukraine this year. But the grain is delayed. In countries that depend on it, especially in East and Central Africa, people have been hungry.

The UN says: 830 million people “suffer from hunger or malnutrition”. What does that mean?

With 830 million people, at least one member of the family is still hungry when they go to bed. These are often children who remain small and become susceptible to illnesses. Around 345 million are at acute risk and are already showing signs of damage to their health. 50 million people live on the brink of starvation. Feeding them saves them from death.

The UN helps these people with the World Food Program. What can Switzerland do?

She can pay. In a crisis, that’s the only short-term answer. As soon as the grain flows out of Ukraine, the UN will buy it. For this she needs money, which she is now asking her member states for. There was a proposal for this in Parliament, but the first preliminary advisory commission rejected it.

Will the West continue to live in abundance?

Yes. There would actually be enough to eat for everyone, enough is sown and harvested. But we waste food: we “waste” it, it’s turned into gas and fuel. 60 percent of the grain produced in the world does not feed humans but is fed to animals for meat. You can correct that.

It is politically unpopular to call for no meat.

You don’t have to dictate that, the market will do it. The farmers will produce more bread wheat and less fodder wheat, then the fodder for pigs will be more expensive, there will be fewer pigs, i.e. fewer cutlets. I recently spoke to a farmer who is already speculating a round further: He will grow feed wheat, he told me. He assumes that feed wheat will become scarce.

Even if the market plays short-term: The crises are now converging. Climate, biodiversity, nutrition. What is the solution?

We don’t use one planet for food, but two – and still there is hunger. To solve that, we need a transformation of the whole system.

This is very much.

Agroecology offers approaches that the UN has approved. This means, for example: nourishing the soil, not just the plant. When soil is a living thing, it makes plants more resistant to disease. We have to keep useful insects alive and promote them, or else: address questions of market power. We need to move away from a system that focuses solely on increasing production.

War tends to lead back there. In Switzerland, farmers want to grow wheat again on organic land.

That does not help. Switzerland has a very small agricultural area per capita, and yet it is able to support itself 50 percent. We run at high speed in agriculture, which leads to deficits in biodiversity. When you plant a carrot, there is a lot of life around the carrot, in the soil, on insects. If you kill this life, the carrot will lie on the field like a patient on an IV drip.

You recently drew lessons from this crisis at the UN. You said that nutrition requires “resilience”.

You can think of it like a pendulum clock, then resilience is the science of the question: how far can the pendulum swing before someone goes hungry? It is the ability to escape from an external shock without much damage.

That failed in Ethiopia and Sudan. How do these countries become resilient?

Cameroon could be an example. There they started to produce more of what they eat themselves. And less of what is sold. This makes nutrition safer, but is less efficient in purely economic terms. This loss is an insurance premium.

Does the climate even allow for more local cultivation in the south? Ethiopia is suffering from the worst drought in decades.

Farming can be re-established in dry areas. There are grassland systems that handle it very well, for example in Mongolia. But many experts are shocked at how quickly global warming is making conditions worse. I know a rainmaker on the Ivory Coast, his job was: He predicted rain and when it came, he was paid. He wrote me that his job was dead. It’s just raining more unpredictably and less and less often.

How do you solve this?

It will need irrigation systems. They are also in the process of planting a green belt across the continent to contain the desert. This can also help for nutrition because you allow moisture to develop there, up to clouds and rain.

Today you advocate local cultivation. You have always been a fan of agricultural trade.

It wouldn’t work without it.

Many say: the time of free trade is over.

The world is riskier than we thought. I was naive, I’ll admit that. We have to be more careful. Create buffers, fill storage. Anyone who imports food has to diversify their portfolio of suppliers. But the world’s population lives very unequally distributed: There are countries like Ukraine, with 40 million people, but almost as much area as Germany, Spain and France combined. So it’s only logical that you use the good soil there and exchange what you harvest.

As Director of Agriculture at the federal government, you campaigned for the opening of the market. Would you do that again?

When I started in Bern, we were negotiating with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The representative of Russia said at the time: You have to cut down pigs, we want to deliver pigs. It didn’t come to a deal. how about today That’s difficult to estimate. Let’s say: It would have been a risk agreement, but not other agreements.

The war has put “organic” up for debate again. The boss of the chemical company Syngenta says: People in Africa are starving because we are eating more and more “organic”. What do you say?

One of the best journals in the world, the science magazine “Nature”, published a study from Switzerland on this question four years ago, by the Research Institute for Organic Farming. The authors were able to show that there was still room in the world for more “organic”. Realistically, 50 percent is very possible. If you compare the yields, you also have to take into account that if conventional agriculture has to save on fertilizers and pesticides, their yields will fluctuate. Conventional farming has no future that is conventional.

Not even in the south? Where people are starving today, there has never been a potent, conventional agriculture. Many countries have not experienced a green revolution.

I was in villages on the Ivory Coast, where a trader comes on Monday morning and unloads the chemicals. Then the farmers spray entire fields, and women who used to pull the weeds lose their jobs. Sub-Saharan Africa is in full swing of the green revolution, countries are becoming dependent on mechanics and chemistry. Biodiversity is being lost and the money is draining away.

We did it too.

I recently gave a lecture on agroecology at an agricultural college in Cameroon. I was also told there: “Now that we see opportunities, you come and say: Watch out.” Of course that’s true. But the dose makes the poison, and when the water in the village is polluted, nobody gets healthier. I told the students: Don’t make the same mistakes we made.