Creating a climate-friendly food system is cooking up a showdown between the U.S. and the European Union.
The two power players are at odds over the best way to mitigate the climate impact of the agriculture industry, from deforestation to the way food is grown and packaged to the waste it creates. This is no side dish: The sector accounts for fully one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.S. position is that farmers can keep growing more food without environmental consequences through new technology, such as gene-edited crops that store more carbon in the soil, data analytics that help farmers use fewer chemicals and feed additives that reduce methane emissions from cattle.
The EU is taking a more regulatory approach, aiming to slash pesticide and fertilizer use by 2030 and expand organic production to a quarter of farmland.
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“The world’s got to get fed, and it’s got to get fed in a sustainable way. And we can’t basically sacrifice one for the other,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a recent POLITICO summit in Paris.
