I never use AI for my writing. I have no AI subscription. I often look into the free Google AI response to my queries though. I always go to the source and quite often they are flawed or the AI didn’t get the actual meaning. For this post, I made the simple query:

Why does capitalism drive economic growth?

Google’s AI came back with the following response:

1. Profit Motive: Companies work hard to earn more money than they spend, which encourages them to produce more goods and services.

2. Competition: Rival businesses try to beat each other by lowering prices or making better products, pushing overall market quality up.

3. Innovation: Businesses spend money on new technologies and research to get an edge over competitors, increasing overall productivity.

4. Reinvestment: Profits are regularly put back into the business to expand factories, hire workers, and build more goods.

5. Private Property: People own their assets and keep their earnings, which gives them a direct stake in making their work and investments succeed.

I used the AI function to get a kind of average view (which I suppose is what AI delivers?) as a starting point for discussion. It is not what I would have written myself, but not totally off the mark.

Point 2 reflects a rather romantic view of competition. There are obviously some markets where quality is the key competitive advantage, but I don’t believe that competition primarily is pushing quality upwards. More often it pushes prices down or make cosmetic changes to products to become more appealing. Sometimes, marketing power gives the market leader the upper hand, regardless of any factual difference to competitors, or big companies just buy smaller ones. Still, clearly competition drives growth.

On point 3, innovation is not always and perhaps not even primarily about increasing productivity (and productivity is actually a nebulous word), it is more often about making new products.

What is totally lacking in the response from Google AI is rent. Rent is an essential part of capitalism. Some even claim that rent is the ur-capitalism from which all other forms originate. In his recent book The alibi of capital, Timothy Mitchell, claims that not only merchant capitalism was a direct offshoot of rentierism, but even the industrial capitalism of 19^th century was driven by rentiers rather than industrialists, factories and steam engines being new tools for the extraction of rent. To a large extent that coincides with the historian Fernand Braudel´s view that finance is the real realm of capitalism. While I differ from Mitchell and Braudel, rent is still a very essential part of capitalism.

One could of course agree that rent is an essential part of capitalism, but still maintain that rent is not driving growth. But rent has many shapes and influence all actors. The AI response above is based on companies or individuals being independent economic actors. Point 5 says: “People own their assets and keep their earnings”. But in reality they are not independent economic actors and most of them don´t really own their assets. On the contrary, even the rich mostly have a lot of debt. Banks, shareholders and other rentiers expect rent from the companies. This means that in order to satisfy the companies own need of capital, they also have to deliver a surplus to the rentiers. The same goes for workers, aka consumers. They need to earn more than they consume as they also have to pay mortgages and other loans. All this rent is based on growth. If there was no growth, it is arithmetically impossible that creditors could get their rent, without the population at large would be continually impoverished. The same goes for companies, they need to grow in order to pay interest to the bank and dividends to shareholders. Thus, rent is an important force for driving growth.

One should also note that the AI response assumes a market economy as all the factors and in particular 2 and 3 are predicated on the existence of market, even if the answer doesn’t say so.

I am well aware of that some maintain that there is a big difference between “a market economy” and a “capitalist economy”. I concede that there is some theoretical difference, but that a market economy will, more or less inevitably, develop into a capitalist economy unless there are rigid regulations preventing inherent tendencies in a market economy, such as the accumulation of capital. Such a market economy will be so heavily regulated, that it hardly deserves to be called a market economy. The existence of markets doesn’t make an economy a market economy as little as the existence of a state makes the economy a socialist economy. Before capitalism, essentially all markets (at least in Europe) were heavily regulated and circumscribed, and societies were not market economies. I have failed to identify any pre-capitalist economy that could qualify as a market economy.

Why do I care?

The main reason is that I have (almost) completed the manuscript (in Swedish) for my coming book, The weight of money. That book is about biophysical economics and the material footprint of “the economy”, aka the capitalist market economy.

In the process of writing, I notice that quite many writers and opinion makers don’t see the six steps below.

1. Human economies are fundamentally a kind of metabolism that use nature resources, energy and human labour to produce things, infrastructure and services.

2. This is also the case of the modern capitalist economy. Despite all talk about an information economy or a service economy, the global economy is still centred around material stuff. The increasing services, information and communication are needed to manage an ever more complex system. Global industrial output grows even quicker than the economy at large.

3. Contrary to most historical economies, the capitalist economy drives economic growth (see above), i.e. an increasing throughput of energy, materials and labour.

4. The capitalist economy also needs this growth in order to continue operation.

5. As perpetual economic growth is impossible, capitalism is not long term sustainable.

6. A no-growth, stationary or degrowth economy is thus not compatible with capitalism.

If point 3 is correct, in my view, point 4 must also be correct, at least in so far that the drivers of point 3 are essential features of capitalism. Take those away, and you have “abolished” capitalism. Growth is driven by competition, accumulation of capital and rents. In addition, capitalism and the market creates and support an individualistic mind-set, where humans interact through transactions instead of relations, which supports the underlying growth tendencies of capitalism and disregards the resultant externalities.

I am well aware of that economic growth has brought with it a lot of good stuff. While it might not be growth per se that has given us antibiotics or vaccines, but the increasing division of labour associated with economic growth has made advances in science more likely. And, clearly, economic growth has contributed to making those possible and accessible for billions. The same goes for food, where a growing economy also means more food – and more people (which is probably not such a good thing from a system’s perspective). The fact that growth enabled a lot of good things is just another side of that growth cause a lot of harm and destruction, because of the metabolic process. You simply can’t avoid taking the bad with the good. Economists are well aware of the concept of decreasing marginal returns. But they seem to be unable to apply that concept to the economy at large and to economic growth. Just because some economic growth has had very high utility and brought wellbeing, doesn’t mean that perpetual growth will continue to deliver satisfactory results.

In any case, my point above is that continual growth is not possible and that capitalism is not compatible with a stationary or shrinking economy. But equally important is that growth in an inherent property of capitalism. Therefore, initiatives that seek to abolish growth as a societal objective are mostly missing the point. Also, to replace the GDP with other measures, as often suggested, is perhaps good, but it will not change the workings of the economy. That also apply to other appealing new economic models such as the doughnut economy. To picture the economy as a doughnut or as in my graph above, doesn’t change the economy, at most it gives us a better perspective.

Now, having concluded that capitalism is dependent on growth and the growth is impossible in the long run, is the plan then to abolish capitalism?

Next essay...

Livestock emissions

What does the strategy say?

It says that the measurement and assessment of methane should take into account the biogenic nature of ruminant methane as well as actual livestock emissions caused by various management strategies, as opposed to the standard emission factors mostly used. It also says that the Commission will asses the inclusion of livestock emissions in the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulations. It will promote various emission-reducing technologies.

Many environmental organisations have criticised this. The European Environmental Bureau says:

“The only special treatment methane emissions should be getting is priority reduction. We cannot allow misleading industry-driven narratives to enter policymaking and stand in the way of tackling the climate crisis. “

It is easy to understand many of those that are upset. After all, they have been told that every day a cow is alive, or every kg of meat or litre of milk that is consumed will make the world a bit warmer. That is what the prevailing metric of GWP-100 (or GWP-20), supposedly, tells us. But the GWP-100 metric doesn’t demonstrate that. It does calculate the warming caused by an additional cow, or an additional kg of meat etc. which is a very different story. When applying the GWP-100 metric in lifecycle assessment this nuance is lost.

The methane emissions from the EU livestock herd has diminished continually for decades. Considering the short time methane exists in the atmosphere, this reduction amounts to a cooling of the temperature (see graph), quite contrary to what the GWP-100 would let us believe.

To work out a better way of presenting the effect of changes in methane emissions should be welcomed also by those wanting to abolish livestock production all together as it presents methane reduction as a real cooling opportunity, corresponding to negative emissions of CO2. The GWP-100 metric exaggerates the climate impact of constant methane emissions, but it also understates the climate impact of reduced emissions. Ultimately, the choice of metric is not based on science, but it is a political choice.

Having said that, the methane story is far too complex to be reduced to any single metric. The biogenic nature of methane does play a role here as methane is a by-product from the break down of organic matter. The driver is this not the cow or the sheep, but microorganisms. And they will break down organic matter, regardless if they are in the rumen of a cow, in termites, or free-living. And there is absolutely no logic that the carbon dioxide emitted by living organisms is not counted as emission while methane is. There are many other reasons for why the application of the concept of carbon dioxide equivalence is far too simplistic and should not be the basis for methane policies. I have written extensively on methane for years, the latest summary is The Methane ruminations.

In line with that: to use feed additives to reduce the natural production of methane in ruminants is simply a bad idea, with high cost and uncertain long term effects. After all, there must be some evolutionary reasons for why the rumen has so many methanogenic archaea. If not, there would certainly already exist non-methane producing sheep, goats or cows, as methane constitutes en energy loss for the ruminant. To promote methane reducing feed additives is just another step towards factory farming. The ultimate step is obviously to keep all livestock indoors and suck the methane out of the air of the barn, a technology already existing, or putting a gas mask on the cows, also in progress.

As for the other major emission from livestock, nitrous oxide, I believe it is very good if the agriculture sector, in the EU and elsewhere, will reduce or abolish the use of standard IPCC-emission factors in favour of measures based on real farm data from the EU. The nitrous oxide emissions from grazing livestock is mostly very much lower than the IPCC standard emission factors. But also for nitrous oxide the story is more complex than simple carbon dioxide equivalence.

Because of these complications, I don’t think it is a good idea to include agriculture emissions, other than those derived from fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilisers, into the EU Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulations.

In the end, a lopsided, narrow climate focus on livestock will always favour chicken over cattle and favour the most industrial modes of livestock production. This was well demonstrated by the recent study showing that organic eggs have double the emissions compared with conventional cage eggs, in the UK. Therefore, those groups using the climate as the main argument against livestock are “useful idiots” for both the fossil fuel industry and industrial agriculture.

EU subsidies for livestock

Some claim that the EU directs a disproportionate share of the farm support to animal production. One can read that 80 percent of the CAP subsidies go to livestock farming or that beef get 580 times more support than pulses. While those figures, perhaps, are correct in a very narrow perspective, they misrepresent the policies. Most of the CAP support is area based and is paid for the land regardless of what is produced there. One can criticise this from a number of perspectives, such as the fact that big farms get the lion share of the support, and that the support is capitalised in higher land prices, favouring land-owners and banks.

Livestock get a lot of the area support as large areas are used to produce feed. Having said that, how to calculate how big area is used for feed is not simple, as many crops are multiple use crops and many crops are processed and split into one feed and one food component or one biofuel and one feed component. For example, wheat is is used for food, for feed and for biofuel. But both the food wheat and the biofuel wheat have by-products which are used for feed. The same goes for oil seeds. In addition, there is a difference between what is grown for feed and what is used for feed. Most specialised crop growers sow wheat or pulses for the best paying market – the food market. But in many cases the quality will not be good enough for the food industry and the crop can be used for feed instead.

The comparison of the support to beef and pulses is also just an effect of the area payments. As pulses are not grown much, the total support will obviously be low – despite the fact that most EU member states have special support to pulses giving them higher support than other crops. It is further a irrelevant comparison as most of the pulses, almost 2/3, are used as feed!

In addition, a large share of the CAP support is for environmental schemes, and one of the most common environmental schemes is support for maintenance of semi-natural grasslands by grazing livestock. Unfortunately there is no reliable EU-total figure for how much support goes to that, but in Sweden it amounts to more than ten percent of all CAP support. It is a bit “unfair” to count that as support for livestock as it is a support for bio-diversity using livestock grazing as a method.

I certainly agree that factory farms should not get any EU support for both moral and economic reason – they are also already profitable without the support.

Environmental and animal welfare groups don’t seem to understand that reduced area payments will harm the extensive production, e.g. grass based ruminants, a lot more than the intensive factory farms, as they use a lot more land. Intensive producers that buy in feed, e.g. the typical factory farm, will be marginally impacted by reduced area payments as the prices of major feed crops are set in the world market and are not much influenced by the EU subsidy regime. Quite a similar ball game as with emissions.

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How the EU support should look like is of course a relevant thing to discuss. Perhaps even more relevant is if and why the EU should have a farm support at all. But that is for another time. But not soon, as I now plan to write about other topics.

On the one hand, I am glad that the unnuanced “less meat is good, no meat is best” is absent from the strategy, because it is simply not correct (less meat might be correct, though). On the other hand, the strategy doesn’t address the shortcomings and the many negative developments of the sector (I addressed these in part 1 and 2 and will not repeat them here) in a comprehensive way. While some of the negative aspects are mentioned in the strategy, the measures proposed are mostly on a technical level, which doesn’t address the systemic failures of the sector and the fact that it has moved in the wrong direction over time, as a result of market pressures, technological changes and policies.

Regardless of the general direction, I believe it is pertinent to ask if this is a strategy at al. In my previous work as an international consultant, I have worked quite a lot with strategic planning and the development of strategies, and I fail to understand what is the strategy in this. Even though I am less impressed by goal-setting and systematic planning today, than I was twenty years ago, I believe that for a strategy to have any real meaning on the EU level, it must be a bit SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). It must also recognise conflicts and trade-offs.

The strategy is filled of typical policy jargon with sentences such as “The opportunity to turn rural vulnerabilities into a tangible long-term asset is greater than ever.” And how am I to interpret a sentence like: “Creating economically attractive and liveable rural areas will help retain and attract people, thereby contributing to the long-term vitality of these regions.” It sounds sooooo very nice and – still – contains nothing but tautologies.

The fourth theme in the strategy summarize the strategy, or the lack of strategy, well: “A livestock sector fit for all farms and regions”. It is good that the strategy underlines how different the conditions are, but the strategy is built on Business as Usual, and it doesn’t question the concentration of livestock or the major drivers of it. It does set out to abolish cages for hens and pens and crates for pigs – which is welcomed. That is mainly a result of intensive public campaigning, but apart from that, the story is mainly about more competitiveness, better feed efficiency etc. Even under the heading resilience most of the actions are about disease management. Huge disease outbreaks, and the risks associated with them, are clearly much more common and devastating when huge number of animals are confined in small spaces and when such factories (as most of them are not growing their own feed, there is no reason to call them farms) are clustered in a smaller number of regions. As they are on the EU.

There is some lip service paid to the benefits of organic farming, mountain farming, grazing and other nice ways of keeping livestock. And there are some ideas about special support directed to them and “territorial product branding”. It talks about ”local value chains anchored in rural communities”. It sounds (almost) like something I could have written myself. But as long as you don’t challenge the dominating industrial paradigm, such efforts will be futile or at least only relevant in a premium market context. The strategy proposes stronger profile and promotion of “EU origin” and the introduction of some, vaguely defined, European Excellence scheme, which essentially will undermine the efforts to differentiate territorial brands as well as other premium schemes such as organic, or free-range pigs.

One of the few interesting proposal in the strategy is that the EU will insist on equivalent livestock standards for imports. On the one hand, it seems like a given. On the other hand, it does brake with the free trade logic that is a fundament of the EU.* We can see how the EU, gradually, introduces more and more trade restriction based on the realisation that higher standards incur costs for European producers and it is not “fair” that they have to compete with others not having similar costs. This is for instance demonstrated in the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, often called a carbon tariff. In principle, I have nothing against this, but having first hand experience of it from the organic sector, where the EU now insists that all standards of the EU organic regulation must be complied with, I anticipate a bureaucratic nightmare.

It also raises the questions of implementation. It is well known that many of the EU animal welfare requirements are not fully implemented within the EU, still producers can continue to sell. When it comes to imports you will have a two step. First, is that the exporting country must have a similar regulation as the EU and that they also have enforced the regulation. Failure of enforcement will mean that the import is blocked. But failure of enforcement of the EU animal welfare standards within the EU rarely cause some investigations and even more seldom any particular action. More than 30 years after the EU first banned routine tail docking (the painful removal of tails, typically without anesthetics) on piglets, only Finland and Sweden comply with the law.

The protein plan

At the same time as the livestock strategy was launched, a protein action plan was presented. It is also very thin. Increasing the production of protein crops in the EU has been quite high on the agenda for decades (see for instance here). It falls short of a proper analysis of why the EU imports so much protein crops. The reason is simply that it, for several reasons, the growing of protein crops, regardless if they are for food or feed, is not profitable in the EU compared to major producers. The landless factory farms of chicken and pigs and the food industry will simply buy where it is cheap. It is the logic of the free trade logic that is the foundation of the whole EU project.

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The low profitability of protein crops is caused by low yields and low prices. With the inflated land prices in most parts of the European Union, a low yield per hectare is a drag. The average yield of dry pulses in the EU is 2.5 tons per hectare. If you pay a rent of €250 per hectare the rent corresponds to €0.1 per kg, which is a lot when prices are in the range of €0.3-€0.4 per kg. The land prices and rents in, for example, Canada (which is a major exporter of pulses) are much lower. In turn, the European agriculture land prices are inflated as a result of the Common Agriculture Policy, as most of it is made up of area payments. In the soy producing areas of Brazil and Argentina, land is rented, bought and sold in “soy currency”.

In this situation, it is pointless to incentivize the demand of protein crops as suggested by the plan. There are some good points in the plan, though, such as to strengthen the role of grasslands, to encourage livestock extensify their production and incentivise farmers combining crop production and livestock.

In the final post about the strategy, I will address some common misunderstandings about the EU agriculture policy as well as the turn (?) in the position re methane in the strategy.

* I am not a proponent of free trade. But I do find it contradictory and hypocritical to on the one hand promote free trade, and on the other hand insist on rules and conditions installing technical barriers to trade. Ultimately, the whole rationale for free trade is the notion of comparative advantages and most of them are found in different regulations, policies and cultures.

The overproduction of grain and oil seeds in the world, mainly driven by artificial fertilisers, has made it cheap and “efficient”, from an economic perspective, to feed animals with grain and oil seed cakes (predominantly soy). The overproduction of grain has led to a huge expansion of the production – and consumption – of chicken and pigs, in the EU and globally, as chicken and pigs are much better converters of grain and soy than cattle. Despite that beef mostly will be the focus of the meat debate, global per capita beef consumption has been flat for 60-70 years, while the per capita consumption of chicken has increased almost 6 times and pork has doubled. It is worth noting that the production of plants has increased quicker than the production of animals and that the share of animal product in diets is somewhat smaller now than 1961. The common view of an enormous proportional increase in animal foods is thus mistaken, even if it is true for China.

Artificial fertilisers also made it possible to decouple land and livestock so that some farms and regions in the world grow crops and other farms and regions have much more livestock than they can feed. In that way, fertilisers are an essential component of what can be called industrial agriculture

Even feed that is more or less “for free” can’t compete with that. Farmers in Sweden has abandoned 90 percent of the semi-natural grasslands despite the fact that the grass grows without fertilisers or irrigation. It is simply more profitable to raise beef cattle in feedlots style indoors. The cost of fencing, movement of animals, daily oversight and provision of drinking water is higher than having animals confined and fed with harvested feed. The abandonment of semi-natural grasslands is meanwhile one of the biggest threat to bio-diversity in the EU, something that the EU Livestock strategy rightly points out.

The specialised livestock production in Europe was stimulated by the influx of cheap grains from North America, Australia and Russia already in the late 19^th century. It made it profitable to buy grains and convert it into pork (which is also the reason for why pork and bacon became major export commodities from the US). That is also the reason for why almost all centres of industrial livestock are close to harbours in Europe (see map). After WWII, when most European countries introduced tariffs to boost its own production of grains, the import of oil seed cakes, which were not covered by tariffs, increased rapidly. This also coincided with the development of vegetable oils for human consumption.

After WWII, the chicken industry provided a blueprint for the further industrialisation of livestock. The capital-intensive model is built on the use of bought-in inputs: feeds, medicines, technologies and breeding stock as well as external knowledge. Producers all over the world use the same breeds, feed and technology. The commodification of animal production converts living, sentient beings into production units or commodities. Through the commodification of animals, their welfare and their ability to exercise their natural behaviours have become externalities - side factors of production - just as the landscape in plant production. The notion of landscape, place or culture in our foods has totally lost any meaning under these conditions, which is both a prerequisite for and a result of commodity farming.

