Ecoagriculture

Strategies to Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity

Future Harvest, Jeffrey A. McNeely, Sara J. Scherr

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781610910620
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Although food-production systems for the world's rural poor typically have had devastating effects on the planet's wealth of genes, species, and ecosystems, that need not be the case in the future. In Ecoagriculture, two of the world's leading experts on conservation and development examine the idea that agricultural landscapes can be designed more creatively to take the needs of human populations into account while also protecting, or even enhancing, biodiversity. They present a thorough overview of the innovative concept of "ecoagriculture" - the management of landscapes for both the production of food and the conservation of wild biodiversity. The book:

• examines the global impact of agriculture on wild biodiversity
• describes the challenge of reconciling biodiversity conservation and agricultural goals
• outlines and discusses the ecoagriculture approach
• presents diverse case studies that illustrate key strategies
• explores how policies, markets, and institutions can be re-shaped to support ecoagriculture

While focusing on tropical regions of the developing world -- where increased agricultural productivity is most vital for food security, poverty reduction, and sustainable development, and where so much of the world's wild biodiversity is threatened -- it also draws on lessons learned in developed countries. Dozens of examples from around the world present proven strategies for small-scale, low-income farmers involved in commercial production.

Ecoagriculture explores new approaches to agricultural production that complement natural environments, enhance ecosystem function, and improve rural livelihoods. It features a wealth of real-world case studies that demonstrate the applicability of the ideas discussed and how the principles can be applied, and is an important new work for policymakers, students, researchers, and anyone concerned with conserving biodiversity while sustaining human populations.

Part I

The Challenge: Agricultural Intensification, Rural Poverty, and Biodiversity

Many ecologists fear that the world is poised on the brink of the largest wave of wild species extinctions since the dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago. If current trends continue,we could lose or greatly reduce populations of 25 percent of the world’s species by the middle of this century. Since global awareness of this crisis emerged in the late 1970s, conservationists have focused on protecting endangered species and endangered habitats primarily through the establishment of protected areas. Nearly 10 percent of the earth’s land is now officially protected, and land purchases to create private reserves are expanding such areas. Agricultural production areas, by contrast, have been largely ignored by conservationists. These areas were assumed to have habitat conditions so radically modified from their original state that their potential contribution to biodiversity conservation could only be marginal. Permanent croplands were estimated in the early 1980s to account for only 12 percent of global land area, so conservation efforts were understandably focused elsewhere (apart from widespread efforts to limit farmland conversion).

Part I draws on new global data to argue that in this new century food and fiber production—both that produced by agriculture (domesticated crops, livestock, trees, and fish) and harvested from natural systems (forests, grasslands, and fisheries) has come to be the dominant influence on rural habitats outside the arctic, boreal, high mountain, and desert ecoregions. Growing human populations, increasing demand for food and fiber products, and growing concern about rural poverty mean that agricultural output must necessarily expand for at least several more decades until the rate of human population growth begins to stabilize, or even begins to decline (as it already has in some eastern European countries). Adequate growth in supply is by no means assured, especially in areas where productivity is limited by poor soils, difficult climates, and insufficient water. Indeed, the World Bank says that billions of people are at risk of serious food insecurity and deepening poverty.

Future economic development in the poorest and most biodiversity-rich countries will depend heavily on agriculture and natural resource management that continue to enhance productivity and adapt to changing conditions. Agriculture will remain economically and socially important. Even industrialized countries cannot reasonably expect to save biodiversity at the expense of agricultural output and incomes, much less the developing countries of the tropics. Rather, the challenge is to conserve biodiversity while maintaining or increasing agricultural production. Protected areas will remain a critical element of any conservation strategy, but this book stresses that it is essential to focus greater conservation effort on the large areas under agricultural use.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the issues the book will address. Chapter 2 summarizes the value and global distribution of biodiversity and identifies some of the places where it is most threatened. In Chapter 3 is an overview of agricultural production systems, followed by a demonstration of why continuing increases in agricultural production are so important to food security and economic development in the tropics. Chapter 4 documents the historically large negative impacts of agricultural expansion and intensification on wild biodiversity; it argues that we can have little hope of conserving wild biodiversity without major changes in the way we farm.

