Food Planet Prize 2022

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 Prize  is the Curt Bergfors Foundation’s primary tool to encourage agents of change and promote game-changing initiatives. To  save the Food Planet, we must accelerate change! The 2021 IPCC climate report confirms that there is no more time to waste. It’s Code Red! Food Planet Prize, therefore, search for solutions that can be applied at a rapid pace and across food systems – preferably globally.

Luckily, 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. They are committed to rewarding them annually. In 2020, five change-making initiatives shared four US 1$ million prizes. For 2021 and onwards, the Curt Bergfors Foundation decided to double the award sum and give US $2 million to 2 winners. This means that the world’s biggest environmental award is all about food.

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The Planetary boundaries concept defines the safe operating space we should stay within to avoid irreversible environmental degradation. It was developed in 2009 by a group of internationally renowned scientists led by Food Planet Prize Jury Co-chair Johan Rockström.

The researchers identified nine biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the planet’s climate and life-support systems. Each has its own quantitative boundary. Five – climate change, biodiversity loss, land system change, novel entities, and biochemical flows – have already been transgressed. And the upcoming update promises to be thin on good news. Prof. Rockström recently hinted on Swedish Radio that the freshwater boundary is likely to have been breached too.

Transforming the food systems is the single most effective way to revert to safety, as pointed out in his Netflix documentary Breaking Boundaries. All nine boundaries are indeed intrinsically linked to what we eat.

At the core of the issue is a paradox: the global food system is exhausting the planet’s resources it depends on. Impoverished soils, plundered oceans, biodiversity loss, and global warming are some of the consequences of this overexploitation. Which inevitably leads to lower yields. But with a rapidly growing global population, it continues to squeeze as much productivity out of nature as possible.

Can the Food Planet cope? Only if we reshape our food system – from production to consumption – within the limits of our planet.