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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Environment
Oliver Milman

Why our broken food system remains a climate disaster: ‘broiling the planet to stuff our faces’

Farmers fumigating a field of strawberries
Farmers fumigate a strawberry crop in Sibate, Colombia, in 2022. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/AFP via Getty Images

Ridding ourselves of fossil fuels has been a tortuously ponderous process and, in the current political era, one that can seem to be in full retreat. But we do have the tools to run our cities, vehicles and industries on clean energy and even through the murk of vested interest, the contours of a post-fossil world are becoming clearer.

Our system of producing food, though, is in a relative stone age when it comes to the climate crisis. We continue to raze vast tracts of carbon-rich forests for crop and grazing land thereby creating, by some estimates, as much as a third of all global planet-heating emissions.

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