Chapter 1

Introduction

During the twentieth century we humans witnessed momentous economic, social, and technological changes. New technologies such as automobiles, airplanes, container ships, telephones, and computers profoundly affected our way of life, enabling us to escape reliance on local ecosystems and become part of a global economy. Radio, movies, and television transformed the way we related to one another and to the world. Public health systems and education became much more widespread, and material wealth—even in the poorest of countries—reached levels inconceivable at the beginning of the century. Our population more than quadrupled, from 1.4 billion in 1900 to more than 6 billion in 2000. As a species, we had a very good century in many ways.

Our twentieth-century prosperity was fueled in part by a constantly growing supply of food, enabling us not only to feed a rapidly growing population, but also to amass food surpluses on a scale never before reached. Based on improved seeds, widespread use of agricultural chemicals, modern farm machinery, and better transportation systems, agricultural production soared. In the past decade alone, production of cereal crops increased by 17 percent, roots and tubers by 13 percent, meat by 46 percent, and marine fish by 17 percent (World Resources Institute 2000).With such impressive gains on so many fronts, why should we worry about the twenty-first century?

First, although more people are consuming more food than ever before, inequity is increasing as well: some parts of the world suffer from growing overconsumption while others go hungry. The World Bank estimates that some 800 million people remain undernourished, in large part because they cannot access the food that is produced. That number is likely to grow because the world’s population increases by 75 to 85 million people each year. Some experts suggest that in thirty years we will need at least 50 to 60 percent more food than we produce now, in order to meet global food demand and enjoy at least a modest degree of greater affluence. If that food is to be accessible to the rural poor, then much of it must be produced where they live, and in ways that increase both their consumption and income.Yet food-producing systems throughout the world are already stressed by eroding soils, declining freshwater reserves, declining fish populations, deforestation, desertification, natural disasters, and global climate change. These and various other factors are making it increasingly difficult to maintain, much less increase, food production in many areas of the world.

What is more, the impressive gains for our species have often come at the expense of other species with whom we share our planet. The main victim of our affluence has been wild biodiversity—the nondomesticated portion of our planet’s wealth of genes, species, and ecosystems. Agricultural production has converted highly diverse natural ecosystems into greatly oversimplified ecosystems, led to pollution of soils and waterways, and hastened the spread of invasive alien species. According to Heywood and Watson (1995), “overwhelming evidence leads to the conclusion that modern commercial agriculture has had a direct negative impact on biodiversity at all levels: ecosystem, species, and genetic; and on natural and domestic diversity.”

While major investments continue to improve agricultural productivity in centers of surplus commercial production, the needs of the rural poor tend to be ignored. As a result, the poor struggle to survive, managing their resources to meet immediate needs rather than invest in a more secure future. Many of these poor people live in areas remote from modern agricultural development but close to habitats supporting the greatest wild biodiversity. Often they have little choice but to exploit these habitats for survival.

Without urgent action to develop the right kind of agriculture, wild biodiversity will be further threatened. The resulting destruction of natural habitats will deprive both local people and the global community of important benefits such as food, fodder, fuel, construction materials, medicines, and genetic resources, as well as services such as watershed protection, clean air and water, protection against floods and storms, soil formation, and even human inspiration.

These threats to biodiversity pose a major dilemma for modern society. On the one hand, modern intensive agriculture has made it possible for the expanding human population to eat more food. On the other hand, agriculture is now spreading into the remotest parts of the world, often in destructive forms that further reduce wild biodiversity and undermine the sustainability of the global food production system. At the same time, reducing biodiversity and simplifying ecosystems can undermine local livelihoods by destabilizing ecosystem services. Recent mudslides in several Latin American countries, floods in Bangladesh, and droughts in southern Africa are all “natural” phenomenon made into a disaster for local people due at least in part to loss of biodiversity.