When farming was still coupled to and dependent of local ecosystems, people and landscapes, the primary role of livestock was to utilise ecological niches in the landscape and human society without eating things that human could eat. Having said that, smaller quantities of grain, potatoes and alike were used as a top up for dairy cows, laying hens or the fattening of pigs, when feasible. Cattle, sheep, camels, goats and other herbivores ate mainly grass, leaves, shrubs and crop residues (straw, chaff etc.). They provided multiple services apart from milk and meat; drought power, skin and leather, wool, hair, storage of wealth and much more. Pigs, hens and other poultry got scraps and fed themselves close to the farm on manure heaps, cropped fields and whatever was available. They can also graze to quite a large extent. Food waste and food industry by-products was meticulously recycled, mainly to pigs, at least in Europe.

The role of livestock varied quite a lot from purely pastoralist systems without any arable farming to very intensive plant based systems with a low share of livestock – but all agriculture system up until today had livestock to some extent, which is clearly an indicator of that it was ecologically efficient. Most systems had a considerable share of animals. This was certainly the case in Sweden which had the same number of cattle 1870 as today, and many more sheep and goats, while the population has increased with more than 150 percent. Pigs have played a big role in traditional agriculture in many parts of Asia and the Pacific.

Looking from a pure efficiency perspective, animal foods seems like a waste. For each person on the planet, about 1500 kcal of plants is used daily to feed animals. In return we get just some 500 kcal per capita per day in the form of animal foodstuffs. The 1000 kcal that is “lost” in this transformation would be enough to feed another 3 billion people. Isn’t it a no-brainer that we rather should eat plants than animals? It is, however, important to consider the wider value of animal products in the diet. On a calorific basis they are “wasteful”, less so for protein. 40% of all dietary protein comes from animals (34% from livestock and 6% from fish and seafood). In addition, animal protein has a much higher bio-availability than vegetable protein and a better composition of amino acids. For sure, you can combine vegetable proteins and make them more complete (but still less bioavailable) – and that is what animals do for us. Ruminants that eat predominantly grass will have an “indefinite” protein conversion ratio as virtually no human edible protein is used (as for out cows at Sunnansjö).

There are important differences between production systems and species, global averages are meaningless. For example, because they rely on grazing and forages, cattle need, in average, only 0.6 kg of protein from human edible feed to produce 1 kg of protein in milk and meat. For backyard chicken and pigs only 0.1 kg of human edible protein is used to produce 1 kg of human edible protein while for industrial systems between between 2.9 and 5.2 kg of human-edible protein is used per kg of protein, according to the most authoritative global study. My own research from Sweden shows a similar pattern, although there are hardly any backyard pigs or chicken left. By and large, a more intensive production with higher quality feed leads to quicker growth and less feed per kg animal food, but a lower protein conversion ratio. Milk and eggs are superior to meat when it comes to feed conversion.

Apart from protein, animal food also provide other much needed nutrients. Around 45% of all dietary fat comes from animals and many of those fatty acids are unique for animal fat. There is no waste at all in fat feed conversion, on the contrary it is a net gain as animals get very little fat in their diets. On a global level, dietary fat is a scarce and problematic product. Animal products are also important sources of iron, vitamin B12 and vitamin A as well as calcium.

Even from a land use perspective, one can’t just dismiss livestock as inefficient. For sure, grazing cattle, sheep, goats, reindeer and camels produce very little food from big areas (while I am sure that can be increased in many cases, I don’t trust exaggerated claims on how much you can produce with better management). But as even the EU livestock strategy points out, grazing livestock are essential for bio-diversity, for landscape and recreation. They produce positive externalities in economyspeak, while arable farming, regardless of whether it produces feed or food, have negative externalities. In addition, part of the “inefficiency” of grazing livestock is that the animals consume a modest share of the total net primary production in the fields compared to arable farming where the whole production is oriented to the species that we want to produce, and all other species are suppressed. Roughly half of what grazing livestock eat is also almost instantly returned to the fields where it becomes feed for myriads of organisms. Grazing livestock simply leaves a lot more energy and habitats to other organisms. Grass based ruminant farming, in most cases, despite a very high feed use and land use, is simply one of the most sustainable farming systems there are.

Of course there are other environmental and climate issues associated with livestock production. By and large one can divide them in three categories: 1) the impact from feed production, 2) the impact of grazing and 3) the impact of the animals metabolism.

1) For feed production on arable land there are no special environmental or climate effects of feed crops compared to food crops, and the distinction between them is blurred as many crops are dual purpose and are processed into fractions used as feed or food (e.g, oil seeds where the oil is used for food and the seed cake is used for feed). In general, arable farming is not good for biodiversity or the soil itself and most arable farming use huge quantities of chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Pesticides are used even more in typical food crops such as vegetables, fruit and potatoes than in feed crops. Some feed crops, in particular legume rich perennial leys, are very good in a crop rotation are actually building soil compared to the annual arable crops.

2) Grazing is a benign form of agriculture production if done right and grasslands are important habitats for a lot of wild life (see above). Grasslands also store considerable quantities of carbon, quite safely underground. The main problem with grazing is if other valuable landscapes are converted to grazing, which they are, especially in the tropics. But globally, grassland areas have not increased for a long time and in Europe, abandonment is the real problem as the EU livestock strategy rightly points out. Also, if grasslands are plowed or “improved” by the use of pesticides and high-yielding grasses, many of the benefits disappear.

3) Clearly, industrial livestock cause local pollution of nitrate and ammonia as well as the spread of antibiotics, hormones and other medicines in the environment, noise, smell, dust and many other problems. Most of the alleged harm for the climate from livestock is from methane and nitrous oxide. The nitrous oxide can be traced back to the use of chemical fertilizers. Without them, the farming system would be in a much more balanced state as per number of animals, land and manure, and nitrous oxide emissions would be reduced drastically. A sustainable agri-food system with livestock in balance, would not emit more nitrous oxide than any other eco-system with animals. For methane the story is similar, but have even more aspects. In general, I believe the methane argument against ruminants has a number of serious flaws. I have collected most of the relevant perspectives in the Methane Ruminations.

I skip over the health aspects here, I don’t think the science is very clear, there is not even a proper definition of “red meat” or a mechanistic explanation of why it could cause disease. The suggested health risk of red meat is “noise” in the bigger picture.

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So, don’t “we” eat too much meat? Probably we* do, but it is not the right question to ask. The right question is, how do we manage agro-ecosystems in the best way? When we know that, the diet will follow, as it always did. To start the discussion in the consumption end, is to perpetuate the myth that it is the consumer that is driving agriculture developments. Also, it is based on a globalised food system where people are detached from the landscapes and the local agro-ecological systems. In the end, consumption of animal products will, and should, vary according to the local conditions.

Next post will – finally – discuss the EU livestock strategy.

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More in depth information (and references to everything stated here) in the following articles:

On land use

On feed use

On wild life and livestock

On the multiple functions of livestock

On climate impacts of livestock

On the health effects of red meat consumption

* It is a bit ironic that most of those saying that we should reduce meat consumption and most of those paying attention to the advise, already consume little meat, while those that probably should reduce their consumption, don’t care.

Predictably, there have been very different reactions on this. The European Environmental Bureau, said that:

”The Commission seems bent on painting a rosy picture of an industry dominated by Big Agri corporations who profit as they pollute. This is not a “Strategy” for farmed animals, the communities suffering from the pollution of industrial rearing, or for the farmers trying to rear animals ethically and sustainably. ”

Copa-Cogeca, the main EU farm lobby was a lot more positive:

”After years in which livestock was too often portrayed as part of the problem, the Commission now recognises its contribution to food security, rural vitality, the circular economy, and the production of high-quality proteins and renewable energy.”

The protein plan was criticised for having a strong focus on protein for feed. I was surprised by how little of the plan that was oriented to plant protein for food and how little action it prescribes there. I had thought that the Commission chose to launch these two together in order to placate the predictable critique of the “anti-livestock” lobby. But it seems to me that Big Ag pulled the longest straw here, also.

I will to cover the livestock strategy, and to some extent also the protein plan in two posts. In this first one I will focus on the status quo of the livestock sector and in the second discuss the policy proposals and their implications.

The Staff Working Document, accompanying the livestock strategy has a wealth of information. Having said that, I believe one should realise that the statistics have some weaknesses. The strategy rightly points out that the livestock sector is very diverse across livestock species and across regions. It is therefore pointless to make broad statements about “the EU livestock sector”.

In 2025, the European Union had 132 million pigs, 72 million bovine animals, 54 million sheep and 10 million goats, and a staggering 1.6 billion poultry birds, mainly chicken. Over the past two decades (2005-2025), bovine animals decreased by 10%, whereas domestic pigs dropped by 15%. The number of sheep and goats has seen an even more significant reduction of 26%. Poultry is the only exception, increasing 14% in the same period.

There are approximately 4.1 million farms with livestock in the EU. The share of farms with livestock decreased from 55.7% in 2010 to 41% in 2020. 6% of the farms concentrate more than 70% of the EU’s total livestock units (LSU)*, while 60% of the livestock farms have less than 5 LSU. Most animals are thus kept in large units while most livestock farms are very small, a factor that is not often realised but has to be taken into account when policies are developed.

The number of livestock farms decrease rapid, while the total LSU are more or less constant. This means that there is considerable consolidation in livestock farms (see chart 3 from the Staff working document).

The average livestock density it 0,75 LSU per hectare, a fairly reasonable density. But when looking into the rates for individual farms, for regions and for countries, a very different picture emerge. Noord-Brabant has 7.41 LSU/ha while Wien has just 0.01 LSU/ha. Netherlands has the highest density of the countries with 3.45 LSU/ha and Bulgaria the lowest with 0.23. Many farms, and in particular poultry farms buy in almost all their feed, meaning they have very high livestock density, and the trend is that more feed is bought in to the farms. If we focus on the 21,000 biggest pig and poultry operations they are concentrated in a few regions with Bretagne (FR), Aragon (ES) and Weser-Ems (DE) having more than 1000 such operations each. Noord-Brabant (NL), Cataluña (ES), Lombardia (IT), Castilla y Leòn (ES), Midtjylland (DK), Pays de Loire (FR), Veneto (IT) and Syddanmark (DK) also have many such operations.

In 2025, the EU produced approximately 42.7 million tonnes meat, this is projected to reduce by 3% over the next decade, with reductions in beef production by 10%, pig meat by 7%, and sheep and goat meat by 7%. Poultry meat is excepted to continue its increase by 5%. Ruminant meat constitutes below 17 percent of the production (Graph 7). The EU is a net exporter of all meats save sheep and goat meat. Pig meat is most important and the EU is the biggest pig meat exporter in the world.

The production of milk is still growing, but slowly, in the EU, despite a decline in the number of dairy cows. 162 million ton milk was produced in 2025, resulting in among others 11 million tons of cheese and 2.3 million tons of butter. Milk is thus a much more important production than beef, from the EU herd, both economically and nutritionally. More than half of the EU beef is a “by product” of the dairy production, e.g. originates from dairy calves or heifers and dairy cows. EU has also a big trade surplus of milk products estimated to EUR 18 billion 2025, more than all meats taken together. Egg production is also growing and is projected to increase by 5% the coming ten years.

4.6 percent of the bovines are organically reared, around 10 percent of the sheep and goats, while only 1.1 percent of the pigs. Looking at the consumption side, the share is much lower as the production in organic is lower. E.g the commission estimates that just 0,3% of all pig meat and chicken is organically produced. In general, the share of organic mainly reflect how, relatively, difficult it is to manage a livestock production organically compared to conventional. As chicken is the most industrial livestock species, it is very hard to produce organically, which is also reflected in the price of organic chicken, which keeps demand low.

The statistics about the housing systems show huge differences between species and type of production system. Larger production units and poultry and pig production in general keep animals indoors. 36 % of the hens are kept in cages (a surprisingly low share, I would have guessed much higher) while most sows are kept in crates during farrowing (birth and thereafter) and gestation. Most bovines are kept in “outdoor based system” (how this is defined is not clear to me). In general, the bigger units for all species, tend to keep animals indoor.

Despite the big importance of livestock in the farm sector, with approximately 40% of the total farm income (this is the direct income of livestock farms, in addition, farms producing feed for sale could also be seen as part of the livestock sector), the average profitability is low. But also here averages says little. Smaller, extensive livestock units and production based on grazing and transhumance (“pastoralism”) struggle to survive and many such farms are abandoned. Those surviving are dependent on the EU subsidies. Meanwhile large farms, and in particular pig and poultry farms are profitable. They are also the farms with highest capital investments and loans.

Extensive livestock production is highly dependent on subsidies. For non-dairy ruminants, direct payments (area payments and environmental payments) constitute 43% of an already low farm net value added. In pig and poultry (they are called granivores as they mainly eat grains) direct payment contribute just 6% of the farm net value added, for dairy it is 20%. Note that as pig and poultry operations often buy all or much feed, there are subsidies “hidden” in the production of feed in other farms.

One third of the habitats of EU interests are dependent on active agriculture management, primarily extensive grazing, but 84 percent of those habitats are in an unfavourable conservation status, mainly as a result of abandonment. In addition, there is also an increased risk of wild fires as a result of abandonment as flammable materials accumulate on the ground. Meanwhile, the intensive livestock production cause numerous environmental problems, such as foul smell, noise, heavy traffic, nitrate leakage and ammonia emissions. Feed production has also considerable environmental impacts. However, some feed, in particular lays (grass and herb mixes used for silage) and pulses can improve soils and reduce the use of fertilizers. Animal manure, if handled well and in the right amounts, will also be beneficial for the soils.

From the protein plan:

Animal products constitute important sources of several macro and micronutrients and provide around 64% of the protein supply in EU diets, with dairy being the most important source of protein. Notably, the share of protein from seeds, nuts and pulses, which often are fronted as important protein sources contributes only 4 percent together while cereals, despite having lower protein contents supply almost as much protein as dairy, 23 percent.

The EU livestock sector uses 74 million tonnes of protein as feed annually. About 26% is imported but given that the EU also exports the equivalent of 9% of protein in arable crop products or co-products, net reliance on protein imports is 15% of its total feed use (or about 13 million tonnes of protein). As the EU also export considerable quantities milk and meat, if one would include the protein embedded in those (the protein used to produce them) the negative protein trade balance would be much lower (I haven¨t done the math and neither has the Commission).

The import is mainly high-protein feeds such as soya in various forms, either whole beans processed in the EU or soy meal. Pig and poultry production is proportionally much more dependent on high protein feeds than beef and dairy. Nevertheless, as a result of the huge quantities of feed used by cattle, the dairy sector still consume considerable quantities (see figure 4 from the protein plan).

Note that one can’t make drastic conclusions regarding the protein efficiency based on these crude figures. First, the theoretically edible protein in grains and high-protein feeds is just theoretical, and not based on real world consumption patterns. People don’t eat more than a minor fraction of the wheat bran (which has a lot of protein) and they don’t eat rape seed cake or soya cake either. Second, the quality of some feed may not be on the level where it could be used as food. Third, plant proteins are not as valuable as animal proteins, because the latter has better bioavailability and amino acid profiles. Averages are also quite misleading as the variations are huge. Under many conditions, animal production is a net contributor of protein to the food system. The more intensive production, which is mostly portrayed as efficient or climate smart is mostly protein negative. I have discussed this in several articles, e.g.

and

In the next article I will discuss the analysis and proposals in the EU livestock strategy and some of the critique.

Since Lex Lindgren, dairy farms have increased in size, management systems have changed, e.g. with robot milking, and the bigger dairy farms are now in the plains where most land is arable as opposed to earlier when they were predominantly in mosaic landscapes with pastures, crop lands, lakes, wetlands and forests. There is now an intensive lobby to get rid of the right to graze for dairy cows. It is simply not doable for stables with 2,000 cows the argument goes, and the modern stables are so spacious and well ventilated that it much better for the cows to be indoors, protected from rain, sun, wind, flies and mosquitoes. The fact that pasture is not rich enough to support a milk yield of 14,000-15,000 litres per year is not so often spoken of, and neither is the fact that it is more work to organise grazing. Interestingly, on neither side of the debate there is much talk about grazing as the most basic cow behaviour. It is not only a matter of ingesting a certain amount of feed, or getting exercise. Grazing is much more, it is more or less the essence of being a cow.

Anyway, to the point. Astrid Lindgren is a red flag for proponents of industrial agriculture, in particular animal agriculture. Apart from Pippi, she also wrote several books where the landscape, people and animals of her youth, i.e. in the 1920-30s, were central, e.g. four books about the six Bullerby (“the noisy village”) children. In an article in a leading Swedish newspaper three representatives of industrial agriculture recently referred with scorn to organic farming as Bullerby dreams and claimed that organic was a return to a time when people starved. Obviously, representatives of organic agriculture responded and assured that they were not backward luddites.

A friend of ours, Tobias Nilsson called and discussed with my wife, Ann-Helen, if we should not defend Bullerby farming. Instead of trying to distance us from the farming system 100 years ago, we should point to all its merits – obviously not without also pointing to some weaknesses. Ann-Helen took the lead and the result was published in Aftonbladet with the title (in translation) Industrial farming is a story with no happy ending. The Swedish agriculture system of the 1930s was diverse and virtually every of the 400,000 farms had a cow or five, grew potatoes, kept laying hens and grew most of the feed to their animals and most of the food for the people. There were basically no tractors or combine harvesters, but there were many horse or oxen driven machines as well as thresher and other stationary machines (powered by electricity) in the farmsteads. Chemical fertilisers were in little use and pesticides even less. Grain yields were considerably lower but the total production of milk was actually much higher than today (despite half the population). Butter was exported and some oil seed cakes were imported, mainly to feed dairy cow. Not only were the farms spread out in the country, also dairies, mills, slaughterhouses and other essential infrastructure were. The system was robust and productive and produced sufficient food for the population.

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Many children grew up in Bullerby-style conditions, for the better and the worse. Around 40 percent of the work force was in agriculture, slightly more than in the industry. The share of income used for food was obviously a lot higher and people lived shorter, but not because they lacked food. The working conditions were not always so good, neither for the farmers nor the farm labourers.

I believe it is time to call the modernist bluff. It is true that industrial farming produce cheaper agriculture commodities. It is the main thing it is good at. That is at the expense of the environment, health and people. Ultimately, it is also not beneficial for farmers at large and certainly not for the majority of them that have to quit farming; because for every farmer getting bigger, there is one losing her livelihood. On a system’s level the effect of “efficiency” is just lower prices, which causes the farmer to invest more in order to bring costs down, which causes prices to drop and more farmer to quite, and so the treadmill goes on and on and on.

Industrial farming will not generate any children’s stories, it will only generate ugliness, destroyed environments and a continued emptying of the farmed landscape.

They know it, which is why they have to portray Bullerby farming or any equal simpler, small scale farming system as being inefficient and people being worked to death. This is why they portray organic farming as leading to starvation. But small scale agriculture is no less productive per area unit than bigger scale. It is obviously a lot less productive per man hour; the whole project of industrialisation of agriculture is to lower labour cost per unit produced and not the produce more per se. Organic agriculture is indeed less productive per area unit than conventional agriculture, but it is less dependent on external inputs and it is much more robust.

Small scale organic farms can produce food instead of commodities. It allows more people to be engaged in food production. That is the real dividing line. It is a nice story as opposed to the nightmare of industrial agriculture.

I just published a long review of the report in Swedish, and will not repeat/translate the article in English. It is hay-making time at the farm and I have a broke tractor to repair, so I will keep this rather short and just point to a few things. I will not comment their food and agriculture scenario. It is so simplistic that I wouldn’t know where to start.

The main objective of the report is a total equality between countries so that all countries will converge on 60,000 per capita gdp in 2100, as well as radically increased equality between people. In order to keep the temperature under 2 degrees they also envision a radical decarbonisation of the economy with a combination of energy transition, changes in consumption and reduced work, especially in the “material” part of the economy. The share of work spent on education, health and care should increase radically.

I appreciate a lot that the authors have understood that it is necessary to produce less. Most other scenarios look at the consumption side, but neglect that the real driver of emissions, the economy and consumption is the production. But they also note that all work entails emissions, so it is not enough to shift work, it is necessary to reduce total work and shift it to non-material sectors. That is the reason for the proposed 1000 hours per year of work*.

