Circular Food Futures: What Will They Look Like?

Abstract

Potentially dramatic changes in the organisation of the food system are being driven by both consumers and producers. Consumers are demanding higher quality produce and more direct connection to producers. For farmers, more extreme weather events and global competition are increasingly making industrial agriculture less economically viable. This paper explores how circular economy (CE) debates might contribute to, and support, the changes needed for a sustainable future. Full compliance with the three objectives of a CE identified by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation might help to describe a sustainable and circular food future. An analysis of the food system is therefore carried out to determine how food systems may be organised to (a) design out waste and pollution, (b) keep products and materials in use and (c) regenerate natural systems. One critique of CE debates is the failure to explore systemic shifts and possible futures that are not an extrapolation of current conditions. This analysis of the food system points to the need for a decentralised network of diverse, polyculture farms, each with integrated energy and water micro-grids, and managed at a local level. Co-locating food producers with food consumers, as much as possible, creates an integrated village system at the food-water-energy-housing nexus. Villages may then be networked to enable collaboration for sharing of rarer skills or the satisfaction of more complex needs and wants, forming a trading network of circular economy villages. It is therefore posited that the transition to a fully circular economy will require a paradigm shift—another agricultural revolution—the transition away from large-scale industrial agriculture to a decentralised network of circular food systems.