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Future of Food

The food system is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. We must transform how we deliver healthy and diverse food to a growing population, using less land and drastically reducing emissions. The Bezos Earth Fund is committing $1 billion to help transform food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet.

Villagers wearing colorful garb carry bundles of large green plants — (Photo credit: AFR100 / World Resources Institute)

While our food system provides nourishment to over 7.5 billion people worldwide, it’s also at the center of many of today’s global challenges. Hunger has been growing recently, and nearly 3 billion have health conditions related to limited access to healthy foods. Agroecosystems are now the single largest ecosystem on the planet and agriculture is the primary driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss. And the food system is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Bezos Earth Fund is committing $1 billion to help transform food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet. By 2050, the world needs to be able to produce enough food to feed 10 billion people.

We must grow and distribute food using less land, with vastly reduced emissions, and with nature-based solutions at the heart of our production practices. This means reconsidering our diets, transforming market systems to drive sustainability, and rethinking where and how food is produced to vastly reduce its footprint on our planet.

While the current food system isn’t sustainable, agriculture can help grow new climate solutions. Agriculture has the potential to capture and sequester vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

Soils alone contain three times as much carbon as is found in the atmosphere, and landscapes have ample potential to “recarbonize” through many more sustainable farming practices. The sector is among the most cost-effective ways of achieving climate mitigation.