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Towards a Sustainable Food System for a Planet with 9 Billion People
December 06, 2016 | Ted Nordhaus
Since
the dawn of agriculture, humans have been converting forests,
grasslands, and other ecosystems to farmland. While climate change, air
and water pollution, and a range of other environmental challenges
frequently get the headlines, food production without question
represents the single largest human impact upon the environment. Land
for crops takes up 12% of Earth’s ice-free land. Add pasture and that
percentage climbs to 36%. The long-term conversion of land for
agriculture has brought enormous losses to ecosystems and wildlife
populations already. The climate impacts are also considerable—15% of
global greenhouse emissions come from the agricultural sector. With
global food demand expected to grow as much as 70% by 2050, those
impacts threaten to grow substantially.
But
there are other possible futures for global agriculture and the
environment that are just beginning to come into view. Radical changes
to food and farming systems over the last century have improved yields,
made crops more resilient to weather and pests, and increasingly
concentrated farming in the most productive regions and on the most
productive lands. Already, in parts of the United States, Western
Europe, China, and Brazil, high-productivity farming is beginning to
return some land to nature. With continuing agricultural modernization
and technological innovation, human societies might pass through a
critical inflection point in this century, returning agricultural lands
to nature in the global aggregate for the first time in ten millennia.
Achieving
that future will require serious reconsideration of many of the ideas
that sustainable food advocates have promoted in recent decades.
Contemporary debates about the sustainability of food and agriculture
have been dominated by romantic ideas about farming that are impractical
at best and pernicious at worst. Despite the fact that
nineteenth-century farming struggled to feed a global population of less
than two billion, a global food movement centered in the wealthier
precincts of the United States and Europe has in recent decades loudly
championed a utopian version of that system as the key to feeding a
twenty-first-century population that has already exceeded seven billion.
In
reality, any significant return to low-intensity, small-scale, organic
agriculture would bring with it environmental consequences the food
movement has not seriously considered. Organic's dramatically reduced
yields would threaten our ability to maintain food production, while the
decreased efficiency would also require massively larger land areas for
farming, increasing the existing pressure on forests and wildlife
habitat.
And
yet, the food movement has successfully captured the public imagination
because it has offered a utopian vision of food and farming to an
urban, upscale, and increasingly affluent population that is now several
generations removed from life on the farm. What is at stake is not so
much the possibility that global agriculture might begin to revert to
low-intensity, lower-yielding farming. The kind of farming the food
movement advocates simply can’t be implemented on any significant scale.
Rather, what is lost in the bellicose debates about GMOs, pesticides,
and synthetic fertilizer is a constructive conversation, much less any
pragmatic vision, about what kind of food systems can practically bring
the best outcomes for both people and the environment.
This
month, Breakthrough will launch a six-part series on the future of food
in hopes of empirically regrounding the conversation about food,
agriculture, and sustainability. Reviewing the best science available,
we’ll consider the consequences and trade-offs associated with different
food systems and the possibilities that continuing social and
technological innovation could open up for a food system that might sit
more lightly on the land.
The first essay in that series,
by Breakthrough Institute’s Director of Conservation Linus Blomqvist
and Applied Invention’s David Douglas, considers the possibilities for
precision agriculture. Much of the conversation around improving
agricultural yields, they write, has focused too much on biotechnology,
which is important but insufficient, and “Green Revolution”-style
application of fertilizers and irrigation, which have largely run their
course in the developed world.
Better
seeds, fertilizer, and pest control will continue to be important to a
more productive and sustainable food system in the decades to come. But
the key to raising yields while limiting environmental impacts will be
using those inputs with ever greater control and precision. Combinations
of technologies that provide plants with fertilizer when they need it
and not when they don’t, control pests while minimizing impacts on soil
health and beneficial insects, and pack more plants onto every acre of
land will be the key to allowing agricultural yields to keep up with
growing food demand.
Precision
agriculture includes practices and techniques that monitor plant needs
and nutrition closely via next-generation tractors, sensors, and
satellites, and apply water, fertilizer, and pest control in a
hyper-precise manner. Implemented optimally, these techniques can
improve yields, reduce inputs, and minimize pollution. Understood in
this way, precision agriculture should take us beyond the arbitrary
distinctions between organic and conventional agriculture and challenge
us to both evaluate agricultural technologies practice by practice and
technology by technology, and consider the trade-offs holistically.
In
the coming weeks, we’ll also look at fertilizer, meat production,
agriculture’s impact on wildlife, and other issues. We’ve tried to
conduct a broad survey of the evidence and literatures associated with
each of these topics, but we’ll also invite responses and perspectives
from leading figures in the field. Feeding a world of nine billion
people while minimizing impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and the climate
will require that we take a hard look at how food is really produced
and what the trade-offs between land, productivity, inputs, and
pollution really are. It will also require understanding agricultural
systems in the broader context of human development and modernization.
Food
production today would be unrecognizable to farmers from 1900, let
alone early Holocene agriculturalists. So who knows what global
agriculture will look like a hundred years from now. But while we can’t
predict the future, we can identify the characteristics of a global food
system that might be capable of meeting human needs while leaving more
room for nature, and we can begin to prioritize food systems and
agricultural technologies that take us in that direction. Doing so will
require first that we get clear about what matters for people and what
matters for the environment when it comes to food and agriculture. This
series was created in hopes of helping to advance that conversation. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/ted-nordhaus/the-future-of-food
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