This situation has led many in the environmental community and the general public to promote the establishment of protected areas where human use—in particular agricultural use—is supposed to be greatly restricted. While such management measures clearly are needed to preserve many types of wild biodiversity, they face many challenges. Some centers of the greatest or most valued wild biodiversity are being surrounded by areas of intensive agricultural production and high rural population densities. In some areas, large human populations preclude the establishment of extensive reserves, so the protected areas tend to be too small to support viable populations of the species they are designed to protect. In these human-dominated ecosystems, conservation action in isolated protected areas is doomed to fail, unless fundamental changes also take place in the adjacent agricultural landscape. Moreover, some types of wild biodiversity, such as some species of birds and butterflies, actually thrive best in farmed and populated landscapes. Farming is a practice that extends at least 10,000 years back into human history, and many species of plants and animals have evolved in concert with the development of agriculture. Some species of large mammals (especially wild cattle in Asia) may even depend on shifting cultivation (Wharton 1968).

Aggressive efforts to conserve wild biodiversity have sometimes reduced the livelihood security of rural people, especially the poor in developing countries (Pimbert and Toledo 1994). But this need not be the case (McNeely 1999). Rural populations historically have established conservation practices to protect environmental services important to their own food production, water supply, and spiritual values (see, for example, Western and Wright 1994; Singh et al. 2000). Examples from this book will show that managing biodiversity through a combination of conservation measures and improved and diversified agricultural systems can increase incomes and household nutrition, reduce livelihood risks, and provide collateral benefits such as increased freshwater reserves and fewer mudslides after heavy rains.

Thus new models for biodiversity conservation need to be developed, involving effective links among the fields of farmers, the pastures of ranchers, the managed forests of foresters, and the protected areas managed especially for wild biodiversity. Conservation options are available besides just “locking away” resources on which the poor depend for their survival and assets that low-income countries could use to promote development and national food security. Agricultural landscapes can be designed more creatively to take the needs of local people into account while pursuing biodiversity objectives.

Ecoagriculture

A central challenge of the twenty-first century, then, is to achieve biodiversity conservation and agricultural production goals at the same time—and, in many cases, in the same space. In this book the management of landscapes for both the production of food and the conservation of ecosystem services, in particular wild biodiversity, is referred to as ecoagriculture. For a start, improved natural resource management and technological breakthroughs in agriculture and resource use is essential to enhance our ability to manage biodiversity well. Genetic improvements in the major agricultural crops that feed the world will continue to be essential for maintaining and increasing productivity. But a much wider range of genetic, technological, environmental management, and policy innovations must be developed to support wild biodiversity in the world’s bread baskets and rice bowls as well as in the extensive areas where food production is more difficult.

Diverse approaches to make agriculture more sustainable, while also more productive, are flowering around the world; many of these reduce the negative effects of farming on wild species and habitats. Such approaches need to be integrated more intentionally with conservation objectives, particularly in biodiversity “hotspots” (Myers 1988) and areas where the livelihood of the poor depends on ecosystem rehabilitation. New approaches to agricultural production must be developed that complement natural environments, enhance ecosystem functions, and improve rural livelihoods. While trade-offs between agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation often seem stark, some surprising and exciting opportunities exist for complementarity. Local farmers and institutions, such as universities and agricultural research centers, are leading the way through active experimentation and adaptation of existing knowledge. But more targeted research on ecoagriculture is needed, and such research must be considered a global priority if major advances are to occur. Environmental and agricultural researchers must learn to work closely together to resolve existing conflicts between natural biodiversity and agricultural production in different ecoregions and under different management systems.

This book examines some of the current linkages between wild biodiversity and agriculture. It suggests strategi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Part I - The Challenge: Agricultural Intensification, Rural Poverty, and Biodiversity
• Part II - The Opportunity: Integrating Biodiversity Conservation in Agricultural Development
• PART III - Policy Responses
• Glossary
• References
• About the Authors
• Index