Global Food Challenges are Real, So are Sustainable Solutions
Global farmers must not only feed ten billion people by 2050 but do so while lowering agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and avoid converting more land to food production. World Food Day, celebrated last week on October 16, reminds us these goals may be impossible if farmers are denied the tools and technologies they need.
Farmers must use every available tool. We must abandon black and white thinking and the acrimonious debate over farming methods and the growing embrace of radical agroecology.
Travelling across Latin America, I’ve found most farmers want it all. They want to make a good living. They want higher yields. And they want to protect the environment. They’ll use any method to achieve those ends — provided it works and is affordable.
Many farmers I have met are “smallholders” — exactly the farmer that is the focus of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) “scaling up agroecology” initiative. Yet a radical version of agroecology embraced by some within FAO is precisely the approach we can’t afford.
Agroecology — the pairing of ecosystems science with agriculture — often emphasizes traditional methods. For instance, farmers who can’t afford expensive machinery or mineral fertilizer will use their own labor to diversify operations and create their own inputs, such as fertilizer from livestock.
However, the politicized agroecology promoted[i] by some FAO[ii] advisors turns those necessities into mandates. It prohibits modern improved crops — especially GMOs — as well as mineral fertilizers and pesticides. As advanced by many environmental groups in the agroecology movement, it condemns free trade and limits farmers to local markets.
Most farmers, however, would happily combine traditional and modern methods. They just want the freedom to choose what works best. For many, hybrid or GMO seeds that enable crops to survive pests, drought, and warmer temperatures sound like good ideas and are proving invaluable.
Importantly, this rigid agroecology model will not meet growing demand for food and agriculture products. Agroecology’s promoters themselves estimate widespread adoption would reduce EU food production by 35 percent. But FAO says 70 percent more food is needed globally to feed 10 billion people by 2050.
Low-yield agriculture will only increase the pressure to cut down forests and convert wilderness to farmland, which The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns are two of the greatest contributors to biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions.
If we want to conserve forests and avoid using more land for agriculture, we must boost yields on land already under cultivation. While intensive farming is much maligned these days, modern technologies made it possible to more than double U.S. agricultural output since 1948 even as the total amount of land used for agriculture declined. At the same time, U.S. forest area has actually increased slightly since 1920.
Some agroecologists say we can make up the difference by restricting meat consumption and eating less. That might be good for some in the wealthier countries. But the world’s poor need the nutritional and economic advantages provided by livestock. As we’ve seen in China, meat consumption increases when people have the means.
Limiting options and embracing restrictive ideologies won’t answer the very real challenges we face. If we’re serious about feeding a growing population, while protecting biodiversity and mitigating climate change, we must give farmers more choices and better technologies, not fewer.
[i] The “Scaling up agroecology” conference held this June in Nairobi was organized by FAO: http://www.fao.org/agroecology/home/en/; http://www.fao.org/agroecology/slideshow/news-article/en/c/1200102/
Headline organizers included the World Food Preservation Center, Biovision, IFOAM and other leading advocacy groups working to block GMOs, synthetic fertilizer and modern crop protection in Africa. A featured speaker was discredited anti-GMO, anti-chemical researcher Gilles-Eric Seralini.
Biotech Expert Robert Wager attended the conference. He describes it in the podcast (link below). In his summary, he says the conference was “dedicated to denigrating biotechnology and agricultural chemistry. Among the speakers were several key figures of the anti-GMO movement — most notably Tyrone Hayes, infamous for claiming that the herbicide atrazine turns male frogs into females, and Gilles-Eric Seralini, author of the infamous, retracted study alleging that glyphosate-tolerant corn causes cancer. Both were given platforms to offer their long-debunked arguments to a diverse audience of farmers, students and politicians.”
[ii] An example is Miguel Altieri, a member of the UN- FAO’s Steering Committee of the Globally Indigenous Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) program with projects in Chile, Peru, Philippines, Kenya and other countries.
[http://www3.uma.pt/isoplexis/consultores/CV_Miguel_Altieri.pdf]. In this paper [https://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/JA11-The-Scaling-Up-of-Agroecology-Altieri.pdf] Altieri says the Green Revolution is a “failed” project that undermined the ability to address “the root causes of hunger.” He raises concerns about “unwanted gene flow from transgenic crops,” condemns “the concentration of global food production under the control of a few transnational corporations, bolstered by free trade agreements,” and promotes “peasant agriculture” as “the new basis for 21st Century agriculture.”