I also appreciate the wish to make the world more fair and equal. Billionaires and millionaires will be eradicated, by very heavy taxation. Nema problema, I am not convinced by several details in the report, however. And clearly, the programme would meat a lot of resistance from the global elite, including from the affluent middle class in rich countries as they would have to share their wealth.

Meanwhile. their projection of a total global GDP growth of 400 percent assume a very rapid increase in labour productivity. The authors point to historical data to make such a productivity growth and work reduction plausible, but I am not at al convinced. Historically, labour productivity growth in the sectors agriculture, mining and manufacturing has been very high – but it was accomplished with ever increasing input of energy and other resources. Services have not showed any remarkable labour productivity gains. When economist say that the service sector is very productive, they just mean that they (the economists themselves as well as other service providers) can charge a lot, not that they produce more per hour worked. The education, health and care sectors, which are supposed to take an increasing share of all work, are hard to make more productive. Therefore, I really question this equation of lower emissions and continued growth. Apart from the fact that energy and material resources are increasingly getting scarcer and scarcer.

I am also not convinced by their focus on reduced work hours, both for salaried labour and domestic work. Admittedly, I come from a long line of workaholics, but I don’t expect everybody to work like me. Still, it is hard to understand why it should be a goal that total average annual work should be 1,700 hours per person.* This means that just 27 of our time awake would be spent on labour and domestic work. They project that domestic work also will reduce (well, as they assume - no objection from my side - equal share of work it will actually increase for men and decrease a lot for women), but if people work less for a salary, it seems odd that they would also spend less time on domestic work. A couple where each partner work 20 hours per week (or in their version 25 hours per week and 12 weeks (!) of vacation) could easily take care of their children (perhaps they still want the send their kids some hours per day for “socialisation”). They could also cook a lot more, perhaps grow some of their food, repair or sow clothes and make all sorts of DIY-stuff. In addition, when salary gaps are much smaller – and taxes much higher (which is part of the plan), it will be relatively, much costlier to hire helpers or artisans to do things you could do yourself.

My objection is not only calculation about time spent. It is also about the view of domestic work that underpins the projections. It seems to me that many intellectuals see domestic work as meaningless chores and not as things that can be fulfilling. In the book, This Life, the philosopher Martin Hägglund pose “spiritual freedom” as the antithesis to necessary work, which includes all things that we need to do. For me that is a strange view. Growing food, cooking, playing with children, eating, taking care of a sick friend, spouse or a relative, mending a pair of jeans or cleaning the gutters are all meaningful. They are in no way precluding spiritual freedom, unless you define freedom as being not bound by anything or to anybody. But such a vision of freedom is just a nicer word for individualism or egoism.

In my view, what is normally seen as domestic work is at the core of being human. If anything, we should expand what we see as domestic work to incorporate also our care for the rest of the living. Food and agriculture as well as our relation to animals, trees, birds and bugs sit much better within the domestic framework (and the economy of care) than in a labour/market economy framework.

*

One thing that strikes me as odd in the report is that they assume that the capitalist market economy will continue. It is even an important part of their solution as they envision a Global Justice Fund which will amass ten percent of all capital in the world and the rent will be used to decrease differences. But that assumes that capital will also in the future generate exorbitant rents. Which basically means that they leave the inequality machine unimpaired.

The Global Justice Report have different scenarios. What I comment is their main and proposed scenario, Sustainable Convergence. There is, however, only one scenario which can keep the temperature within the 1.5 degree target. In that scenario the global average GDP is 15,000 euro instead of the 60,000 euro which is their main scenario. As the current global GDP is almost 25,000 euro per capital, that amounts to a shrinking economy (Timothée Parrique has written a long article about that, including a critique of how the authors define "degrowth”). Perhaps that is not politically realistic – but then the proposals in the Global Justice Report are also not politically realistic at al.

But, what is politically realistic can change very rapidly, especially when reality bites. I have written about that extensively, e.g. in my nine “collapse” post.

* The 1000 hours per year is calculated for the working share of the population in working age. As an average for all, it amounts to 850 hours per year, hence the figure 1,700 for total work including domestic work discussed below, and the basis for the graph.

On the one hand one could claim that organic agriculture has been very successful over the last 40 years, on the other hand, it is still just a niche.

On one hand, organic agriculture has been very innovative and developed a lot. On the other hand its standards have stymied innovation and new concepts are attracting innovative farmers.

On the one hand, the entry of organic products in mainstream markets was an important path for expansion, on the other hand, it also shaped organic agriculture, to the worse, after the supermarkets.

I will conclude with two visions for a path ahead.

A remarkable success

The success of organic agriculture in Europe has been remarkable. Key to this success has been the development of organic standards and certification, political support, sales in supermarkets and innovative farmers. We have a lot to be proud of. And the Nordic and Baltic countries have been in the forefront.

Denmark has the highest market share of organic products in the world. Visiting Denmark you will find a good range of organic products in all supermarkets. The city of Copenhagen serves 90 percent organic food in its school canteens and other public canteens. The new government wants to double the organic acreage. The inspection of organic farms is governmental and without cost. Already in the late 1980s a national public mark for organic was established. The organic sector has also been well organized in Organic Denmark, and it should have a lot of credit for the success. Also here, the government has been helpful with generous support to the sector, including to its organisation.

Estonia is number two in the European Union, in terms of organic area share with 22.5% of total farmland. The organic acreage in Lithuania grew 35 times between 2001 and 2024. I worked there there in end of the 1990s and early 2000, helping the sector in its initial steps.

In the market place, on an EU-wide level the market share for organic foods is in the range of 3-4 percent. In the biggest market, Germany, it is around 6.5 percent, According to Nic Lampkin, organic policy researcher since many years, with the current development some 16-18 percent of the EU agriculture area could be organic by 2030 instead of the official target of 25 percent– and that is still an optimistic assessment. Even in Denmark organic farming hasn’t grown lately.

The development in Sweden has been particularly troubling. Organic took off with a rapid development from the foundation of KRAV 1985. There was massive political support and organic was media’s darling for decades. A national target of 10% organic in the year 2000 was adopted unanimously by the Swedish Parliament 1994, already. The successful development after the 10% target led to new national targets in 2000 and 2006. In twenty years from 1985, organic grew from a few hundred producers with a few thousand hectares to 19,000 organic farmers with 510,000 hectares.* With 19% of its arable land managed organically, Sweden almost achieved the next national goal of 20% organic farming in 2005. In 2025, the organic arable land has dropped to 357,000 hectares and 3,700 farms a fifth of the numbers of 2005.

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The development in the market place in Sweden was largely positive until 2017/18, but since then the organic market has contracted considerably. The reasons for this are debated, but factors that have played a role are: the food and environment agenda has been totally dominated by climate and other aspects of farming such as pollution, harm to bio-diversity and even health have had the back seat. The backbone of organic farming in Sweden has been dairy and ruminants and they have been (unfairly) demonised because of methane emission. This has been linked to the raise of veganism, which now also seems to have peaked, however. Supermarkets constantly seek new trends and products and organic is no longer new and sexy so they haven’t spent much on publicity for organic products. In the public debate, organic is no longer a media darling and has been under attack from various camps. The pesticide lobby in Sweden sued and won a case against the Coop supermarket chain over exaggerated claims of the dangers of pesticide use. The political support for organic farming has also waned considerably.

Organic has a lot to offer, but it also has some weak points.

The growth of organic is linked to supermarkets. The competition with conventional farming, with other ”green”(-ish) concepts and competition within the organic market forces producers to reduce costs, by increasing scale, specialising and replacing labour with machinery – essentially the same methods as in agriculture in general, leading to less people engaged in farming, bigger farms and less diverse production. In Sweden, the average certified organic farm now has 129 hectares of farmland, which is almost three times the average farm size of 46 hectares. The main reason is that many small organic farms have dropped out of certification as well as mainstream markets. The cost of organic certification is very high and as most small farms neither can nor want to sell to the big retailers they opt out of certification, which has little value in direct marketing.

When certification became a competitive business, fees became market oriented in a way that big farms pay much less per hectare than small farms. A small farm, like ours, pay 8 times more for certification then it did 30 years ago in fixed currency value. Gradually, the system has developed into a self-serving bureaucracy, not by evil intentions, it is just how things work. This was cemented and exacerbated by that it became embedded in the EU regulation for organic production. Nowadays organic farmers are subject to a huge array of rules and administrative requirements, I can’t even use my own urine in my organic garden. Organic farmers have no influence over the standards and others are now defining what organic agriculture is. Of course, despite these shortcomings, certification is still essential for organic marketing under mainstream market conditions. But is this an argument in favour of certification, or an argument against the mainstream market?

On the farmers’ side, many are turned off by the rigid rules of organic – ”to go organic” is not the interesting and liberating challenge it once was. Young and entrepreneurial people are more likely to go for regenerative farming, local, vegan, permaculture or any other concept which sound more interesting, cool, new and less rigid. If I would be a young farmer today, I would not go for certified organic agriculture!

Having said that, let me just say a few words about regenerative agriculture, which is so much hyped lately. Regenerative farming is vaguely defined, but essentially it has the same basis as organic farming. It talks about soil health, but already the organic pioneer Eve Balfour titled her book The living soil and another pioneer, Albert Howard, said that “The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible.” Howard also built most of his ideas on traditional farming practices in India. By and large, there is little new, neither in organic nor in regenerative farming. In essence, regenerative agriculture is organic agriculture in a new packaging, but with an undefined table of ingredients. In reality, regenerative seems to mean as little as sustainable has done the last thirty years.

Where is the path ahead?

I see two divergent tracks for organic in the years ahead, one within the current market economy framework, the other outside of it.

I believe that the low-hanging fruit have already been picked both on the production side and the consumption side, at least in the EU context. With public subsidies for organic agriculture for 30 years, those farmers that have good conditions for organic production have already converted their farms. For farms with more difficult conditions, say a chicken producer dependent on purchased feed, grain producers on the plains or an intensive table fruit production, higher incentives for organic or bigger disincentives for conventional are needed.

Radical improvements in actual production results, making organic production more competitive could also be a path, but I don’t see any such dramatic breakthroughs in the pipe. I guess this is your expertise, but I saw nothing about it in the programme.

Within the existing framework of policy and market dependence, organic can only grow substantially with massive political support. This can take various shapes. One measure is to increase direct support to organic farming. This could be argued for, based on the comparatively benign effects of organic farming compared to conventional. Another version is to make conventional farming more expensive. This could be by means of banning pesticides, restricting use of synthetic fertilisers, posing size limits on farms and in particular on animal farms. In general, it is about applying the (theoretically) well established concept of the Polluter Pay Principle. After all, research show that the external costs for damage on environment, climate and health of the food system are very high. If those costs would be included in the price of food, prices would double. One could also stimulate the market by skipping VAT on organic foods.

Public procurement of organic foods to canteens of schools, healthcare, military etc. is also an important policy measure. It is also an enlightening example of the difference between ”the market” and policy. In many municipalities in Sweden there are public goals to purchase organic foods to the canteens. The national average is that one third of the food purchased by the public sector is organic. This can be compared to the share of organic in private restaurants which is just a few percent.

Linking organic more strongly to reduced vulnerability and increased robustness in the food chain might also be a promising path.

A radical transparency in the food market, where all products would have to give detailed information about how they were produced, including the use of pesticides in the cultivation of crops or antibiotics to animals, could give organic products a competitive edge. An alternative version is that it would be conventional production that would be subject to additional inspections and certification as well as the costs associated with that.

On the consumption side, most consumers have been reached by the organic message. Of course, massive campaigns by supermarkets or public authorities may give organic another boost. The recurrent attention on the pollution and health risks with agrochemicals might also give organic a new lease. Overall, I believe that the potential of the market to drive the development is not that big, however.

The more radical ideas for flipping the terms of production between organic and conventional I sketch above are not likely to materialise within the current economic and political systems. Especially not those leading to higher food prices. All of them have been suggested for decades, by myself and others.

Relationship food

This leads us to the other organic path, to initiatives outside of the normal market context. Food outside of the market is of course nothing new. For most of human history food was not a commodity to be traded. Most food was self-consumed, shared with kin or exchanged with neighbours as part of a non-market economy. Even when food was sold for money, it was not traded as an anonymous commodity in highly centralised market. Still today, many people grow, cook and consume food outside of the market context. When throwing a party or feeding the family, food is not a commodity but something very different. Food and eating are still social acts full of culture and meaning. As a side note, that food is an important part of the culture is one reason for why diets are very hard to change and why public dietary advice mostly are ignored.

The concepts of relationship food, landscape diets, bio-regions or bio-districts all point toward a very different food system. They are based on food as the main ecological link between humans and the rest of the living and a carrier of meaning rather than something to be sold. Farming is primarily the management of agro-ecosystems rather than profit-making business. This approach fits the organic principles of Health, Ecology, Fairness, and Care much better than the mainstream market.

Relationship food is based on personal relationship between those that produce and those that consume and the management of the farm is a relationship between us and nature, formulated somewhat idealistic. Food is in this way an expression of these relationships. This can take many forms such as self-provisioning, community supported agriculture, Reko-rings and direct marketing etc. On our small farm, the meat we produce from our very small herd is sold directly to consumers, many of which live close by and can see our cows and appreciate the associated landscape. Our vegetables are sold at the farm, in Reko-rings or given to charity. Essentially, instead of using the market as a tool to change things for the better such as with organic certification, this strategy aims to reduce the power of the market and replace it with relationships, even if money often is used.

With this perspective, there is no inherent value in the constant drive for efficiency. Instead of less people, more people engaged in farming and food preparation means more people engaging in a fruitful and rewarding relationships with each other and with nature.

The diet will also change by local, shorter and more direct relationships. You will get less ultra processed food and more healthy foods and diets will adjust to local conditions. In general, I believe the entry point to human diets is and should be the production and not theoretical calculations of ideal diets. A call for a localised food system doesn’t mean that all food must be local. All ecosystems have some interchange with other ecosystems and humans have exchanged things, including exotic foods, for millennia.

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Many criticise organic agriculture for being structurally dependent on manure or rest products from conventional farms. I believe most of the critique is a bit unfair as there are many flows of nutrients from organic farms to the conventional system, e.g. by live dairy calves sold to conventional breeders and organic by-products, such as rape seed meal, whey, oat shell and slaughter house waste are mixed up with conventional. But clearly, organic farming has a nutrient challenge. Nutrient cycles are the natural foundation of agriculture. Organic has already taken important steps with crop rotations and a better integration between livestock and crops. But there could be more: Better use of natural grasslands is essential and ruminants should to a much larger extent graze.

But it is not enough. On a system’s level, we need to re-build and repurpose our sewage systems from protecting lakes and the sea from eutrophication to be built for maximum recycling of nutrients. This will be easier in a localised food system. But it also points to that a full conversion to organic is only possible with major transformations of society. In the longer run, localised food systems might not allow megacities of 10 million people. But why should we have such cities anyway?

Clearly, there is a very long way ahead before this vision will be globally adopted. Change will, in any case, start locally and the notion that there are globally applicable solutions is mistaken.

Each farmer and food producer have to chose which path they will be part of, and I guess also researchers and advisors, explicitly or implicitly chose. In the end, external factors, such as the collapse of the global financial system and global markets, climate change, energy and resource scarcity, population implosion etc. might be what make us change. A localised organic food system is certainly better equipped to deal with such shocks.

So let us walk the talk!

Speech notes for the closing session for the Nordic-Baltic organic conference in Uppsala 17 June 2026.

My organic credentials

I started with organic farming in 1977. Our farm, Torfolk, were founders of the first organic marketing cooperative 1983. We also started a food processing operation, first for goat cheese, later on for jams, cordial and juice, it is still operating. 1985 I was one of the founders of KRAV, the pioneer Swedish organic certification body (nowadays a standard setting organisation). For two decades I worked as a consultant for organic agriculture with focus on certification, market and policy development, primarily in developing countries. I was the founding president of the International Organic Accreditation Service and the vice President (1998-2000) and President (2000-2005) of IFOAM- Organics International. Currently, I operate a small farm with cattle, vegetables and fruit - organic obviously - together with my wife Ann-Helen.

Already some years ago, the Government of Denmark, the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, the Danish Society for Nature Conservation, the Confederation of Danish Industry, a trade union and the Danish Local Government Association agreed to a number of environmental measures for the agriculture sector. This was often, on mistaken grounds, presented as a ”climate tax” on agriculture. The emissions that were subject to taxation are methane and nitrous oxide emissions from livestock. Not only are the carbon dioxide emissions exempt but also the considerable nitrous oxide emissions from the use of nitrogen fertilisers.

In this year’s election campaign, two agriculture related issues played a considerable role: a proposal to ban the use of pesticides in areas where drinking water is sourced, and restrictions of the very large pig production. Some named the election “svinevalget”, i.e. the pig election.

The programme of the new coalition government, expressed in an agreement, includes pledges to end routine tail docking and what is called “extreme breeding”. The latter seems to be vaguely defined as the efforts to increase the number of weaned piglets per sow. On average, sows in Denmark wean more than 37 piglets a year, and those in the top 10% of farms nearly 43. In Sweden, the average rate is 29. There will also be a temporary moratorium on new and expanded conventional pig production, at least until all details in the new pig policies are in place.

“I hardly dare say it, but we got more than we asked for,” said Britta Riis, the head of Animal Protection Denmark, to the Guardian. “We made pig farming a top political issue. And we’ve won immediate, and systemic, change.”

Not only pig farming is affected. Already on the ministerial level there are big changes, where no minister will have the whole agriculture portfolio. There will be a new ministry for nature and animal welfare under the social democrat Christian Rabjerg Madsen. Maria Reumert Gjerding, who served as the president of the biggest environmental movement, Danmarks Naturfredningsforening, until the appointment, will also deal with many agriculture issues as the minister of environment representing Socialistiskt Folkeparti (Green left). It leaves me wondering how “nature” is not part of the “environment” (or vice versa)?

Some of the other initiatives in the government agreement are:

• The VAT on food will be halved and there will be no VAT on fruit and vegetables.

• There will be a ban on the use of pesticides on 160,000 hectares in areas with drinking water sources.

• A national food strategy will be developed to increase public procurement of Danish, local and organic foods. It will also double the area farmed organically, support the development of plant based food and local small scale food production.

• The new government also wants to change the public support to farming, with less money to area support and more to environment, climate, organic and regenerative farming as well as small-scale farming. This fits quite well with the proposals from the EU Commission for the reform of the common agriculture policy (CAP).**

While animal welfare groups and environmental groups are happy, the main farmer organisation objects and, in addition, they also say that this invalidate the earlier agreement. So it is a rather large upheaval.

An agriculture powerhouse

One have to put this into context. Denmark is the country with the second highest share of agriculture land in the world, 59% after the 62% of Bangladesh. It is also an agriculture net exporter with exports some 40 percent higher (in value) than imports. The productivity in farming is also very high, both expressed as yield per cow, sow or per hectare and measured as labour productivity. Despite this, agriculture contributes just 0.9 percent of the GDP, well below the EU average of 1.6 percent.

Pig farming in Denmark is very intensive. The country, with a population of 6 million, produces 30 million pigs for slaughter every year. Even if Danes eat a lot of pork meat*, most of them are for export. Clearly, Denmark has an oversized and very intensively managed livestock sector, 1.6 livestock units per hectare and it imports a lot of feed so there are good reasons to reduce the numbers. The livestock sector has actually decreased considerably lately.

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Perhaps contradictory, despite being an agriculture powerhouse Denmark has very high food prices, 20 percent above the EU average. This is caused, among others, by high labour costs and a 25 percent VAT on food. Denmark also has the highest market share of organic food in the world, 11.6% in 2024.

Other European countries such as the Netherlands and Germany have also restricted the agriculture sector, and in particular the livestock sector. To a large extent this is the result not so much about the size of the sector as such but of the concentration in ever bigger production units.

Which road ahead for European farming and farmers?

For many farmers in Europe, restrictions like these are seen as a threat to farming and a result of that urban populations, opinion makers and politicians don’t understand where food comes from and that the conditions for farming are already very hard. Often, environmental or animal welfare regulations are seen as a major burden to farmers, especially as imports are not subject to the same rules. Because of agriculture’s small share of the GDP politicians seems to believe the sector is insignificant. With increasing competition for land and very high land prices (in the Netherlands reaching almost €100,000 per hectare), farmers are squeezed out of the market.

