Farming to feed hungry need not hurt nature - expert
Date: 02-Sep-02
Country: SOUTH AFRICA
Author: Toby Reynolds
That was the message from a leading scientist at the Earth Summit, which is trying to hammer out ways to help enrich poor nations without fouling the planet further.
"Improving agricultural productivity can conserve biodiversity. The two are mutually compatible," said World Conservation Union Chief Scientist Jeffrey McNeely.
The world's population is growing, with most of the increase expected in poor, tropical areas of the globe, and more people will need more food.
That will require either an expansion of agriculture at the expense of forests and wildlife, or an improvement in existing methods.
The former is the 'doom and gloom' option, but McNeely said he believes it need not be the case.
In fact, the advance of agriculture and the preservation of the environment can come together to the benefit of both farmers and local communities, he said.
McNeely was launching a study he wrote with economist Sara Scherr, advisor to food security group Future Harvest, which addresses the questions of how the world can support a 50 percent increase in human population without encroaching further on our natural resources.
"If you want to see positive stories, you must look here," he said last week.
"If we follow this lead, we will see a greatly reduced rate of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, we will see countries being more self-reliant, and we will see protected areas less affected by the farming going on next to them."
The report, titled "Ecoagriculture," details 36 case studies demonstrating that it is possible to reconcile farmer's demands for productivity with conservation, ranging from
Increasing agricultural production is essential, argues Scherr, and seeing as most of the three billion people predicted to join the world's population in the next half-century will live in the impoverished tropics, it is specially important to focussing on strategies for the developing world.
SMALL FARMS OR INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE?
Otherwise, she said, entrenched visions of Western industrial farming will predominate, and will encourage people in the developing world to slash, hack and tear down their indigenous ecosystems in favour of vast, clear-cut fields.
"We are going to get about 2.8 billion people in these areas... It will place great demands on land use, and in addition population is growing fastest in the world's biodiversity hotspots," she said.
"If we are really going to preserve biodiversity, then we are going to have to change the way we farm," she added.
Going through the report, McNeely and Scherr highlight several examples of how this can be done.
There are farmers in Zimbabwe who have designed a hand irrigation scheme for small plots of land that uses much less water than more expensive mechanical water supply systems; rice-growers in California whose paddy flooding has reduced the need to burn off stubble, reducing their costs and expanding wetland habitats for bird life; and animal herders in Costa Rica whose hedge-planting has both helped shield their livestock and reduced soil erosion.
In Zambia, introducing the idea of leaving fields fallow to allow nutrients to regenerate has improved the structure of the soil, reduced the need for expensive fertilisers, and nearly tripled farmers' annual income from the maize they grow in between fallow periods.
"Everywhere there are examples," McNeely added, describing a scheme for using waste orange peel from juice factories to fertilise the soil of endangered forests.
Sherr said the future looked bright, and the world should sit up and take notice.
"We are in the middle of a paradigm shift," she said. "I find out about a new initiative every week, and there is a lot more going on than anyone has any idea of."
