The global food industry is deeply involved in anthropogenic climate change. Intensive agriculture consumes large quantities of fossil fuel: in the chemicals applied to fields, running on-farm machinery, food packaging, and transporting goods to consumers over long distances. Industrial food production encourages adopting monocultures, resulting in the clearing of forests and vegetation that would otherwise reflect and absorb heat (contributing to the greenhouse effect). The modern food industry continues to expand the scale of animal production, through CAFOs, which produce large amounts of greenhouse gases and extensive environmental pollution. The modern food industry is a global structure; these challenges to environmental sustainability are fundamentally a part of this structure, too. Based on the energy requirements, waste production, and generally destructive practices of the global food industry, it may be impossible to reduce its contributions to climate change without restructuring the entire system.

During Agriculture Day, an event organized by CGIAR on the sidelines of the Climate Conference in Cancun (COP16/CMP6), we briefly interviewed Erik Ywema Peter, General Manager of the SAI Platform. The ‘Sustainable Agriculture Initiative’ was launched in 2002 by the Group Danone, Nestle and Unilever, and now includes 25 companies like Illy, Kellogg's, Kraft, PepsiCo, Coke, and McDonalds.

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