And, for sure, all these perspectives have some validity. But the changes in the agriculture sector itself are also responsible for the changed position of farming in European society. Farms are no longer producing “food for the people” but one or two commodities for the market, often a global market. Modern farmers often don’t know where food comes from or where their “products” end up. And while they often preach the value of buying local, they often buy the same industrial food as everybody else do. Not to talk about from where they sources their machinery, their fertilisers, their seeds, their working clothes etc. The importance of local or national food production for food security and resilience, is totally undermined by the input-dependency of industrial farming.

It is often discussed that farmers quit because it is not profitable to farm. But it is too simplistic to say that the number of farmers are shrinking because it is not profitable to farm. By and large, the number of farmers are shrinking because the productivity per labour unit has increased tremendously and farms have grown bigger and bigger and bigger, so there has is no need for all those small farms and farmers. If some farmer will get more land and a bigger tractor, or manage more cows, it inevitably means that some other farmer will go out of business.

Farms are also no longer the backbone of the country side. They have become so big and are managed with so little manpower that the existence of farms is so guarantee for vibrant rural development. Having visited many of the world’s agriculture powerhouses, such as Mato Grosso in Brazil, the US midwest and California, Ukraine and Russia, I can attest that those landscapes are quite dead, with the exceptions of Ukraine and Russia which maintain a large small scale, backyard farming culture parallel to very large farms. The same goes for some European countries, where huge industrial farms have broken the ties with the local context and landscape. They induce heavy traffic, pollute rivers and air, are noisy and use industrial technologies and even foreign staff. When they are also mainly targeting export markets, locals simply see no value of their existence, this is also expressed in Denmark.

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Farm organisations are often talking about farming as culture and identity, while in the agriculture business magazines everything is about productivity, new technologies and machinery. Farming as a lifestyle is considered backward and the modern farmer should be an entrepreneur and business manager, following the world market and buying and selling futures to manage risk. Even when it comes to domestic food supply, most farmers don’t care about domestic markets, they just sell to the highest bidder.

The industrial scale and the loss of individuality of the animals through the combination of the increased scale and the industrial methods employed, has made animal abuse into a system and not an exception. The fact that modern stables are clean, well ventilated and in many other ways optimised for “animal welfare”, doesn’t change this.

Because of this development, the public support for farming has eroded – and rightly so.

For more than hundred years ago farming, and in particular livestock, was driven out of the cities as the cohabitation was hard. Today, wealthy people build houses in the country-side and urbanites need recreational areas, nature needs to be restored, industry and commerce need logistic hubs and solar power and the tech sector needs land for data centres. Farming just has to move, and environmental regulations get tighter.

While I welcome many of the reforms of the new Danish government, I see no sign of a radical new agriculture paradigm.

The farm restoration

In the end both the farm organisations and society at large, are wrong.

Food is essential and the one percent of the GDP is misleading as agriculture support a whole food system. Food for people is like energy for the economy (it is after all also energy), and they are both totally essential. As long as oil and gas flows, the world markets are working and there is nice weather, there will be food. But the last years’ experiences have made more people aware of that food security is also about availability, affordability and the robustness and resilience of the food system.

The farmer organisations should, instead of promoting farming as any other industry, go back to farming as a mission, a calling where the focus is on the stewardship of the land, caring for the animals and the environment. Of course, this is easier said than done, as many farmers are stuck with loans, debt and infrastructure investments, tying them to the existing system. Overall, the responsibility for such a transformation rest with society at large.

In Denmark, it makes some sense to reduce agriculture’s share of the land as long as it is in favour of nature restoration and not data centres or golf courses. But in general, European countries need to protect its farm land as an essential resource. The current food system is characterised by over-production and the subsequent food waste and a wasteful use of food crops as animal feed. It is driven by fossil fuels, fertilisers, pesticides and a whole set of other resource demanding inputs. Instead we need a farming system operating on place based resources, the land itself, a healthy soil, a multifunctional landscape and in particular people, farmers. We need to restore farms as vibrant ecosystems and farmers as land stewards. Land must also be made available to willing farmers, young or old, in traditional or new constellations.

In order to do that we also need to unchain farms and farmers from the market forces, which ultimately lead to capitalist management of the land and the constant race for more, quicker and cheaper. There is a reverse relationship between the agriculture share of the GDP and number of farms. If you want more people on the land and restore agriculture as something that makes rural areas attractive, you should not promote increasing productivity and making things faster. Instead you should promote small and slow.

On the last point, let me close by expressing my respect for Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement. He passed away 21 May.

* It is interesting to search per capita pork/pig meat consumption on the net and realise that there will be widely differing figures for the countries. For Denmark, it varies between more than 70 kg to less than 30. The variation is to some extent caused that consumption can be expressed as carcass weight or any other figure between carcass weight and the mouth. For pigs meat the quantity on the plate will be in the range of 50% of the carcass weight. But there are also other difficulties arriving at a solid figure, regardless which definition you will use. You can read a detailed analysis of how to calculate consumption in Germany here. Or my report on Sweden here.

** One might get the impression that Denmark is a very radical green country. While it is fair to acknowledge the steps taken, one should also note things in the government agreement which point in another direction. Those include, but are not limited to, an open window for nuclear power, radical increase in military expenditure (up to 3.5% of the GDP) and a commitment to further economic growth, despite the fact the Denmark is already one of the richest countries in the world.

The four LCA-related reports I have made (for indoor farmingⁱ, for milk and plant-based alternativesⁱⁱ, for fatⁱⁱⁱ, and for feed use in the Swedish livestock sector^iv) made me realise how limited value LCA has. Let me be clear: there are situations where LCAs are useful. This is often the case when a producer considers a certain change in a production process. It is something very different when results of LCA-based comparisons of totally different products and production systems, are supposed to guide policy or consumer behaviour.

In general there are many shortcomings both in the method as such and in how LCAs are conducted. And many of the flaws in how LCAs are conducted are linked to the general flaws. In summary the shortcomings, in relation to food and agriculture, are:

— Most input data are not from the production examined but from databases or simple standard values, generating faulty results.

— Baselines for biogenic processes are rarely, if ever, used.

— The use of the metric carbon dioxide equivalents is grossly misleading for methane emissions.

— The choice of functional unit is arbitrary.

— The allocation of impact among co-products or between main product and by-product is arbitrary and often even meaningless.

— Allocation of highly variable impacts is arbitrary.

— The selection of impact categories are limited by the method.

— Lack of context and system analysis, which is the most severe shortcoming.

The use of standard values instead of actual measurements

Many flaws emerge from the use of standard values and databases to assign impacts. This is particularly relevant for methane and nitrous oxide. Those conducting LCAs are not measuring emissions of methane or nitrous oxide. Instead they use use simple conversion factors (from IPCC or other databases or public sources) which translate the quantity of feed consumed, manure deposited or chemical fertilisers used into emissions. They just put in data and out comes figures of how much nitrous oxide and methane are generated by the process. But there are huge uncertainties and variations in these emissions, in particular for nitrous oxide.

When Brazilian researchers measured how much nitrous oxide was emitted from the urination of cows on pasture, they found that merely 0.2% of the nitrogen was converted to nitrous oxide.^v This is one tenth of the standard emission factor used by the IPCC and often used in LCAs. A meta-analysis of 422 studies of nitrous oxide emissions from land fertilised by animal manure or chemical fertiliser revealed that emissions from manure are considerably lower than the IPCC standard emission factors while they were considerably higher for chemical fertiliser.^vi

LCAs mostly do measure things that are easy to measure, but then we can also see that the variations are huge, so huge that making general statements are meaningless. For cow’s milk, the land use range from 0.7 m2 to 242 m2 per litre milk according to the meta-analysis by Poore and Nemecek published 2018.^vii To use an average figure for calculating the “hoofprint” of milk is simply nonsensical, under these circumstances.

Unclear baselines for biogenic processes

For climate impact of agriculture, the role of methane and nitrous oxide are critical for the results. In ruminant products more than half of the emissions are caused by methane and about one quarter is from nitrous oxide (the exact composition depends on local conditions). It is fairly simple to estimate carbon dioxide emissions from the food chain as it is a direct result of the use of fossil fuels, where one atom of carbon in oil, coal or gas will become one molecule of CO₂. The much bigger quantities of carbon dioxide which are emitted from soils, plants and animals are not considered emissions in greenhouse gas accounting. It is not coherent that one of the gases (methane) from the metabolism of the sheep, is considered to be emissions and not the other (CO2).

Methane

The methane climate calculations are based on the assumption that a reduction of cows will mean a corresponding reduction in emissions. But that is based on the assumption that the biomass that is now consumed by cows will not be transformed by any processes that produce methane. Clearly that is a flawed assumption. If we limit the discussion to the grasslands, which do provide most (at least 55%) of the feed of cattle and sheep alike (Mottet et al 2017), it is apparent that if all domesticated animals were culled, the number of wild animals would, hopefully, increase, and most of them would be ruminants, emitting methane. The grass not eaten by animals would be eaten by insects such as termites or grasshoppers, rot or burn depending on climatic factors. In all cases the land, will emit methane.

As cattle use a lot of land, rewilding of various sorts (often afforestation of grasslands) are often proposed as a better alternative than grazing cattle or sheep. While rewilding can have considerable merits from a biodiversity perspective it is not at all apparent that new landscapes will emit less methane. Dams by a growing number of beavers cause considerable methane emissions^viii. Even forest plantation, long seen as the gold standard for carbon sequestration in landscapes, comes with their own problems. First,the carbon stock is mainly in the wood above ground and is there very vulnerable to fires, storms and insects and secondly, recent research show that the reduction in albedo can turn forests into net warming ecosystems compared with grasslands or other more open landscapes^ix.

There are many efforts to calculate the number of wild animals before humans reduced their numbers as well as their methane emissions. Of course we can’t know for sure and it also depends on at what time we set the baseline, but it can safely be assumed that the biomass of wild mammals and their methane emissions were in the same order of magnitude as the biomass and emissions from domestic ruminants.^{x xi} The methane emissions from wild animals are considered to be “natural” while emissions from domestic ruminants are classified as “anthropogenic”. This is hardly scientific.

Another missing baseline is that the reduced methane emissions from the draining of natural wetlands is not counted as a reduction of emissions while the emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide from these wetlands are classified as anthropogenic. Historically has at least 20% of all wetlands in the world been drained for agriculture purposes, and even far higher share in the temperate zones ^xii. A rich wetland can emit as much as 300 kg methane per year according to the Swedish forestry agency (2021).^xiii If such land is drained and grazed by cattle, the corresponding methane emission will be considerably less (but carbon dioxide more), but the emissions from the cattle are now suddenly anthropogenic. There is a similar issue around rice cultivation which often take place in former wetlands.

There is a lot more to say about methane, something I have elaborated upon in The Methane Ruminations.^xiv

Nitrous oxide

For nitrous oxide the emissions from agriculture are estimated to be in the range of 40 percent of all terrestrial emissions (excluding other anthropogenic emissions).^xv Agriculture occupies in the range of 30 percent of the terrestrial land (some claim 40 percent, but I believe that is a gross exaggeration based on the mistaken assumption that all “grasslands” are primarily used for grazing). Basically, all natural ecosystems emit nitrous oxide, which means that the land that is now used for agriculture would emit considerable quantities of nitrous oxide even if they were not farmed.

It would be more “fair” to compare nitrous oxide and methane emissions with the emissions from a comparable natural ecosystem and just allocate any augmented emissions as anthropogenic emission caused by agriculture.

Carbon balance

A similar issue is the carbon balance in soils. Most agriculture soils are losing organic matter, depending on a number of factors (climate, pedology and management). How should such changes in the carbon content be reflected in LCAs? Some want to credit cows with the often huge amounts of carbon in grasslands, while others argue that there would be as much carbon in the soil even if it is not grazed, grazed by wild herbivores or grazed very lightly. But grasslands which are not grazed are often degraded. In any case, changes in carbon stocks in soils are very hard to measure in a meaningful way (there are many different methods, there is organic and non-organic carbon as well liquid carbon, density of soil, depth of sampling and many other factors influence the results, even time of the year), and the results are site specific and can’t be translated into global figures. In our farm, one field went from 11.7% organic matter to 24.4% in 11 years. Very impressive, but totally unrealistic as the field has been under no other management than cutting hay once per year for decades.

On the other end, some researchers have developed something they call carbon opportunity costs based on the idea that most land used could be converted to another native land use with higher carbon storage. The difference is then allocated to the production as carbon dioxide emission.^xvi The use of carbon opportunity costs in LCA makes land use a totally dominating determinant of perceived climate impact. The concept is questionable to say the least and very sensitive to the choice of time over which the change in carbon stock should be distributed. If one want to use this concept as a kind of natural baseline for carbon, one should then also use natural baselines for methane and nitrous oxide as discussed above.

The use of carbon dioxide equivalents

While methane emissions can vary considerably, and there is the question of natural baseline, an even bigger problem is the conversion of methane emissions into carbon dioxide equivalents in order to get one figure of the climate impact. This is normally done with the metric GWP-100, or GWP-20 if you want to make it look worse. But both are equally misleading and they are not telling us how much warmer it till be. Through this conversion, the real climate impact of methane is exaggerated and distorted. ^xvii If you trust the GWP-100 or GWP-20, thirty years of livestock production in the EU would contribute a lot to global warming, and every bite of meat and every glass of milk will add to an ever increasing global warming. But, the methane emissions from the whole EU livestock sector has not contributed anything to global warming the past thirty years (figure below).^xviii

The reason for this is that methane is short-lived and it is only if the rate of methane emissions increase (or the break down of methane slows down), that the concentration of methane in the atmosphere will increase and cause additional global warming. The methane emissions from the EU livestock sector has decreased over the period and thus contributed to cooling.

A arbitrary choices of functional unit

If agronomists make LCAs to analyse agriculture systems, they often use land area (hectare) as the functional unit. But if you do little and harvest little, the environmental impact is likely to be minimal per area unit, which is fine, but also somewhat irrelevant. Extensive grazing is (mostly) environmentally benign, but it also produce very little food. Food products are often analysed per kilogram. But kilogram is not a meaningful unit when it comes to food. It is virtually impossible to feed a person with broccoli; you need to eat 10 kg per day to get your energy needs from it. You can choose calories as the measure, but then sugar and palm oil will always be the most efficient product. Protein is perhaps a more relevant measure, but in some countries protein intakes are excessive, so it is not ideal either.

Some try to make more sophisticated nutritional indexes. Smedman et al used such an index comparing milk with plant based milks. They estimated how many essential nutrients were covered by at least 5 % of the daily needs when 100 gram was consumed. Their research showed that milk had the least climate impact of all beverages tested. ^xix Other researchers, however, contested the results and showed that if one used a 20 % threshold, orange juice was clearly the best and if one used a 2% threshold, soy milk was the best.^xx

In a very recent analysis of milk and plant based alternative, Agriscope developed a “Food Substitution Index 20” to rank the substitution potential of plant-based drink for cow’s milk. When including nutritional values, only soy milk compare positively on environmental impact with cow’s milk. Still, plant based milks need fortification. The researchers also gave cow’s milk a negative value because of high fat content.^xxi But, if the fat content of milk is a problem or not can be discussed and it is certainly dependent on the whole dietary pattern.

This is a recognition of that it is outright silly to compare these drinks without considering their nutritional status. There is no way one can state that one kind of functional unit is the Right one. In my own assessment^xxii I stated – tongue in cheek – that it is much better to drink water than to drink milk or any of the plant based alternatives.

The allocation of impact among co-products or between main product and by-product.

How impacts are distributed among co-products is another important issue. This is particular relevant for milk-meat and vegetable oil-oils seed meals.

Each cow gives birth to a calf every year, and those are either used as replacement, or killed at birth or raised for meat. The cow herself will sooner or later meet her Creator and be converted into hide, meat and other by-products. For the milk-meat complex you have to allocate impacts between meat and milk. Mostly this is done with economic allocation, i.e. impacts are allocated according to the economic value of the co-products. But that makes impacts subject to market price fluctuations. In June 2016 the farm gate price for beef was SEK3253 per 100 kg, while milk was paid SEK2792 per ton. In December 2022, beef price reached SEK3253 while milk price reached SEK6749 (figure

1). An LCA for meat would allocate double the impact to meat 2016 compared to 2022. Today, beef prices are very high while milk prices have fallen back.

And this is not even the whole story. Meat constitute half of the weight of the cow sent to the slaughterhouse. There are entrails, tallow, bones, hides etc. All of them have some use. But, at least in Sweden, the farmers are only paid for the meat, the rest are “in kind” remuneration to the slaughter house. If you look at the shelves of pet foods in the shop you can see that some pet food, made from this “worthless” by-products, command a higher price than meat, however.

In a Swedish context, grazing is considered a very valuable way of maintaining biodiversity in the landscape. Grazing can, therefore, be considered an additional service from livestock, such as cattle, sheep and horses. In one study, Greyertz et al (2023) concluded that <1–48% (for beef) and 11–31% (for milk) of climate impacts could be allocated to ecosystem services such as maintaining semi-natural grasslands, preserving certain animal breeds etc. ^xxiii

If one think a bit further, it is not really meaningful to make all these allocation. An individual can chose drink milk but not consume meat (derived from milk production), and therefore imagine that she doesn’t contribute to slaughter or the emission from meat. But the cows will be culled sooner or later and the emissions currently allocated to milk will instead be allocated to milk if nobody eats the meat. If we all go vegetarian the emissions from milk will be higher.

There are similar complications for vegetable oils. Most of them (not olive and to a lesser extent palm oil) have protein rich animal feed as a co-product or by-product. Without livestock eating it, the environmental impact of the oils would increase considerably, and most for soy oil, which is the second most utilised vegetable oil. As animals also contribute to important dietary fat, the total vegetable oil production would need to increase if all went vegan. Palm oil is already the dominating oil in the world market and it has much less valuable by-product than the other oils (save olive, but olive has a very narrow climatic range and therefore is no realistic alternative on a global scale) so the net effect, if all went vegan, would most certainly be a radical increase in palm oil production.

To avoid the many problems of allocation some LCAs chose system expansion, where the system boundary is broadened to include the “additional functions” of co-products. It gives the primary product a “credit” for the impacts avoided by not producing those co-products conventionally. But that comes with its own set of problems. In one example wool got negative emissions because lambs meat was supposed to replace beef.^xxiv You can read more about the problems associated with system expansion here. ^xxv

Allocation of highly variable impacts

In agriculture, changes in land use, also poses major challenges. E.g., if soy bean production expand into the Amazon rainforest, and cause deforestation, carbon emissions and loss of biodiversity, is that impact a function of those particular fields, of soy bean production in Brazil or soy bean production in the world? In addition, there is also the question for how long the impacts should be distributed. Is it one year, twenty or hundred or even more? De Ruiter at al argue that as a result of global trade soy beans are interchangeable with many other crops, and therefore, changes in land use should be distributed on all arable land in the world.^xxvi There is no right or wrong here, but the choices made have an enormous impact on results.

The selection of impact categories

With its roots in engineering LCAs don’t include impacts on animal welfare or social, economic and cultural impacts, which in many cases could be even more important than environmental impacts. But LCAs also never include all relevant environmental impacts, especially those that are difficult to quantify. Effects on soil fertility and erosion are mostly left out as well as impact on bio-diversity. Even for categories that are often included, the indicators used are far from satisfactory, e.g. for impacts of pesticide use. It is obviously not possible to have one measure that will fully capture the impact of hundreds of pesticides in very different ecological conditions, but the LCA method calls for one metric. There have been many efforts to develop biodiversity indicators for land use impact. But in the end, it is futile to capture such impacts as they are context specific. ^xxvii

The narrow perspective that results from the product focus means that the multifunctional role of agriculture is excluded and that vital resources are neglected. Biodiversity is part of the agriculture system and not only an impact category. The same goes for land, where “land-use” often is an impact category of an LCA, but land is an integral part of the agriculture system and not an input that is used in the production. Land use by grazing livestock is often portrayed as a problem, but in many cases it is a very sustainable ecosystem. By not recognising these relationships LCA can’t deal with soil health, land degradation or agricultural bio-diversity itself.

