One question on everyone’s mind today is how COVID-19 will impact our lives in the short and long term. What will our new normal look like?
What we rarely consider, however, is our own influence on times of crisis. Having spent this past year exploring the Future of Food and Agriculture, I find myself asking, more specifically, what role has our food system played in leading to COVID-19?
Our interaction with animals has changed over time and it’s no coincidence that more animals are getting sick and transmitting diseases to humans. The rise in disease outbreaks over recent decades aligns with the negative long-term implications of the growth of large-scale agricultural and intensive farming practices.
It’s time for us to realize the interconnectedness of animal health, people’s health, and planetary health. We cannot stand idly by, waiting for the inevitable to happen again. It's time to imagine a different preferred healthy, economically equitable, environmentally sound, and animal-friendly food future. We need to act now to improve our relationship with the food system and that’s why XPRIZE has focused on the Future of Food and the Future of Forests to identify specific breakthrough areas that can address these issues and offer solutions.
According to this record of pandemic history from the World Economic Forum, eleven out of the 20 major pandemics occurred over a period of 1700 years, and a staggering nine struck in the past century alone. In other words, the world went from one large outbreak every 150 years to one every 11 years in recent history.
The 2000s saw two pandemics: SARS (2003), H1N1 (Swine Flu – 2009) and the 2010s witnessed four outbreaks that you might have heard of: MERS (2012), Ebola (2014), Zika (2015), and of course COVID-19, which was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020.
All of these are zoonotic diseases that spread through human contact with animals carrying pathogens such as harmful germs, viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 3 out of every 4 new infectious diseases that could evolve into epidemics and pandemics, are zoonotic diseases. At the root of these outbreaks are two unhealthy food system practices that persist internationally.
The first counterproductive practice is poor livestock management. Below average hygiene, wildlife animal trade, cross-contamination risks, and low animal welfare contribute to the spread of pathogens in animals before they leap to humans and cause infectious diseases. Another major contributor is excessive antibiotic use in animals for growth promotion. Over time, gut bacteria in animals grows immune or resistant to treatment and evolve into infections.
The second damaging practice in our food systems is deforestation for Agriculture. Disrupting entire habitats of highly complex and biodiverse ecosystems in the world’s forests activates a multifaceted series of events that almost always ends up with opportunities for pathogen development. Nipah virus has infected hundreds of people in Southeast Asia, killing up to 75% of those infected. It originated in fruit bats that were forced to leave their homes in the rainforests of Indonesia and settle on Malaysian orchids. In their new homes, they shared fruit with locally farmed pigs, transferring the virus to them and then to the people that farmed them.
Some might say that the solutions to address these two dangerous practices aren’t realistic. XPRIZE is doing the work already through the Future of Food and Future of Forests Impact Roadmaps and has identified a set of core food systems and forest problems and highlighted several breakthroughs that can establish a more food secure, environmentally sustainable, and health hazard free world.
The Alternative and Novel Proteins at Scale a breakthrough from the Future of Food Impact Roadmap envisions an unprecedented scale-up in consumption of protein sources that are not drawn from wild or farmed animals. Shutting down borders between countries and social distancing is important to contain COVID-19 and prevent it from spreading, but what’s more important is creating safe distances and better relationships between human and animal species to prevent the emergence and transition of future viruses.
The Land Use Revolution breakthrough, also from the Future of Food, promotes novel methods of optimizing natural resources and inputs such as water, soil, seeds, and fertilizer to minimize waste and contamination. The less dependent we become on land and resources, the less need we will have to cut down forests and their ecosystems to make room for agriculture.
Ocean and Land Biodiversity Stewardship, a breakthrough from the Future of Food, encourages the creation of a system for analyzing, tracking, and valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services in forests and on farms, recognizing the vast benefits of biodiversity in a manner that influences market activity at scale.
Value of Forests, a breakthrough from the Future of Forests Impact Roadmap, calls for techniques, methods, and platforms that help assess the ecological value (ecosystem service) of forests at high resolution. Both breakthroughs improve our understanding of how biodiversity hundreds and thousands of miles away has a significant impact on our day to day health and well-being. Systematic and evidence-based research on these species ties directly to a thriving human species.
Stopping Wildfires, a breakthrough, also from the Future of Forests, focuses on highly efficient wildfire prevention, mitigation, and management techniques. Putting an end to high severity wildfires that can cause severe soil erosion that create uninhabitable portions of forests, threaten drinking water supplies, and hazardous living conditions due to falling trees is crucial. Leftover shrubs or hardwoods from wildfires are not only more prone to new fires, they also often take up leftover soil nutrients and prevent the regrowth of forests.
Pandemics are here to stay unless we take drastic action to repair our Food Systems. Based on these breakthrough areas, XPRIZE has been tirelessly working to design a series of competitions that will address them, such as our collaboration with California Governor Gavin Newsom, to design an XPRIZE competition that would drive innovation and develop hardware able to rapidly detect and extinguish wildfires. Most recently, XPRIZE announced the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance, a global coalition that combines the power of collaboration, competition, shared innovation and radical thinking to accelerate solutions that can be applied to COVID-19 and future pandemics. To learn more and see how you can get involved, please visit www.xprize.org/fight-covid19.