Global Food Production Is Shrinking Animals and Plants: U of G Study

Humans are producing more food than ever – but at what cost to the environment?  

A new analysis from University of Guelph researchers, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, says our global food systems are becoming less diverse and more vulnerable to climate change, in part due to animals and plants shrinking over time.  

According to the work, our global food production systems are changing animal and plant communities towards relatively smaller and faster-growing species that rely on limited food and energy sources. 

For example, the transition from forest ecosystems to wheat fields shows a shift from large, long-lived organisms (e.g., trees) to small, short-lived ones such as annual grain crops. The same happens in fisheries once top predators are fished out. Common management practices, like deepwater trawling, select for small, fast-growing species capable of outlasting the high mortality rates of harvesting. Commercial harvesting tends to also reduce the average body size of individual species.