Lack of context and system analysis

Even bigger shortcomings result from the lack of context of the analysis, little understanding of agriculture systems and how changes in production change consumption. Some of this is already reflects above in the discussions about allocation.

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A general rule of ecology formulated by Garret Hardin is “you can never change one thing”, because as soon as you do that, other things change as well. It is well known that if a product becomes cheaper, consumption will increase. Through the industrialisation of agriculture crop production, food is very cheap, but this has also increased food waste tremendously. The increased productivity in crop production has also made it commercially interesting to use crops such as grain and soy beans for animal feed. This has favoured the monogastric animals such as pigs and chicken over ruminants that feed on grass (even ruminants get more farmed crops to eat nowadays).

The most important changes of the agricultural system in Western Europe over the past seventy years is the abandonment of small farms, small fields, pastures and marginal lands and the decreasing diversity of the farming systems. There are fewer farms and each farm mechanise and specialise into a few crops or one kind of animals. Not only farms specialise, whole regions do, even countries do. Livestock and crop production have been separated and cycles of nutrients between animals and crops as well as between farms and the rest of the food system have been broken. Largely this has been ”solved” by massive application of chemical fertilisers. The simplification of the production system has also led to the use of pesticides.^xxviii The effects of global trade are huge. Some research demonstrates that the importation of soy beans into Europe has caused the abandonment of 6 million hectares of semi-natural pastures and meadows. ^xxix Other research show how the large scale trade in feeds and grains result in accumulation of nutrients, such as phosphorus, and eutrophication in major importing regions, such as Europe.^xxx

People are largely missing from LCAs, which means that the changes in behaviour which are triggered by new methods or new technologies are not captured.^xxxi It is well known that if a product becomes cheaper, consumption will increase. Chicken consumption has increased almost 10 times globally over the last fifty years, and this is largely driven by higher “efficiency” in chicken breeding, reducing feed use as well as labour use. Chicken is now one of the cheapest proteins you can buy. Chicken has not mainly crowded out more resource demanding beef and pork but rather the less resource-demanding grains and pulses, and in the process it has lost its role as small scale food residue converter. So, while the environmental foot print of chicken is small compared to beef according to LCAs, in reality, the changes in production and changes in markets and consumption has led to a huge increase in the size of the environmental foot print of human food chains.^xxxii

These massive changes in the agriculture landscape and food system are not captured by LCAs, and you will not understand how to avoid them by reading hundreds of life cycle assessments.

When looking into LCAs one can get many mistaken ideas. One prominent example is the comparison of livestock production and crop production. If they are compared side by side, product by product, almost all comparisons will conclude that it is much more efficient (from a multitude of indicators) to eat plants than livestock products. But, a considerable part of the crops are not edible by humans. Almost all oil crops have protein rich by-products which can’t be eaten by people. Major grains, such as wheat and rice have big shares of non-edible by-products; for wheat, normally only 80 % of the grain harvest goes to flour and for rice it is even less. Then there are leftovers from the production of sugar, beer and liquor, even the iconic tofu and oat milk have by-products which are fed to animals. Add to this food waste, straw etc., you realise that a certain proportion of animal products reduce resource use. In addition, some years, part of the wheat crop is not good enough for flour or pasta, some of the barley is not up to specs for malt and the oat is not good enough for oatmeal or oat milk. What happens with it? Animals eat it of course.^xxxiii Finally, when livestock is integrated with crop production rotations can be much better and yields of crops will benefit. In essence, the miraculous increase of productivity, and the end of food shortages in Europe 1800-1940 was largely driven by integration of livestock and crop production^xxxiv.

There are plenty of studies that clearly demonstrate that a certain fraction of livestock products is favourable. ^{xxxv xxxvi} One can’t quantify how high proportion that is, as this depends on climate, water and land resources. In addition, there are agro-ecological zones where crop production is very challenging, but where grazing livestock can use the land to produce food.

Another example is when different agriculture systems are compared, e.g. between organic and conventional agriculture. In the article “Towards better representation of organic agriculture in life cycle assessments”, van der Werf,, Knudsen and Cederberg demonstrate the inadequacy of LCA for comparisons between conventional production systems and agro-ecological and organic systems. They explain how the concerns of the public regarding the environmental impact of different production systems, through the LCA approach, is transformed into the question how big is the environmental impact from 1 kg of x produced in system z compared to system y.^xxxvii Others have also discussed this earlier, such as Meier et al (2015), Environmental impacts of organic and conventional agricultural products – Are the differences captured by life cycle assessment? ^xxxviii

Many of those working with Lifecycle analysis are fully or partly aware of the limitations. Bruno Notarnicola and other LCA experts write in The role of life cycle assessment in supporting sustainable agri-food systems: A review of the challenges, in the Journal of Cleaner Production that deficiencies in LCA methodology ”results in severe limitations when agricultural systems are being evaluated” and they caution that while the LCA concept is easy to understand and the results are user-friendly, most people, even many of those conduction LCAs, are interpreting the results in the wrong way without due considerations to assumptions and limitations.^xxxix

There is a special LCA breed called consequential LCA which supposedly aims to include wider impacts, but in reality there are huge controversies on how to apply such an approach. And even for consequential LCA (CLCA) an analysis conclude that: “the actual effects of a decision on the global environmental impacts are in most cases highly uncertain. We will never know how close the CLCA results are to reflect the actual consequences.”^xl

Summing up

Already the question asked for in most of the LCAs leads the mind and the method into a one-dimensional perspective of agriculture, as a producer of things to be sold. To a large extent the LCA is a technological mirror of the capitalist market where the value of a crop or an animal is only expressed in monetary terms. Which, of course, is the reason for why the method is so popular.

For sure, there are situations where a lifecycle assessment has value. It can be a useful tool to analyse production chains to find hotspots for improvements. But it is not, and will never be, an analysis that will answer the questions how our food system should look like as little as the price of a food stuff tells us what we should eat.

In general, LCAs contribute little to the understanding of agriculture systems; on the contrary, when looking into LCAs one can get many mistaken ideas. One example is the comparisons between organic and conventional food systems that is discussed above. Another example are comparisons of environmental impact of diets which disregard the fact that the farm and food system is highly networked and interdependent.

Lifecycle assessments are very, very far from being the method that will give us easy answers to the difficult questions there are about what we will have for lunch and how we should farm.

After looking into loads of various sustainability tools, standards or index I doubt there is one that will give us all the answers. Fortunately, there are many ways to understand the food system. The best starting point is probably to grow your own food and raise animals, prepare, preserve, cook, share and eat. Through those practices you will both understand the food system and shape it, according to the local context.

(this is an updated version and amalgamation of a number of previously published posts)

i Rundgren, Gunnar 2020, Små gröna blad – inomhusodling ur ett hållbarhetsperspektiv, Matlust.

ii Rundgren, Gunnar, 2020, Milk and plant-based alternatives — an environmental assessment, Matlust.

iii Rundgren, Gunnar 2016, Vilket matfett ska man välja? Är palmolja alltid dåligt? Matlust.

iv Rundgren, Gunnar 2023, The use of feed for the production of meat, egg and cheese in Sweden, WWF Sweden.

v A.S. Barneze, A.M. Mazzetto, C.F. Zani, T. Misselbrook, C.C. Cerri, Nitrous oxide emissions from soil due to urine deposition by grazing cattle in Brazil, Atmospheric Environment, Volume 92, 2014, Pages 394-397,

vi Anaïs Charles, Philippe Rochette, Joann K. Whalen, Denis A. Angers, Martin H. Chantigny, Normand Bertrand,

Global nitrous oxide emission factors from agricultural soils after addition of organic amendments: A meta-analysis, Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, Volume 236, 2017, Pages 88-98,

vii Poore, J. och T. Nemecek 2018, Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers, Science 360, 987–992 (2018).

viii Colin J. Whitfield, Helen M. Baulch, Kwok P. Chun, Cherie J. Westbrook. Beaver-mediated methane emission: The effects of population growth in Eurasia and the Americas. AMBIO, 2014

ix Hasler, N., Williams, C.A., Denney, V.C. et al. Accounting for albedo change to identify climate-positive tree cover restoration. Nat Commun 15, 2275 (2024).

x Manzano, P., Pardo, G., Itani, M.A. et al. Underrated past herbivore densities could lead to misoriented sustainability policies. npj biodivers 2, 2 (2023).

xi Pedersen, R. Ø., Faurby, S., & Svenning, J.-C. (2023). Late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions have strongly reduced mammalian vegetation consumption. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 32

xii Paudel, Rajendra & Mahowald, Natalie & Hess, Peter & Meng, Lei & Riley, William. (2016). Attribution of changes in global wetland methane emissions from pre-industrial to present using CLM4.5-BGC. Environmental Research Letters. 11. 034020.

xiii Skogsstyrelsen, Klimatpåverkan från dikad torvtäckt skogsmark – effekter av dikesunderhåll och återvätning, RAPPORT 2021/7

xiv Rundgren, Gunnar 14 April 2024, The Methane Ruminations, Garden Earth.

xv Eric A Davidson and David Kanter 2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 105012

xvi Waite, R., S. Wirsenius, T. Beringer, and T. Searchinger. 2026. “Carbon opportunity cost calculation tool, version 1.0.” Technical Note. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. Available online at doi.org/10.46830/

writn.25.00160.

xvii Graham A McAuliffe et al 2023 Environ. Res. Lett. 18 084014

xviii Xavier Poux, Myles Allen, Michelle Cain, Vikas Patel. Comportement du méthane dans l’atmosphère et analyse des enjeux techniques du PRG100 et du PRG* - application au secteur des ruminants en France et en Europe. AScA, Oxford Martin School, Cranfield University, rapport pour l’OFB, 2025, 44p.. AScA. 2025, 44p.

xix Smedman, Annika et al 2010, Nutrient density of beverages in relation to climate impact, Food Nutr. Res. 54.

xx Scarborough, Peter och Mike Rayner 2010, Nutrient density to climate impact is an inappropriate system for ranking beverages in order of climate impact per nutritional value, Food Nutr. Res. 54.

xxi Green, Ashley, Barbara Walther, Alexander Mathys and Thomas Nemecek 2026, Comparing plant-based drink

alternatives and cow’s milk based on environmental burdens and a novel nutrient profiling system, Agroscope Science | No. 231 / 2026

xxii Rundgren, Gunnar, 2020, Milk and plant-based alternatives — an environmental assessment, Matlust.

xxiii K. von Greyerz, P. Tidåker, J.O. Karlsson, E. Röös, A large share of climate impacts of beef and dairy can be attributed to ecosystem services other than food production, Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 325, Part A, 2023, 116400.

xxiv Wiedemann, S.G., Ledgard, S.F., Henry, B.K. et al. Application of life cycle assessment to sheep production systems: investigating co-production of wool and meat using case studies from major global producers. Int J Life Cycle Assess 20, 463–476 (2015).

xxv Brander, M., & Wylie, C. (2011). The use of substitution in attributional life cycle assessment. Greenhouse Gas Measurement and Management, 1(3–4), 161–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/20430779.2011.637670.

xxvi De Ruiter, H, m.fl. 2016, Global cropland and greenhouse gas impacts of UK food supply are increasingly located overseas, Journal of the Royal Society Interface Volume 13, issue 114

xxvii Huayang Zhen, Pietro Goglio, Fatemeh Hashemi, Christel Cederberg, Maxime Fossey, and Marie Trydeman Knudsen, Toward Better Biodiversity Impact Assessment of Agricultural Land Management through Life Cycle Assessment: A Systematic Review Environmental Science & Technology 2025 59 (15), 7440-7451

xxviii Rundgren, Gunnar 2014, Global Eating Disorder, Regeneration.

xxix Boerema, Annelies m.fl. 2016, Soybean trade:Ballancing Environmental and Socio.Economic Impacts of an Intercontinental Market, PLOS One 31 maj 2016.

xxx Thomas Nesme, Geneviève S. Metson, Elena M. Bennett, Global phosphorus flows through agricultural trade,

Global Environmental Change, Volume 50, 2018,

Pages 133-141,

xxxi Timothy G. Gutowski, A Critique of Life Cycle Assessment; Where Are the People?, Procedia CIRP, Volume 69,

2018, Pages 11-15.

xxxii Rundgren, Gunnar 2014, Global Eating Disorder, Regeneration.

xxxiii Anne Mottet, Cees de Haan, Alessandra Falcucci, Giuseppe Tempio, Carolyn Opio, Pierre Gerber,

Livestock: On our plates or eating at our table? A new analysis of the feed/food debate, Global Food Security,

Volume 14, 2017, Pages 1-8.

xxxiv Rundgren, Gunnar 2014, Global Eating Disorder, Regeneration.

xxxv Zanten, Hannah m.fl. Defining a land boundary for sustainable livestock consumption.

xxxvi Peters, Christian J. m.fl. 2016, Carrying capacity of US agricultural land, ten diet scenarios, Elementa:Science of the Antropocene.

xxxvii van der Werf, H.M.G., Knudsen, M.T. & Cederberg, C. Towards better representation of organic agriculture in life cycle assessment. Nat Sustain 3, 419–425 (2020).

xxxviii Matthias S. Meier, Franziska Stoessel, Niels Jungbluth, Ronnie Juraske, Christian Schader, Matthias Stolze,

Environmental impacts of organic and conventional agricultural products – Are the differences captured by life cycle assessment?, Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 149, 2015, Pages 193-208. ,

xxxix Notarnicola, Bruno m.fl. 2017, The role of life cycle assessment in supporting sustainable agri-food systems: A review of the challenges, Jorunal of Cleaner Production 140 (2017) 399-409

xl Ekvall, T. (2020). Attributional and consequential life cycle assessment. Sustainability Assessment at

the 21st century: 42-62. http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.89202

This winter, we had four wild boars visiting the compound. They even dug up the ground next to our house. I guess the soil was not frozen there as it were in almost all other places. They did no great harm, but we can’t have (don’t want) the boars in our vegetable fields or in our rather big ornamental garden. We called one of the guys hunting on our land and he came and shot two of them a few meters outside our house. They are now smoked and frozen. One of the survivors kept returning for some week and slept in our hay storage, but then it left.

Our farm is in a forested area next to a lake and massive wetlands. It is no real wilderness, even though some people would call it that; Thoreau probably would. We love this spot on earth and we do like the wildlife and spend time observing the many species we have here. But clearly, the relationship is not simple. It is a real challenge to farm in this place.

For the cattle, the wildlife is not a big problem. Of course, the geese, the deer, the voles and many other creatures compete to some extent with the grazing and they reduce the hay yield. A moose sometimes tear down the permanent fence and a deer may occasionally take down the electric cord in our temporary paddocks. But by and large these are small bearable annoyances. As long as the wolves in the vicinity don’t start to feed on our cattle*, the cows can co-habit with the big wildlife just fine, tick and mosquito-borne diseases are another matter. We would like to have hens grazing in the 0.4 hectare orchard, but the risk with all the predatory birds, the fox and the odd lynx seems to be too high, though.

For the crops, the story is different. Mammals and birds are a much bigger threat to most of our crops than insects, weeds or fungi. A few days ago, we set potatoes in a field half a kilometre away from home. There the soil is better than close to the homestead (but we can’t reach it with irrigation, so it is a kind of gamble...). In the same field we have sown peas, carrots and beetroot and we will plant beans and squash once the soil is warm enough (we had minus 6 degrees Celsius, just fourteen days ago). But both cranes and boars like potatoes, and cranes and doves and many other might want to pick up the peas as they germinate. A few years ago, the closest farm, some three km away, had ten hectares of peas totally razed by birds. So, we put an electric fence around the whole field and electric cord without power over our paltry two rows of peas (while we do sell vegetables, dry peas are only for self consumption). Still, in many other places on the farm, deer and hare destroy our crops.

The hare, voles and deer take turns in wrecking havoc in our orchard. When I thought the small trees were over the worst attacks from the hare, who strips the bark off them, the voles had a virtual feast two years ago. Of course we take measures. I put chicken mesh around newly planted apple trees, which stays there for 6-7 years, until the bark is rough enough to prevent the hare. We put net over our strawberries to prevent the deer from eating the plants – delicious late winter feed, the say – and the same net is used to deter birds from eating the mature berries. In between, we let the net off to allow the bumble bees and others to pollinate the flowers.

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The often heard notion that biodiversity – through an illusive natural balance – is always good for the crops doesn’t really carry weight in my view. And nobody has managed to give a plausible explanation for why deer should like organic cabbage less than humans do. Ironically, in most monoculture landscapes there is much less problems with wildlife as there is no habitat for them, even if geese and swans do create a lot of problems for winter wheat.

In Sweden, some species have made a spectacular return. In the mid-19th century there were just a few hundred roe deer, moose and red deer and now there are around 300,000, 240,000 and 26,000 respectively. Wild boars were exterminated in the 17th century and now there are some 350,000. Beavers were gone by 1870 and now we have 100,000. Hunting of cranes and swans have just started again as their numbers are causing problems for farmers. Even predators are making comeback, even though the resistance to wolves is quite vocal and the number of white-tail eagles is so high that they pose major threat for some other birds (we have them here as well).

There are several reasons for this return of wildlife, the emptying of the landscape as a result of urbanisation, fewer people working the land, cheap meat from feeding arable crops instead of grazing, hunting regulations. In some cases the human landscape management has made things easier for the wildlife. Moose thrive on the big clear cuts for example and in other cases much wildlife has been accustomed to living close to humans. Rats is an obvious companion to humans since the dawn of agriculture, and magpies, swifts and swallows thrive on traditional farms. Jackdaw, pigeons, deer and many other animals live well even in a modern city and deer which evolutionary was a very shy and jittery animal are nowadays half pets.

Some make the case that agriculture in general and livestock in particular is a major threat to biodiversity. For sure expansion of agriculture has always been at the expense of other primary ecosystems (where else would you farm?). Today, the focus is often on the expansion of agriculture into tropical rainforests. But agriculture in other parts of the world has expanded into all kinds of ecosystems and in particular into steppes and grasslands and wetlands. Many of the most fertile agriculture areas are in former wetlands or grasslands. Grazing of livestock has mostly taken place in existing grasslands or wetlands, but also other ecosystems have been converted to grazing. As a matter of fact, there are many indications that wildlife and grazing domestic animals can cohabit the same landscape very successfully.

Based on the Swedish experience, one could make the case that the retreat of farming and urbanisation have been good for the wildlife, but that is a hasty and premature conclusion. In Sweden, one third of the species on the red list has the agriculture landscape as their major habitat and the semi-natural grassland are extremely rich in biodiversity. The loss of farms in general, and small scale farms and grazing animals in particular is, today, a major threat to biodiversity. Meanwhile, intensification of farming is also noted as an equal threat. The intensification is today mainly about fertilisers and pesticides. But over the last hundred years, it has included the erasure of all obstacles for mechanised large scale farming. Farmers have replaced narrow fields divided by open ditches with giant fields with subterranean drainage. Adding to that they have taken away trees, boulders, swamps and other obstacles to “rational” farming. Fewer crops are also grown on each farm. Livestock is gone from many farms and those with livestock mostly have one species and in many cases even a specialised production of the particular species, i.e. just having dairy cows without keeping the calves for slaughter or raising piglets for sale to pork factories etc. Animals kept indoor contribute very little to biodiversity compared to those out grazing, rooting, trampling and defecating.

Also in Japan, research show that abandonment is a major threat to biodiversity. Not only indigenous communities are custodians of the land, traditional farming has also had the same role. In Sweden, I would still say that the abandonment of farms have been a boon for some species and a big loss for others. It is inevitable that their will be winners and losers when landscape changes.

This means that the often heard argument for intensification of farming and a simultaneous abandonment of traditional and extensive agriculture systems (often called land sparing) is not a general win-win option, but it could more often be a lose-lose option. It certainly is in Sweden.** Even more so if one consider that the intensified systems are based on high levels of inputs such as pesticides and fertilisers. In a Swedish context, I would say that “re-wilding” of forests would be a much more relevant and needed action as our forests have been transformed to two-species same-age plantations.

Having said that, there are clearly spaces on earth which humans should use very lightly and certainly not plough or replace wild life with domestic animals. Rich Westerner countries have already gone through their period of agriculture expansion (peak farm land was more than 100 years ago in Western Europe), which means that the focus on the dark side of the agriculture expansion is on countries such as Brazil and Indonesia which are in the same demographic and developmental trajectory which Western Europe was much earlier. While I also want poor people to keep their rainforests intact and limit agricultural expansion, who am I to point fingers at them when my own farm is established on a drained wetland and lake?

