Global population is growing so fast that we’ll need to produce more food in the next 50 years than the planet has yielded over the past 10,000 years. At the core of this paradox is the global food system, fueling population growth while simultaneously exhausting the planet’s capability to provide and support life.
Can the Food Planet cope? Only if we reshape our food systems within the limits of our planet and its biosphere.
The Curt Bergfors Food Planet Prize is the largest monetary award in the global food arena. It rewards innovative solutions that can help us shift to sustainable food systems within a ten-year timeframe. The main aim of the prize is to encourage agents of change and promote game-changing initiatives.
Visionaries all over the world are working passionately to rethink, re-engineer and reshape our food systems. Their brilliant ideas, bold initiatives, and smart solutions must be recognized and given the opportunity to make an impact. In 2020, four change-making initiatives received US 1$ million prizes. For this year and onwards, the Curt Bergfors Foundation has decided to double the amount of money given to each of the now 2 winners – from $1 million to $2 million.
Meet GreenWave one of the 2021’s Food Planet prize winners…
The methods used today to extract food from the oceans are often anything but sustainable – the oceans are becoming depleted and we humans are responsible. Considering how much of the earth’s surface is covered by water, and despite the unsustainable methods in use, the proportion of food currently originating from the sea is surprisingly small. It is clear that we need to look for not only more, but also significantly better ways to produce food from the marine environments. US nonprofit GreenWave describes themselves as a global network of regenerative ocean farmers. The organization has developed a scalable system for ocean-based food production with a very small environmental footprint. To grow their idea to a point where it can create change globally, their system and everything needed to use it is shared through an education-based model. This contrasts with a more traditional business where an idea is scaled up within a company itself and thereby limited to that company’s own growth rate. GreenWave’s goal is to provide knowledge, materials and support to 10,000 independent ocean farmers managing 1 million acres of seaweed and shellfish within ten years. Read more about GreenWave and B4Plastics – the winners of the 2021 Food Planet Prize – on foodplanetprize.org.
Meet B4Plastics, another of the 2021 Food Planet Prizewinners…
A significant part of all plastic pollution in the oceans is due to lost or abandoned fishing gear, so-called ghost nets. In addition to threatening marine life while they are still intact, these nets, cages and ropes are eventually ground down to microplastics by the movements of the sea and absorbed into the food chain. Up to 30 percent of all the fish we catch never leaves the ocean but dies unnecessarily, caught in gear that keeps fishing untended.
Within the GLAUKOS project, Belgian company B4Plastics is developing strong bio-based polymer materials for fishing gear that are completely biodegradable, unlike current plastic materials. Using these new materials makes it possible to predetermine the lifespan in water of a net, for example. This guarantees that the equipment, if lost or left in the ocean, neither continues to harm marine life over time nor contributes to pollution as does conventional gear.
“These are challenges that we all need to engage in. Our food system is broken, and the planet is ailing. We are all part of the problem, and we must all try to be part of the solution. I want to contribute through the foundation and these awards.”
Curt Bergfors, founder of The Curt Bergfors Foundation.
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