There is also a question of attitudes or values. Recent research shows that there is a North-South divide in the attitude towards wild life in the Americas. Latin America regards wildlife as part of the social community, deserving of rights like humans – a value the researchers call “mutualism” – while the United States and Canada largely view wildlife as a resource for use by humans – a value they label “domination.” The study found that people with Indigenous ancestry across the Americas are strongly mutualistic, and Latin America had larger Indigenous populations when it was colonised. Equally important was the heritage of the colonisers. Those primarily colonising the North was from countries where domination was strong and those colonising the South held more mutualistic views.

While I cherish the wild life on our farm I also frequently curse it. In general, I find that far too many couch theoreticians have very firm opinions on how we should manage farming, forests, nature and wildlife. In my view, it is a delicate art with constant compromises and adaptations on both sides. We adapt or adjust what and how we do things in order to cohabit with wildlife, but so are they. By and large, there is no simple silver bullet solution for the cohabitation between humans, their crops and livestock and wild life. And there is also no clear dividing barrier between “us” and “them” as many of them live in human landscapes.

Pastured livestock, hunting, fishing and foraging are all strategies that permeate the barrier more than farming does, which is why people involved in those activities often have both a mutualistic and a more practical and rooted perspective on human-nature relationships, regardless if they are classified as being Indigenous or not. In the other end, there are ecomodernists (and some misanthropists) that maintain the best way to “save nature” is to keep humans and nature apart as much as possible. I believe that is mistaken from a number of perspectives, which I will try to explore in essays to come.

Now the damn geese are returning, have to chase them, over and out.

* There are some packs in the vicinity, but the wolves in Sweden rarely attack cattle (but it has occurred). They are a huge problem for sheep though.

** Admittedly, the equation might be different in more densely populated areas. Also, Sweden has 7 percent agriculture land, around 15 percent wetlands and around 2/3 of forests.

I got a lot of comments on this article, some here, but most on Facebook. While many mentioned various smart technologies, I don’t think anybody could point to that this or that technology could make small farms profitable in competing with large farms. Clearly, you can reduce the disadvantages of being small by being a smart farmer and use the best technology, smart management. And some technologies “de-scale” well. Virtual fences was mentioned. One person suggested that the GPS was a blessing for small farms as it allows you to work at night (assuming that you have a day job to live from)!

Automation was mentioned. While automation certainly could make the life of small farmers easier, e.g. by having weeding or planting robots, I fail to see how that could flip the competition. In real life, I am certain that robotics will favour the bigger farms more than the small ones. The end result of a large scale application of robotics in farming will just mean lower prices, which in turn will lead to larger units.

The opportunities for marketing through social media was also mentioned. For sure, there are apparent advantages with that (we use it as well). But it is mostly valuable as a marketing strategy or a relationship strategy, which is not at all about competing with big farmers in the same market, but creating separate markets. It just strengthen my argument that small farms are not competitive in commodity markets – and that they shouldn’t even try (see more below). They can survive, perhaps thrive (see also more below) in other settings, such as directs sale, community supported agriculture, Reko-rings/food assemblies etc.

Some pointed out that small farms can use old equipment, old barns and repair and maintain them to keep costs low. I guess that is very common, especially for extensively managed mixed farms. We have two old tractors on the farm and most equipment is old. It should be noted, however, that it is the drastic reduction in the number of farms and the growth of big farms, that has supplied the market with all these smaller, older and cheaper machines which can be repaired on the farm. Some market gardeners are more into new machinery. There are different strategies for survival.

*

Some seem to interpret my post as a statement of that small and diverse farms are not as good as big farms, but nothing can be further from the truth. The fact that small farms can’t compete is not an indicator of their failure, but an indicator of the failure of commodity farming*.

Some suggested that small farms can have a much better production system and use the land and resources better and thus get high yields, while maintaining bio-diversity. And that is true, but alas, also not something that makes a farm competitive in commodity farming. Again, this is not a failure of small farms but of commodity farming.

Many people seem to believe that small farms produce less food than bigger farms. But that is a mistake. The competitiveness of big farms is that they produce cheaper, not more and certainly not better. Some claim that small farms produce 70% of the worlds food. That is not correct - but they could produce all food.

Quite many pointed out that the “big” are (much more) dependent on fossil fuels and fertilisers (which are made of fossil fuels), so that, in the long run, they are not sustainable. Agreed! Of course they are. Shunning oil and using draught animals or just manual labour is more resilient and sustainable. It is, however, also linked to lower labour productivity compared to diesel-driven farming. This means that the income will be on a similar level.

By and large, small-scale farms are better from most perspectives. They are also more resilient as it is “easier”, i.e. less difficult, to maintain production in times of crisis, war or societal collapse.

It is hard

But regardless if you try to compete in commodity markets, build new markets, use best possible technologies, or do “primitive” farming it is hard to be a small-scale farmer living off the land. Period.

There are many people in high-income countries who start small scale farming with the ambition “to make a living”. Most fail. As Eric Suquet jokes: A farmer wins a million dollars in the lottery. A reporter asks her what she’s going to do with all that money. Her answer: “I guess I’ll just keep farming a little longer until it runs out.”

I commented on a similar story seven years ago:

“you can find evidence all over the world that small farms are not viable as commercial production entities providing a normal income. I see wave after wave of young people who have read a book or heard a lecture about organic gardening, of double digging, of the market garden, of holistic management or permaculture trying to make a dream come true. Other kinds of small farmer hypes is the idea that you find a unique line of production, such as herbs, truffles or raising rabbits for meat. Regardless of method and product, most will fail.”

It has been the same story for as long as I have farmed (i.e. since 1977). Of the farms with which we formed the (first?) organic marketing cooperative Europe in back in 1983, hardly any of them are in operation today.

Why should we be competitive?

It is hard, but I believe it is harder than necessary when you try to be competitive. If you, instead, let go of that obsession a weight is lifted from you chest:

“Do we WANT to be more “competitive”? Why? Perhaps some of us want to be more “collaborative” - collaborating with people, with animals, with plants, with soils, and etc.” (Scotlyn, in a comment on my previous post).

My own farm experience started with a very high level of self-sufficiency and very low costs and a corresponding very low income. After a while we became more commercially oriented, tried to develop small scale technologies, stopped making butter, keeping hens, tanning leather, working with horse and focussed on organic vegetables. We became a sizeable producer, with at the peak some 7 hectares of vegetables every year, the rest of the land in green manure crops or forage to a neighbour from which we got manure. But in the end, we, the two families running the operation, had to work much more with a much lower pay than our employees (who were properly employed with union contracts). After spending all time on the farm the first 5-6 years, I worked as a consultant and organiser of the organic sector in Sweden as the main job. After a while, I got well paid and poured money into the farm. As the organic market grew, economies of scale became more apparent and we had to compete with bigger farms with better logistics (our farm was far from markets and logistic corridors which made transportation costly). Gradually, the farm scaled down operations and became more oriented to local and regional sales again.**

In the current farm, Sunnansjö, my wife and I have dropped all ambitions of being competitive or profitable. The farm is oriented to:

- providing excellent food for us and some more people

- optimising multifunctional ecosystems

- being resilient

- creating more bio-diversity, in particular by breaking up rigid land-use categories such as forest, arable land and grasslands.

- providing a nice place to live

- learning

These things don’t pay bills. In order to survive economically, we pursue several complementary paths (in no particular order):

- getting income from outside the farm,

- keeping costs low, both for the farm and for private consumption,

- a high degree of self-sufficiency, including a lot of food processing,

- sales of meat, hides, fruit and vegetables, and

- having courses and events

- having no debt (will pay off the last this month).

Some would say that, our farm is not sustainable. But essentially, I believe the sustainability discourse is flawed. Sustainability, especially social and economic sustainability, is not something that is based on hard scientific analysis but totally dependent on the society and politics, and subject to all kinds of assumptions. Economic sustainability defined as profitable is an oxymoron, profit-orientation is not sustainable at al.

In addition, most farmers, in Sweden at least, have had numerous income streams for centuries. Earlier, they produced all sorts of handicraft, made charcoal, logged or provided transportation services. Today, they are clearing snow on roads, have various side jobs, rent out houses etc. As a matter of fact, also big farms often have non-farm income and often one of the partners have a day job.

One could argue that this is a luxury position that is easy to take for someone who is existentially secure and have various resources. I guess it is. Poverty is a real problem for most small farmers in the world and also in low income countries. But I have observed (I did work with smallholders in third world countries for around 20 years) that also there, successful small farmers have often got income from other sources. And they are also likely to become the big farms in the future. So the dynamic is quite the same. An important difference is that a “failed” smallholder in a very poor country may starve.

The way ahead

Some believe that free markets*** where independent farmers can sell their stuff to consumers represent an ideal; that it is interference by governments or big corporations that corrupt free markets. For sure, that is problematic, but free markets are never fair, powers are never equal, capital will be accumulated by some and not by others. The forces of competition are by themselves as much a problem as government rules and big corporations´ monopolist tendencies (which certainly also are problematic). Therefore, we need to build up systems outside of the prevailing markets. We need to challenge the producer-consumer divide and the notion that food is mainly a commodity to be sold.

I have come to the conclusion that the market mechanism itself is problematic as it reduces food and agriculture to products to be sold and the land to commodity. On our farm, we want to work with relationships instead of transaction as the leading principle. Relationship food is based on personal relationship between those that produce and those that consume and the management of the farm is a relationship between us and nature, formulated somewhat idealistic. Food is in this way an expression of these relationships.

We should see farming as a kind of human ecosystem niche construction****, where thriving ecosystems is as important as the production of food. Exact details will vary, and should vary as culture and ecological conditions differ, but I am sure small-scale farming will be a key feature.

I am well aware of that this vision doesn’t fit well with cities of 20 million people sourcing their food from all continents. But the right question is “Why should there be such cities?”

* I use the expression of commodity farming here as shorthand for the production of commodities sold in competitive markets. Most farmers just produce a commodity like, wheat, milk, coffee, cattle and sell it in a wholesale market, where they are basically price-takers. The more specialised and niche you are, either in what you produce, or how you sell, or both, the less affected you are by (global) commodity markets.

** There are many more things to say about the development of the Torfolk farm, which I left in 2008. I describe it more in Swimming in a river of change.

*** Free markets don’t exist and have never existed on any kind of scale. On the contrary, markets were created by rulers to control and profit from peoples’ cooperation and exchange. Markets are also dependent on state infrastructure such as private property, standardisation of measures, rule of law and money.

**** Niche construction theory is an ecological concept that is based on that organisms actively modify their environments, altering natural selection pressures and co-directing their own evolution. I use it in a wider sense, not mainly applied to genetic evolution, but also to cultural evolution.

For sure, machinery producers are powerful entities and they will twist things, like all commercial companies, to their own benefit. Meanwhile, the market for small scale farm technology is small in Sweden, but certainly not globally. Many manufacturers in India, China, Japan and Thailand cater for the needs of small farms – and they do produce a lot of useful implements (and many less so). Likewise the appropriate technology movement, also called intermediate technology has been around for more than fifty years and have introduced an array of interesting innovations.

While there is no doubt that there are many smart things to develop also for small farms, the real crux in a competitive market is not if small and diverse farms can improve labour productivity, but if they can improve it more than the bigger specialised farms. i.e. can technology flip the competition in favour of small farms?

It can help to look also into other sectors of the economy to realise that “small” is no advantage except in very exclusive markets. Perhaps some of you remember that when the Internet was new, many claimed that it would bring new possibilities to small companies. For sure, it did offer almost anybody the opportunity to open a web shop or write blog posts like this. But in the end, the Internet is also a place where the winner takes it all. Most internet based services are concentrated in the hands of very few companies and the concentration is even much bigger than in comparable analogue businesses.

Earlier, it was simple technologies that would save the small farms, today it is often robotics, AI and automation that will save the small farms: “According to the researchers, there are a number of digital applications that are suitable for use on small farms and can help them to remain [my italics] competitive,” says the web site of the German project Digital value chains for sustainable small-scale agriculture. But, I find no convincing argument for this on their web site, but several instances of the opposite. e.g. “the AI has to be trained individually for each crop and each pest pattern”. This is a typical technology effect, leading to less diverse production and bigger scale. The essential question which isn’t answered on the project site is how these technologies will benefit small farms more than big farms.

By and large, farmers are price-takers and productivity improvements are basically just resulting in lower prices. This means that if all small farms and big farms alike adopt certain productivity increasing technologies, prices will fall and the cost for the new technology has to be offset by a bigger production, which will depress prices even more (aka the agriculture technology treadmill). The net result is that for each new technology leap forward, farms get bigger and bigger. In a Swedish context, and I suspect it is quite the same in most “advanced economies”, the farms now in peril are those that were “viable family farms” just a few decades ago. Here we talk about crop farms with 50-300 hectares of land, dairy farms with 40-90 cows. Hardly small farms at all. The really small farms have since long either ceased to exist, become lifestyle farms, experience destinations, adjusted to a very low level of income or supplemented by day jobs (often a combination of all these). They have also in many cases developed new marketing channels or even created non-market models, such as CSAs.

Small and diverse farms can thrive in a localised economy setting or in extreme exclusive settings catering for an elite. Policies can obviously mitigate some of the disadvantages of smallness, redirecting government support, instituting tax rebates for small farms, adjusting regulations to accommodate for the needs of small farms, supporting cooperatives etc. And obviously, in a collapse scenario without oil and gas and all the technologies and infrastructure dependent on them, the situation can/will dramatically change.

Anyway, in this post I want to focus on technology. Obviously, improvements are always possible and should be welcomed. So the question is not for or against technology per se, but on how technology works in the current capitalist market economy. My conviction is that technology will not make small farms comparatively more competitive than big farms.

I invite my readers to prove me wrong! I know that many of you are engaged in small scale farming and alike. Give me some examples of technologies that make small farms competitive in commodity markets! Please don’t refer to this or that very successful market gardener/small farmer unless you have solid figures from their actual farm operation. And be clear about what is the result of technology and what is just a result of savvy marketing or a unique setting (having land for free in or close to a city).

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This first article demonstrated that there is no real decoupling taking place in the global economy.

The second article explained how the GDP is calculated and in particular how growth in GDP is calculated. It shows that the way growth is measured is full of flaws and exaggerates growth, which makes real decoupling even harder to accomplish.

The third article is about the service paradox of – why the assumed transition to a service economy is not reducing our impact on the environment.

The fourth article demonstrates that increased efficiency, digitalisation or a circulate economy are not pathways to combine economic growth with lower use of resources.

This final article address the main theme of the book I am writing*: despite all abstractions, the economy is basically still about using labour to convert natural resources into commodities to sell.

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Before I start, I note from some reactions I got on the previous four articles that some interpret my articles as a “defense” for growth or the GDP. This is not at all the case. On contrary, I would say the articles, and the book, are written with the purpose to establish the strong link between resource use and the economy. I demonstrate that there is no way out of that link. This means that if we are serious about reducing our ecological footprint we must also renounce economic growth.

The economy is essentially about converting various materials into either food, energy or things, artifacts. Those things can be goods for consumption or goods or structures for production, the latter is called capital. For all economic processes labour is essential. In addition, energy is always needed. In some cases the energy expended might only be human labour, as when you work manually in the garden. But also in these cases, energy has been used to produce the tools. And the tools are made of stuff. Historically, energy was renewable and many of the materials used were also renewable. Today, most energy is not renewable and most materials are not renewable.

In addition, the economic process also creates waste. These are the basics of all economic processes regardless of social or economic system, and regardless if the production is for the market, for self consumption or for giving away. In this way, the economy is also an important link between nature and society. All these processes are included in the natural metabolism of human societies, marked with A in the graph.

All social systems also have their special way of organising these economic processes. To be sustainable, the social system, including the prevailing beliefs and values and the economic system should be mutually supportive. In an organic (in its real meaning, not the method) farm economy, there is no clear separation between care (in its wider sense of reproduction, maintenance and repair), production and consumption. For the human to eat is as essential as feeding the cows and to eat is also to be able to produce, and what is produced is used for consumption, care as well as more production. To reproduce and take care of humans is also an integral part of the system, as natural as breeding cattle. In a wider sense, the care of nature is also part of the daily life, of production and consumption. Clearly, this is an idealised picture as in almost all agrarian societies there have been lords or empires demanding taxes, tithes, labour, slaves, soldiers, maids etc (marked with B in the graph).

It is still important to recognize that the capitalist market economy is different from earlier social systems, both in scale but also in organising principles**. In the capitalist market economy, two main institutions have been established to organise both production and consumption: money (and money-like instruments, such as bonds, shares, credits) and markets. Through them the link between culture and nature and the relationships between humans are mediated and in some sense severed. Man no longer consumes food that someone known has grown, and the tools one use are not made from any local materials by someone one has seen at least once or twice. Man buys products, commodities. These are no trivial changes and they change both nature and society. Other aspects of then market economy is the rift between care, production and consumption.

What is mostly discussed as “the economy” is the part B dominated by social institutions such as money, markets, governments, corporations, banks and investors. But all these are vehicles to manage part A, which is the biophysical essence of the economy. That is also where technology resides. What is in A are resources which are for free in an economic sense, natural resources, their contribution is not reflected in B. Only costs associated to their extraction, maintenance and conservation are part of society. Similarly, human care and reproduction (also in A!) is to a large extent a free service to the economy, but obviously essential for any human society. Here, societies pick up a bigger share through taxes and the welfare state.

But despite all the machinations in B, the basis for the economy is what happens in A and the economic contribution of B is to allocate and distribute resources. Therefore, all ideas of a de-materialised economy are just fantasies.

Obviously, there is a lot more to say about this – which is why I am writing a book!

So what comes next? A “collapse” perhaps. I wrote another series of 9 articles on that theme recently. The first one is this one: https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/me-the-collapsnik

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Thanks for reading, and a special thanks to those giving comments or spread my texts to yet others. Probably, I will spend more ink on food and agriculture themes in the coming months. Is there something special you would like me to cover?

* The book is written in Swedish with the tentative title Tyngden av pengar (the weight of money). It has a broader perspective than these five articles, and includes discussions about energy, money, markets, consumption, labour, capital, population. Would you be a publisher, publishing agent or a friend of a publisher, I am interested in having it published also in other languages. If so, contact me at gunnar(at)grolink.se.

** The fact that there have been markets also much earlier and the fact that there were very wealthy men in the past doesn’t change this. Markets and capital were not the organising principles of these societies, as little as the existence of a state meant they were socialist societies (some of them might actually have been state-controlled planned economies).

Note that the reasoning in this article is based on that labour and capital is used optimally and that there is “perfect” competition, i.e. that savings in the cost of production will lead to lower price. Of course, these idealised assumptions are not there in reality, but by and large, in the long run, these assumptions are fairly realistic.

Let’s start with the circular economy.

The circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended. In practice, it implies reducing waste to a minimum. When a product reaches the end of its life, its materials are kept within the economy wherever possible thanks to recycling. These can be productively used again and again, thereby creating further value. European Parliament

It is very hard to be against a circular economy! Almost all economies before industrial capitalism, to a very large extent, were circular. And still today, the poorer people are, the more circular the economy is, with a few exceptions (such as recycling of broken thin plastic bags or batteries). Already these facts should lead to a more critical perspective of the combination of growth and a circular economy. The whole industrial revolution is built on the replacement of circular processes, regulated by the pace of nature, with linear processes. To return to circularity, one will have to adjust to the pace and place of natural processes. Instead of using free gifts of nature one has to invest substantially in recycling and other circular processes.ⁱ A look at farming, gives you a clue of the difference.

In organic agriculture you are dependent on natural processes to regenerate fertility and regulate pests. You will use crop rotations, polycultures, integration of crops and livestock and meticulous recycling of nutrients on farm and those leaving the farm*. Traditional farming also reproduced the seeds and breeds, the labour, the tools and the energy needed, on the farm or in its vicinity. In conventional farming, you buy in diesel and electricity in huge quantities, which is used to drive all sorts of bought implements. Synthetic fertilisers and pesticides are major tools for regulating yields and pests. Seeds and breeds and all sorts of technologies are bought in from outside. Crop and livestock production has mostly been separated and circularity has been lost also there. Labour and capital is increasingly supplied from external sources. If you compare the production costs per unit and the labour required in a modern industrial farm with an organic, traditional farm, you get a good picture of why the economy will shrink with a truly circular economy.

Re-use of products is obviously something good – but it doesn’t create any economic growth at al. It is basically only the fees of any intermediaries that create an added value in an economic sense. And if the re-used stuff is cheaper, the consumer will have more money to spend on other stuff. In the apparel industry, it is noted that a growing second-hand market doesn’t reduce the purchase of new clothes.ⁱⁱ And even if it did, the money saved would be spent on something else. It is only if re-use is combined with lower incomes and lower societal production that resource use will be lower – but that is then a shrinking economy.

If recycling is easy and affordable, the price of the new goods made of the recycled materials will go down, and less people will work with the extraction of virgin materials. This will not grow the economy, unless the consumption increases, which is quite likely (=Jevons paradox). But then the resource consumption will also increase. If Jevons will not play, it means that people will have more consumption space instead, with the same result as above. If recycling is costlier than using virgin materials, which quite often is the case, recycling will only happen at scale with mandatory regulations. The value-addition will then increase. But, if recycling is costlier, it means that more labour, energy or other resources will be used in the process. This means that those resources will not be used in other economic activities, so the net effect on the GDP will still not be positive.

Improved quality and durability is clearly desirable, but it certainly doesn’t create any growth in an economic (GDP) sense, rather the opposite.**

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There is a rapid growth (or at least a hype) in the sharing industry. Sharing is also good, but it certainly doesn’t drive economic growth. If 100 people share 20 cars (sailboats, power tools etc.) it means less sales of cars (good!) but no economic growth. On the contrary, the economy will contract. But as people save money, they (and the car workers losing their job) will do something else and use resources. Now, if they save on a very resource consuming thing, like cars and spend their money on something less resource consuming, you could perhaps***, combine a neutral impact on the economy at large with a slightly lower use of resources, but you have not created any economic growth. And it would not be result of sharing per se.

Digital economy

I will skip the AI analysis for now (I took a stab at it here). But thirty years ago, the same stories heard about AI today, was told about the digital economy. For sure, we see that the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla) have astronomic valuations. But overall, the digitalisation has done little to increase economic growth. As a matter of fact, growth has been persistently slower since the digitalisation started to penetrate the economy. In many cases, it just makes the products cheaper and many services are today “free”. This certainly doesn’t create growth. There is the idea that digitalisation reduces the material footprint of goods and services. But there is no empirical evidence for this, rather the contrary. One example is the transition of the music industry from CD to streaming. That has, supposedly, saved a lot of resources. But it also reduced the added value in the music industry where the revenue shrank to half between 1998 and 2018.ⁱⁱⁱ Video-conferencing and telecommuting are also seen as major resource savers. But are they really? It is a bit hard to analyse, but my take is this: With the improvements in digital communication it has become a lot easier to outsource work to distant locations. Even if you manage much digitally, there will be many long-haul trips by managers, experts, quality professionals, auditors etc. And physical transports of intermediate goods will increase.

When I was a teenager, I lived a year in Belgium and didn’t go home to Sweden any time. I wrote letters and made a few phone calls. Towards the end of my stay, some friends came and visited, by train of course. Today, people studying abroad will travel home, or get visits from their parents and friends regularly, despite the fact that they can meet digitally. In addition, they will sometimes fall in love with someone from yet another country and then you have trips between, at least, three countries going on. In reality many more countries as each of the partners have close friends or siblings living in yet other countries, On a system level, there is really no indication that information technologies have saved resources. And as we know, they also need quite a lot of resources.

Efficiency then?

This is perhaps the star in the green growth narrative: by increasing efficiency, we can break the link between economic growth and resource use. But this needs some unpacking, definitions and deliberations. To begin with there is a huge difference between labour efficiency and resource efficiency. Mostly, efficiency is about increasing labour productivity, i.e. producing more with less labour. This is in essence what most of the industrial revolution, including the agricultural revolution, has been about.

Already David Ricardo noted that: “If ten men turned a corn mill, and it be discovered that by the assistance of wind, or of water, the labour of these ten men may be spared, the flour which is the produce partly of the work performed by the mill, would immediately fall in value, in proportion to the quantity of labour saved; and the society would be richer by the commodities which the labour of the ten men could produce.“^iv

The immediate result of improved labour productivity is that prices go down. The labour now freed can do other things, as Ricardo observed two hundred years ago. But the mills, in his example, were increasingly turned by coal and the machinery needed also consumed a lot of resources. Increased resource use has been the normal condition for decreasing labour use. A modern day farmer can manage some 500 times more land in cereals than a farmer working only manually. But it comes at the cost of an enormous resource use. Improved labour efficiency is therefore the main driver of both economic growth and resource use.

But then there is increased resource efficiency, i.e. using less raw materials or energy per unit produced. Seen in isolation this is obviously a good thing. But a narrow perspective doesn’t suffice to understand how this play out in the economy. Quite often, improved resource efficiency leads to increased consumption of the goods in question. The classic example is the improvements in coal extraction and its effects on coal consumption. Watt’s steam machine made coal a more cost-effective power source, leading to the increased use of the steam engine in a wide range of industries. This in turn increased total coal consumption, even as the amount of coal required for any particular application fell. The economist Stanley Jevons concluded: “It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”^v This is called Jevons paradox.

There was a parallel development in iron. With new production technologies, the amount of coal needed for a ton of iron went from 8 tonne to 2 tonne. With that, iron and steel became so much cheaper that railroads could be built, which in turn increased consumption of both coal and iron.^vi Today, some 0.4 tonne coal is needed per tonne of iron. And we use more iron than ever. Notably, as opposed to labour efficiency, improved resource efficiency doesn’t drive economic growth at al. The effect on the economy and the resource use differs depending on if the consumption goes up as per Jevons or if it is stable, i.e. if the consumption is elastic or not.

If a car maker reduces the use of steel per car to half of what they used before, and consumption remains the same, prices will fall and the value addition of the car-maker will remain on the same level. The work in the steel mill will fall, however, and labour will be made redundant. If they get new jobs the effect on the economy will be neutral****. If consumption increases to the double, the effect will be more work in the car factory and the same work in the steel mill. There will, seemingly be economic growth. A double production will also require substantial investment in machinery, infrastructure, transportation and marketing. All of that requires resources, and the material footprint of machinery, buildings and infrastructure is very high, higher than most other.^vii Meanwhile. the increased labour and capital needed will no longer produce something else, but also not use other resources. On a system level it may neither result in economic growth nor any major change in resource use.

Summing up, there is really no basis for concluding that improved resource efficiency can reduce the environmental footprint of a growing economy. But feel free to prove me wrong!

* Recycling of nutrients leaving the farms is hardly working nowadays as a result of modern sewage systems, but it is essential for organic agriculture on a societal scale. Today, most organic farmers are compensating for this deficiency by importing nutrients from other sources.

** In GDP accounting, consumption is immediate at the point of sale, and not related to the real value of consumption over time. With a more correct accounting practice, also consumer goods should be seen as capital investment and depreciated over its lifetime. This is obviously not possible on a macro-economic scale, in particular as many consumers buy new stuff even if the old is still working.

***As discussed in the previous post, most goods and services are resource intensive, so the resource saving is not at all certain. I know quite many city-dwellers that seem to use the money saved on not having a car on extensive holidays. And many members of a car pool are people who didn’t have a private car in the first place.

**** Of course they can be more or less productive in their new job, but it is reasonable to assume that their productivity will be the same.

i Giampietgro, Mario 2019, On the Circular Bioeconomy and Decoupling: Implications for Sustainable

Growth, Ecological Economics, Volume 162, 2019, Pages 143-156.

ii Svenska Dagbladet, 10 oktober 2025, Second hand boomar – triggar mer konsumtion, https://www.svd.se/a/kw22wL/vinted-plick-och-vestiaire-boomar-inte-nodvandigtvis-mer-hallbart (2026-03-25).

iii Quartz 2022, Streaming has helped the music industry recover—to half its peak size, 21 juli 2022.

iv Ricardo, David 1823, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, tredje upplagan.

v Jevons, William Stanley 1866). The Coal Question (2nd ed.).

vi Ayres, RU 1989 Technological Transformations and Long Waves, International Institute for Applies Systems Analysis.

vii Alfredsson, Eva och Malmaeus, Mikael, 2019, Real Capital Investment and Sustainability- the case of Sweden, Ecological Econoimics 161, 216-224.

This is the third post of five about the resource use of the economy. In the first, I demonstrated that the decoupling of emissions, energy use and resource use is not happening on a meaningful scale. National level decoupling has little explanatory meaning in a global economy, not even if you make consumption-based calculations. Economies that have most of their income from rents and from the control of global value chains, will appear to have small ecological footprints, but if resource use is linked to the value addition process, the picture is very different.

In the second article, I demonstrated several shortcomings in how growth of the GDP is measured, which makes it virtually impossible to analyse decoupling in a meaningful way. In this and the two following posts, I will further explore and explain why it is virtually impossible to grow the economy without increasing the use of resources.

A transition to a service economy is one of the paths that is claimed to accomplish simultaneous economic growth and a lower ecological footprint. But is that so? If we look at the bigger picture, however, a transition to a service economy doesn’t seem to lead to a lower footprint. Between 1991 and 2022, the share of global employment in services increased from 35 percent to 50 percent. In 2023, services composed 77 percent of the GDP of the USA while it was 65 percent in Sweden. Meanwhile the material footprint of the USA is considerably bigger per capita. Services’ share of the GDP of China doubled between 1970 and 2022 while resource use increased 12 times in the same period ^{i ii iii} How come?

Obviously, there are some personal services, such as household cleaning, hairdressing or massage, which have a very low footprint. They represent a very small share of the services, however. It is also apparent that such services are dependent on wage inequality as it is basically impossible for most of those who provide personal services to buy personal services themselves. Alternatively, society must raise taxes in order to subsidise them, which is exactly what states do to provide for health care, schooling and higher education (the extent this is done differ, but all states to my knowledge has some level of subsidised services). In relation to growth, personal services contributes very little to economic growth and it is quite easy to realise that there will be no growth in an economy made up of personal services. If we all cut each other’s hair, hang the laundry of our neighbour and teach the neighbourhood children math, there will be no economy, no market and no capitalism.

Many services use much resources. The travel industry is a good example where air travel, hotels and cruise ships all are much more resource demanding than many industries. Most services are actually, in one way or other, linked to manufacturing, mining, forestry or farming. In most industries big chunks of the work have been outsourced to service contractors. When a job is done within a manufacturing firm it is seen as part of manufacturing, but when the same job is bought in externally (i.e. outsourced) it is classified as services. 24 percent of the production value in the Swedish automotive industry goes to services. In the food industry, service costs corresponds to 20 percent of the output value ^iv. Real estate, rental and leasing services is the most important category of services in the USA and they are obviously closely linked to very high resource use.^v Finally, a big portion of services is trade and distribution, and their link to resource use is quite obvious as it is the huge flow of goods that necessitates all those services. After all, it is only because Walmart, Carrefour or Amazon sell a lot of stuff that they can employ a lot of people and earn money.

It can perhaps be easier to understand the relative importance of services and how much they are linked to manufacturing, investments and real estate by looking at the consumption side. In Sweden, almost half of the household consumption is made up of purely material stuff such as food, clothes, energy and housing. Only one fifth of the personal consumption is allocated to things that can be classified as services with fairly low resource use. In between there are services with a very high material content, such as travel, hotel and restaurants. Notably, as manufactured goods are mostly becoming cheaper as a result of continued productivity gains while services don’t demonstrate the same gains, the actual volume of goods consumed increase with increased income. Not even the very rich consume a very high share of services, even though the do spend more on financial services, insurance and alike. ^vi

While the cost of services has taken a larger part of the economy, industrial production in volume has increased much more than services have. Between 1800 and 2010, the global industrial production increased 200 times, an increase with 2.6 percent per year, while the GDP increased only with 2 percent per year (and as demonstrated in my previous article, that is likely an exaggeration of the GDP). And during the period 1950-2010 industrial production increased 12,7 times while the GDP grew 8,5 times.^vii The seeming paradox is a result of the productivity gains in manufacturing, making more stuff cheaper than ever before. But this also means that the resource use of manufacturing is increasing.

Developments in agriculture is even more striking. In the middle of the 19^th century, it took 200 hours of work to harvest and thresh one tonne of barley or wheat. Today, that takes just 5 minutes. If we look at the ”transition to services” from a global perspective we can see that the share of people working in manufacturing has been quite consistent over time, it grew from 21 to 24 percent between 1991 and 2022. Meanwhile the employment in agriculture went from 43 percent to 26 percent and the employment in services grew from 35 percent to 50 percent.

It should be clear from the above that there is not really a big shift to services happening. The increase is linked to ever more complex value chains for goods, producing ever increasing quantities of stuff. The illusion that a shift to services would dematerialise the economy is built on the assumption that the car-worker will stop making cars to become and artist or that I will go to the barber instead of buying new shoes. But that is not how the economy works, There are not fewer cars made but ever more. And there are more shoes.

A real shift to a society with lower material footprint will only happen if the total production – and consumption – of manufactured good and investments are reduced. But this would also lead to a reduction in services as there would be less overhead, less demand and less taxes.

i World Bank, 2024, Services, value added (% of GDP), https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.SRV.TOTL.ZS

ii West J, Schandl H, Heyenga S and Chen S (2013). Resource Efficiency: Economics and Outlook for China. UNEP, Bangkok, Thailand.

Our World in Data (2024). Data adapted from United Nations Environment Programme. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/domestic-material-consumption-per-capita [online resource]

iii World Bank, 2024, Employment by sector, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.IND.EMPL.ZS

iv Kommerskollegium 2012, Everybody is in Services.

v https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233657/us-service-sector-value-added-gdp-industry/

vi Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, 10 juni 2014, Income Inequality and Income-Class Consumption Patterns, https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentary/2014/ec-201418-income-inequality-and-income-class-consumption-patterns (2026-04-01)

vii Marsh, Peter 2010, The New Industrial Revolution, Yale University Press.

However, the GDP measure itself and how the growth of the GDP is measured is the other part of the comparison and the way that GDP growth is measured perverts the decoupling analysis.

Before I continue, let me make it clear that I don’t consider the GDP to be a relevant measure of human wellbeing or “progress”. I will not repeat all the arguments for that (some of them you can find here). Meanwhile, I also don’t think that the obsession with the GDP is driving the growth of an economy. Already the fact that the GDP growth in most high-income countries was higher before the introduction of the GDP-measure makes that clear. The GDP is just a measure of economic activity and the value-addition process and as such it has some merit for analysing the economy. If you are not familiar with the GDP and how it is calculated, please read this IMF-article first.

Here I focus on how the GDP is compared over time, because that is what is relevant in the context of decoupling. One might believe that it is quite straight-forward to calculate this, but when you take a critical look it has some serious methodological shortcomings.

Adjusting the GDP to changes in quantity and quality

When the GDP growth over a period of time is calculated it is not just the nominal (current) size of the economy in monetary terms that is considered. First, you need to adjust for inflation. Inflation increases prices but not really the economy as such, so you need to recalculate the figures to compensate for inflation. That is hardly controversial, or difficult to understand. But then things get tricky: GDP comparisons over time also try to adjust for changes in quantity and quality of products. If you produce two bicycles Year 2 for half the price compared to Year 1 (corrected for inflation), you get more, the double, for the same money. When the “real” GDP is calculated the effect of this increase of volume is that the bicyle-economy has grown 100 percent in the period between Year 1 and Year 2. But then perhaps the quality of the bicycles was lower in Year 2. That is also adjusted in the calculation of the real GDP. But clearly, it is quite difficult to determine the difference in value between two different qualities.

I write this on a computer that is perhaps 1000 times more powerful than my first laptop bought 1994. And the price is much lower. How do we compare “a laptop” 2026 and 1994? It is not only difficult, it is more or less subjective. For example, when calculating the average quality improvement of computers between 1995 and 2001, Italy estimated a 4 percent annual improvement, France 15 percent and the US 25 percent. The GDP effect of such a divergence in thirty years is a factor of 1000.ⁱ Most users of a computer will use them mainly as advanced type-writers, and despite all improvements I don’t think I write much faster, perhaps 50 percent, on this computer (with LibreOffice) than on the 1994 version (with Word Perfect). After all, it is mainly about thinking, typing, editing (and yes, I still mostly use the keyboard commands rather than the mouse for copying, moving etc.).

In addition, there is a time perspective. The economic (GDP) value of a good emerges at the sales and not during the use (this is of course also by itself a very strange thing). I still have some organic t-shirts made from Peruvian Pima cotton which are thirty years old, while some new ones bought at H&M, or another mainstream shop, keep a year or so. This is not reflected in the GDP, which grows more rapidly if stuff last shorter time. I am probably not the only one among those born 60-70 years ago, who has the impression that the quality of many items, such as household appliances and tolls, is considerably lower nowadays (there are also some items which are better).

Apart from the pure problems with how to make these calculations there is a fundamental problem with a mismatch of units. The GDP is measured based on prices expressed in monetary units. But quantities and qualities of goods are not monetary phenomenon, even though the GDP-wizards at national statistical agencies use various methods to convert them into money.ⁱⁱ It is like trying to reconstruct the temperature at a certain time by re-calculating changes in wind and precipitation into degrees Celsius (or Fahrenheit if you so prefer). Even the simple assumption that two bicycles of the same kind represent a double value compared to one bicycle is flawed as the marginal utility for me having a second bicycle is much lower than the utility of the first bicycle.

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Impact of choice of base year

Linked to the problems above is the choice of base year. A base year in real GDP calculations is a year chosen as a reference point to measure economic growth. It allows economists to adjust nominal GDP for inflation, ensuring that comparisons of output over time reflect changes in physical production volume rather than price changes.

In the paper, Putting Power Back Into Growth Theory, Blair Fix shows how the choice of base year can impact the GDP with an example of an economy made up of cars and computers.

-1980, the USA produced 100 cars and 1 computer. (the figures are indexed). The cars costed around 8,000 dollars and a computer 20,000 dollars.

- 2011, the car production was still 100 but the price had increased to 20,000 dollars, while the computer production had increased to 500, but prices had plummeted to 600 dollars.

If we chose 2008 as the base year the GDP would have grown by 29 percent. With 1980 as the base year, the growth would instead be 131 percent! (see graph, courtesy of Blair Fix). One can’t say that one of the years is correct, so the choice is arbitrary ⁱⁱⁱ

Looking at the US economy as a whole, according to the paper by Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics, by Blair Fix, Jonathan Nitzan, and and Shimshon Bichler (2019) the size of the GDP growth in the period 1947-2018 will differ with 30 percent depending on which base year we chose.^iv This is not unique for the USA. When Nigeria changed its base year from 1990 to 2010, its GDP grew with 89 percent! And the annual growth rate increased with three percentage units. The public debt decreased from 18 percent of the GDP to 11 percent – good for the government.^v

In an article in Ecological Economics, Gregor Semieniuk demonstrates how the choice of base year (he calls them vintage) influence the analysis of decoupling. When comparing the emission intensity for a number of countries over a 10 year period the result will depend on which base year one selects. When he studies the IEA statistics of global energy intensity between 1971 and 2010, his conclusion is that: “While the primary energy ratio stays fairly constant across vintages, the GDP ratio varies more, expressed by a standard deviation that is an order of magnitude higher than that of primary energy. In other words, the main driver of any energy intensity changes is a change in accounting for GDP, not energy, across vintages”.^vi

Most countries have started to use the method of chain-linked GDP to reduce the problems with the choice of base year, but it really doesn’t solve the problems related here. ”The only solution to the base-year problem would be if prices were stable. But since we cannot change history, this solution is unattainable” as expressed by Fix, Nitzan and Bichler.

The financial services

A third problem is the impact of the financial economy on the GDP. The total global financial assets amounts to 600 billion dollars. From corresponding to 75 percent of the GDP 1990, they now amount to 200 percent of the GDP.^vii A lot of this increase is caused by asset inflation, e.g. increases in stock and property prices (in turn often financed with debt).^viii Changes in asset prices and increase in financial capital doesn’t directly impact the GDP. But there are numerous ways that there is an influence. GDP wizards are imputing rent also from privately owned housing, so if the cost of housing goes up, so will the GDP. There are also many financial services that are included in the GDP, such as the interest on credits, the fees of stockbrokers or funds, insurance etc. Financial services are nowadays an important part of the economy, and they tend to grow with the growth of financial capital. More than one fifth of the US GDP is now made up of financial services. That Luxemburg is the EU-member state with the highest GDP is simply a result of that it is a financial centre and that financial services are costly.

As a result of the growth of the financial sector, GDP has grown a lot in the advanced economies. But it is questionable if the financial services really should be included in the GDP. Before the 1993, financial services were not even included in the System of National Accounts (the GDP standard). In various steps they have been included and in 2008 also costs and income for patents, brand and royalties were included. Before that they were considered assets. Through that change, the GDP-growth of Ireland 2015 was 26.3 percent compared to 7.8 percent with the old way of counting.^ix

Even if financial services are included, the method by which they are included is inconsistent with how goods are included. If the price of a property has grown with 100 percent in a period of time, also real estate agent fees, credit costs, insurance and imputed rent for that same property will have grown correspondingly or at least considerably, despite the property being the same. This is very much in contrast to how the GDP wizards calculate the value of goods, where a 100 percent increase in price for the same product will be considered to be inflation.

Real GDP as measured can’t be used for determination of decoupling

From the above it should be apparent that measuring GDP over time is a venture that is difficult. As Joan Robinsson says: There never will be a unit for measuring national income that has the same meaning for everyone, still less a unit that means the same thing at different times” ^x It seems as if the methods are exaggerating current GDP and that already scant indications of decoupling may show to be invalidated if measured in another way. This should, perhaps, suffice to end the decoupling debate. Nevertheless I will continue with my five piece series of articles. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.

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i Fix mfl 2019, Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics, Real-World Economics Review. No. 88. July. pp. 51-59.

ii Fix mfl 2019, Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics, Real-World Economics Review. No. 88. July. pp. 51-59.

iii Fix, Blair 2015, ‘Putting Power Back Into Growth Theory’, Review of Capital as Power, Vol. 1, No. 2 , pp. 1-37.

iv Fix mfl 2019, Real GDP: The Flawed Metric at the Heart of Macroeconomics, Real-World Economics Review. No. 88. July. pp. 51-59.

v World Economics 2025, Base Years and Rebasing, 28 november 2025 https://www.worldeconomics.com/Concepts/BaseYears/, 3 januari 2026

vi Semieniuk, G. (2024). Inconsistent definitions of GDP: Implications for estimates of decoupling. Ecological Economics, 215

vii Goldman Sachs 2025, Investing in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, 15 oktober 2025, https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/2025/10/15/21c88473-1287-408f-97f8-36c7a80340cb.html#_6f0099ab-ee31-4000-a5a1-96067cd13000 (3 januari 2026).

viii McKinsey Global Institute 2025, Out of balance: What’s next for growth, wealth, and debt?, Oktober 2025.

ix Lynch, Robin 2019, The treatment of Intellectual Property in the National Accounts, ESCoE Discussion Paper No. 2019-10.

x Robinson, Joan 1962, Economic Philosophy.

- It is indeed possible to decouple carbon dioxide emissions from economic growth.

- It is more difficult to decouple useful energy from economic growth.

- It is not likely that economic growth can be decoupled from general resource use, because ”the economy” is basically about transformation of natural resources into commodities – regardless of how many layers of services we add.

- Because of the globalisation of value chains, decoupling of national economies are not particularly relevant as a proof of anything.

- How growth of GDP is calculated has a huge impact on the results, but this is rarely recognised. The measure is a lot more subjective and ambiguous than most people understand and the development of GDP over time is based on even more dubious calculations.

- Efficiency is not a recipe for decoupling, nor is circular economy and other green growth fantasies.

As part of my ongoing book writing project, tentatively called “the weight of money”, I have expanded my analysis of why decoupling is a fantasy. In five posts, I will explain why.

This first article is about what decoupling means and the empirical evidence.

The second article is about how the GDP is calculated and in particular how growth in GDP is calculated and why that has a huge impact on the notion of decoupling.

The third article is about the service paradox of – why the assumed transition to a service economy is not reducing our impact on the environment.

The fourth article is about efficiency and other aspects supposedly making it possible to combine economic growth and lower resource use.

The final article is more directly linking to the main object of the book: despite all abstractions, the economy is basically still about using labour to convert natural resources into commodities to sell.

*

Let’s start with some definitions:

Absolute or relative?

When speaking about decoupling one has to be clear about whether it is an absolute or a relative decoupling that is discussed. An absolute decoupling means that emissions (or whatever is discussed) are decreasing. A relative decoupling means that the emissions don’t grow as fast as the GDP grows. Essentially, an absolute decoupling is necessary to avoid dramatic climate change. ‘

What?

Often, decoupling is specifically about carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but sometimes it addresses greenhouse gas emissions (mostly calculated as CO2 equivalents, a very dubious concept), or energy use, pollution or use of “materials”.

Which entity?

It is also essential to clarify which the entity that is subject to research, a production process, a firm, a country, a value chain, the global economy. Boundaries matter – a lot.

Which period?

It is also very important to be clear about which period we are discussing and if that period has some special conditions that needs to be taken into account.

*

There is a flow of reports and articles claiming that absolute decoupling is happening. For example, a report from the Energy&Climate Intelligence Unit (2025)ⁱ demonstrates that since the signing of the Paris Agreement 2015, 43 countries have reached absolute decoupling and 40 countries have reached relative decoupling of carbon dioxide emissions. When you take a critical look in these kinds of reports, you often find weaknesses. In this case, I haven’t really checked it: let’s just assume that they have done the math.

There are no theoretical obstacles for decoupling of emissions to take place. In many countries there have been a development where fossil gas (mostly called “natural gas”, but I reject that green-washing) is replacing coal in power generation or heating^ii. Just by switching from coal to gas in electric power generation, you reduce emissions with 50 percent! ⁱⁱⁱ On a global level around 80 percent of the supplied energy is still of fossil origin, even if coal is declining and gas is increasing. So you can very well increase the use of fossil fuels and still reduce emissions. Another important driver is the increased use of biomass. In climate budgets, carbon from biomass is not counted as emissions (some argue for that it should, but let’s not discuss that now), so when you skip coal and burn wood instead you get zero emissions.

In Sweden, the use of biomass has increased with 350 percent since 1970, and biomass is now the biggest energy source.^iv In the EU as a whole biomass use increased with 200 percent between 1990 and 2010^v and in the US it increased with 240 percent between 1973 and 2023.^vi

We also need to consider prices. In particular when it comes to oil. Oil reached its lowest price, around 12 dollars per barrel, in the end of 1960 Since then oil has risen considerably, albeit with huge fluctuations. The first half of the 20^th century, oil was still relatively expensive. In that period the use of fossil fuels increased with 1.7 percent annually, while the global economy grew by 2.13 percent. Between 1945 and 1973 the fossil fuel use grew with a staggering 4,.48 percent per year while the economy grew with 4.18 percent, even the opposite of relative decoupling (not sure if there is a term for that?).^vii

When oil prices sky-rocketed with the two oil crises in the seventies, people started to economise, cars got smaller, industries reduced waste and farmers stopped using ultra excessive quantities of nitrogen fertilisers (which are just fossil fuels in drag). An even more remarkable case is how use of oil, gas and nitrogen fertilisers shrank dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, energy had been almost free, and waste was rampant.^viii With this in mind, it is not hard to find proof or decoupling of carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth in the period from 1980 and onwards. Still, the overarching global picture is that the only periods of global absolute decoupling is in periods of economic contraction, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Global Financial crisis 2008 and the Covid pandemic.

If one also consider the linkage between useful energy and economic growth we can see that an even stronger correlation. After all, it is the useful energy that drives the economy. For example, if you drive a car, it is the power rotating the wheels that you are after, not the noise, the exhaust or the generation of heat (well, if you live in Sweden, you do like some of that heat half of the year). If you have a car with an internal combustion engine (ICE!) around one third of the energy in the petrol or diesel is converted to that power. In addition, already before that, the oil had to be extracted, refined and transported and pumped, so the actual energy use is even higher. Meanwhile, in an electric car almost 90 percent of the energy is rotating the wheels. And electricity generation itself has gone from mostly coal to hydro, nuclear, sun, wind and gas, all more efficient than coal. Similarly a gas power station has a lot higher energy efficiency.^ix According to the calculations by Carey King, the useful energy and GDP are strongly linked together between 1900 and 2000 in USA, Great Britain and Austria, but not in Japan since 1980^x.

If we, instead of fossil fuels and energy, look into the material footprint, the picture is less clear as there are so many different kinds of materials. However, looking over a period from 1900 to 2020 we can see that total resource use per dollar has decreases, but with variations over time. It went from 3,7 kg of materials per dollar 1900 to 1.5 kg per dollar in 2012. ^{xi xii xiii C}

Clearly a relative decoupling but absolutely not any absolute decoupling. If wee look in more detail we will see that it is almost only biomass use per dollar that has shrunk, while the use of fossil fuels, metals and other materials have fluctuated between 1 and 1.5 kg per dollar, with a peak from WWII until 1970s (see above).^xiv Between 1970 and 2024, metal use increased with 300 percent and gravel, sand and rock increased with 454 percent (mainly as a result of building and construction), while the population increased with “just” 122 percent ^xv

Let’s now turn to which entity we are measuring. Global figures are of course the most relevant as the economy to a large extent is global. But mostly supposed decoupling is demonstrated per country. Already in that case, we have the distinction between territorial or consumption based emissions. If most of the dirty industries are outsourced, it is not hard to show a growing economy and decreasing emissions in the territory. But also the consumption based emissions represent a narrow look. Instead we need to look into where and how the money is generated, because it is the linkage between emissions and the economy that is the topic. If you are an oil producing and exporting country, a huge share of your GDP will be derived from oil exports, but the only emissions of that oil that will be booked on your country is the emissions in the extraction, within country transport and refinery. The combustion of Norwegian oil and gas cause emissions which are ten times as high as Norway’s own emissions. To that should be added the emissions caused by the use of the nitrogen fertilisers that Norway also export.^xvi That Norway is the global champion of adoption of electric vehicles doesn’t make much difference.

As the GDP is measured through the value added in the economy, the most relevant way of assessing any decoupling, is to link them to the emissions in the value chain. A study of 866 products in 28 countries showed that 45 percent of the emissions were caused by suppliers and subcontractors and 23 percent by the controlling company and 32 percent by usage and disposal.^xvii If you are a car company or a maker of mobile phones most of the emissions are caused in those countries where most of the industrial work is done, e.g. in China, while most of the value is captured by controlling company, located in high-income countries.

In a ground-breaking study 2018, Pablo Piňero and colleagues showed that if emission of a value chain is distributed according to the value created in the various stages, countries like Sweden and Germany would cause much higher emissions. In the Swedish case, the emissions based on value addition are 42 percent higher than when calculated based on consumption and 53 percent higher than if you calculate territorial emissions.^xviii

In this article we have only discussed how emissions and resource use are calculated and allocated, assuming that the GDP and GDP-growth are solid scientific facts. But as I will demonstrate in the next article, they are not.

Rreferences

i Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, 2025, 10 Years Post-Paris: How emissions decoupling has progressed globally, December 2025

ii IEA (2019), The Role of Gas in Today’s Energy Transitions, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy-transitions.

iii EIA 2024, How much carbon dioxide is produced per kilowatthour of U.S. electricity generation?, 11 December 2024 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11.

iv Energimyndigheten 2025, Energiläget i siffror 2024

v Kalt, Gerald 2012, Bioenergy in the context of the EU 2020- and 2050-policy targets: Technology priorities, opportunities and barriers, 12th IAEE European Energy Conference.

vi US EIA 2024, Monthly Energy Review, 23 December, 2024, https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/.

vii Fressoz, Jean Baptiste och Christoph Bonneuil, the Idea of infinite growth from fossil capitalism to green capitalism, in Borowy, Iris och Matthias Schmelzer 2017, History of he future of economic growth.

viii FAOSTAT

ix Lumley, Graham 2024, Coal vs Natural Gas: Comparing Fossil Fuels, BKV Energy, https://bkvenergy.com/learning-center/coal-vs-natural-gas/.

x King, Carey W 2021, The economic superorganism, Springer

xi Pineault, Éric 2023, A social ecology of capital. Pluto Press.

xii Bithas, Kostas och Panos Kalimeris, Unmaskuing decoupling, Science of the total environment 619-630 (2018) 338-351.

xiii Hickel, Jason och Giorgios Kallis 2020, Is green growth possible, New political economy vol 25, no 4 469-486.

xiv Pineault, Éric 2023, A social ecology of capital. Pluto Press.

xv Global Material Flows Database 2025, International Resource Panel, https://www.resourcepanel.org/global-material-flows-database.

xvi NOU 2023: 25, The transition to low emissions s. 211.

xvii Meinrenken, C.J., Chen, D., Esparza, R.A. et al. Carbon emissions embodied in product value chains and the role of Life Cycle Assessment in curbing them. Sci Rep 10, 6184 (2020). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62030-x

xviii Piñero, P., Bruckner, M., Wieland, H., Pongrácz, E., & Giljum, S. (2018). The raw material basis of global value chains: allocating environmental responsibility based on value generation. Economic Systems Research, 31(2), 206–227.

In the Wealth of Nation, after the famous example of how the pin factory radically increases the productivity in pin making, Adam Smith continues to discuss how division of labour and markets are tied together: ”As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market”. I believe this observation is correct, and that it explains why a globalised food system never can work in favour of organic or regenerative farms.

The problem with a (globalised) commodity food system is not that the food from “other countries” is bad or that “they have lower standards than us”. Of course that could be true (It is said in most countries so there must also be some logical gap there….), but it can also be the opposite. No, the problems are on another level:

- There is an enormous resource use and emissions from transports.

- It creates dependency and vulnerability.

Those are relevant objections. I will not discuss them here, however.

What I do want to discuss are three other aspects of commodity markets, which work against the principles of regenerative/organic/agroecological (take your pick) farming:

- A global food system can not be circular; you can’t close nutrient cycles and return all those nutrients embedded in the food to the land from where it came.

- The global (the bigger) market drives increasing division of labour, which drives increasing specialisation, mechanisation and larger scale. This makes it very hard to compete with a regenerative organic production.

- The global market disconnects and alienates people from the rest of the living, replacing lived experiences and wisdom with theoretical information and abstract knowledge.

While they, seemingly, have little to do with each other, they are essentially three sides of the same coin.

A global food system can not be circular.

While there are many ways, by which a farmer can activate nutrients tied up in the soil and get nitrogen from the air by nitrogen fixing bacteria, there is a real challenge to get sufficient nutrients to plants. Most organic or regenerative farms have some level of nutrient import to the farm. It can be compost materials from outside, manure from conventional farms, some feed or mineral feed to livestock etc. On a larger scale and longer term, it is absolutely critical that most of the nutrients shipped away from the fields is recycled back to the fields (I am well aware of that as sewage systems are working now a lot of nutrients are wasted and the rest is mostly contaminated, so you don’t want the sludge anyway – it is also not allowed in organic farming). But this is hard enough to accomplish on a local scale, and simply not practical on a global scale.

The global market drives specialisation and increasing scale.

For some, this might be a truism which merits no further explanation. However, I realise from many interchanges in person, in lectures and on social media that many people don’t see to see this logic.

The division of labour is a fundamental principle of the modern industrial society. It is based on that each individual person makes a narrow set of work with the assistance of machinery of some kind (a tractor, a drill, a truck or a computer). As Adam Smith notes with his pin factory example, this increases the productivity per man-hour tremendously. The twin to this specialisation and division of labour is a bigger market. With a bigger market, division of labour and specialisation can increase and with more specialisation you need a bigger market.

If you grow fifty different crops, it is incredibly hard to mechanise the production as each crops needs some special technology, storage facility, even skills and knowledge. In addition, each crop needs special packaging materials and logistics and perhaps different markets as well. If you want to be efficient you need to narrow the number of crops, and you will also narrow the “qualities” of these crops. It makes no sense to grow twenty varieties of tomatoes. The same goes for livestock

According to the same logic of division of labour, you will also specialise within the production. Instead of regenerating the fertility of the soil, you will buy bagged fertilisers, instead of spending energy on increasing bio-diversity on the farm, you buy pesticides to manage the increase in pests caused by the narrow number of crops. Instead of raising and training your children (or the neighbour’s children), you buy labour. Instead of being a jack of all trades you have to become a wheat/carrot/chicken producer. And so it goes on and on. Note that it is the scale and kind of the market that is relevant here, not if it is national, regional or “global” per se. What counts is the competition and volumes traded. A global market is just the worst because it is the biggest with the fiercest competition.

Some seem to believe that “the problem” is big companies, big food industries or big supermarkets. For sure they are problematic. But they are largely a result of the big market. Some say there is too little competition in the market as the markets are dominated by a few actors. But the reality is that the more competition and transparency there is in a market, and the bigger it is, fewer actors will dominate. The internet is of course the best place to verify this statement. In terms of services over the internet, such as online shopping, movie streaming, translation services or audiobooks there will be a few actors that take most business. The same goes for the digital infrastructure where companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple dominate their respective slots. I recently wrote an article about this phenomenon in the farm input industry.

Of course, there will be the odd farm that will survive in niches of the (global) market. There will be the extraordinary cheese or wine that can be exported to another continent. There was a demand for exclusive products already thousand years ago. There will always be some space for extraordinary products for an elite, and that is fine for those engaged in it, but it has very little relevance here.

For other small and diverse producers, the global market has no opportunities. They can only survive in special niches. e.g. there can be the producers of vegetables that supply a particular high end restaurant (here I would recommend this entertaining video on the farm-to-table movement, by Morgan Gold, even if I don’t fully agree with the conclusion/solutions in the end). Or a farm with grass-fed chicken that delivers directly to consumers. Or a CSA, a farming club, a Reko-ring or similar. All of them are intentionally shielded from the large anonymous mass market. Some believe that they should be scaled up, but that will not work. They could be scaled out, though.

I talk mostly about small scale, but what about diverse and large scale? Also here I am sure you can find the odd example that is working. Before you point to one of those farms, please check how they make their living. In my experience if such a farm is an organic, regenerative exemplary farm it will most certainly have external income, or being owned by someone rich enough (did I say King Charles?) or selling their services as advisors or selling their story on social media or whatnot. On big farms the logic of specialisation is the same, or even stronger, as the rate of mechanisation will be higher on a larger farm.

Commodity markets disconnect and alienate people from the rest of the living. This is not a bug, no negative side-effect, but an inherent feature of commodity markets. The whole point with bigger markets is to break the tie between consumers and producers, between the people and the land. The only relationship that is supported in these markets are transaction with money, a fetish devoid of any meaning. Exchange of goods is not only about the goods themselves, equally important are the social connections and the meaning conferred in the exchange.

This is also one major reason for why so much of the food debate is mistaken and based on very theoretical discourses. The conscientious global consumer tries to avoid palm oil from Indonesia, beef from Brazil and a few more symbolic products. But, by and large, there is no way to assume responsibility of your footprint in a global market place. It is also a reason for why some people, without blinking, can recommend you to eat stuff that is produced on another continent, without contemplating what that really implies.

There is also a system scale objection to the idea that farms will be profitable once they do everything right. For sure, if one farmer adopts a unique technology, it can give her an advantage, but when everybody adopts it, prices will fall and you are back to square one. One agriculture economist in Sweden once stated that prices of agriculture products is determined by the lowest compensation where there still will be people willing to farm. This will continue to be the case as long as there is over-production in the farm sector, which most likely will continue also in the future. The opposite, under-production, may be a good deal for farmers, but socially and morally repulsing.

Therefore, it is better to realise that the anonymous mass-market, the commodity market, the global market – call it what you want – is not at all conducive for a diverse, organic, regenerative, agro-ecological farming, and to realise that converting the food system is as important as converting how you farm. It is essential to re-connect food to the land and the process of farming. This will give food an enhanced value not only as a supplier of energy and essential nutrients, but also as a source of meaning and experience of the land, of the living and of the people producing food.