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The Worldwatch
Institute is pleased to send you the sixth in our series of
World Summit Policy Briefs, From Rio to Johannesburg:
Ecological Farming — Reducing Hunger and Meeting Environmental
Goals, by Research Associate Brian Halweil. The World Summit
Policy Brief series highlights and provides recommendations on
key environmental and sustainable development issues that will
shape this year’s World Summit on Sustainable
Development.
From
Rio to Johannesburg:
Ecological
Farming — Reducing Hunger and Meeting Environmental
Goals
by Brian
Halweil
WASHINGTON,
DC - June 11, 2002 -
Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, agriculture remains high
on the international agenda because it brings together
critical issues like water, poverty, hunger, and health.
Governments, farmers, scientists, and others will gather at
the World Food Summit in Rome this week to assess the progress
towards eradicating hunger, and the U.N. Secretary General has
already identified agriculture as one of the priority areas
for the Johannesburg Summit in
August.
Nonetheless, a
fundamental split has emerged in national and international
discussions between embracing an ecological approach to food
production and clinging to the currently dysfunctional model
with its dependence on chemical inputs and technological
fixes. Without radical changes in how we farm, food production
will continue to be at odds with the goals of alleviating
poverty, eliminating hunger, and restoring natural
ecosystems.
Agricultural
Dysfunction
While farms have
become more technologically sophisticated in the last decade,
they have become ecologically and socially destructive.
Agriculture contributes to some of the world’s most
threatening environmental problems—from global warming to the
spread of toxic chemicals. And the vast majority of farm
families remain among the poorest people on the
planet.
Shaped by
national and international policies biased towards large,
specialized farms, the countryside in most nations has become
less biologically diverse, as farmers plant more uniform
fields and rely on fewer crop varieties. These monocultures
have reinforced a strong dependence on chemical inputs,
widespread in the industrial world and becoming more common in
developing nations. Worldwide, farmers use 10 times more
chemical fertilizer today than in 1950, and spend roughly 17
times as much—adjusted for inflation—on
pesticides. This dependence
on agrochemicals not only pollutes the soil and harms human
health and wildlife, but also contaminates water at a time
when usable supplies are increasingly scarce. (Water is
another priority area identified by the Secretary
General.)
At the same
time, rural areas remain the locus of global poverty—they are
home to 75 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion people living on
a dollar a day or less. Roughly 100 million families—about 500
million people—lack ownership rights to the land they
cultivate, a condition that greatly reduces their ability to
make a living and their incentive to invest in the land. Rural
indicators of health, education, and political participation
lag far behind those in urban areas. Hunger, too, is
concentrated in the countryside, worsened by poorer access to
safe water and sanitation.
Over the past
thirty years, participants at international conferences have
repeatedly pledged to break the back of hunger, but this
elusive goal has always retreated into the future. Delegates
at the 1974 World Food Summit pledged to eradicate hunger
within a decade. Two decades later, delegates at the 1996
World Food Summit called for cutting world hunger in half by
2015, even as the number of hungry remained roughly the same
as in 1974. Most recently, in 2001, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization declared that at the current pace,
even the less ambitious 1996 goal—reaffirmed as a U.N.
Millennium Development Goal—would not be reached for more than
60 years, too late for many of the world’s
poor.
At the global
level, the share of the world’s population that is hungry is
generally on the decline. But this decline masks the
persistence of hunger in much of the developing world. And in
sub-Saharan Africa, the share and the absolute number of
hungry children has increased in the last two
decades.
The
Agroecological Choice
Farmers and
agricultural scientists in many parts of the world are
restructuring food production to better serve the ecological
and social goals outlined in Rio. This “agroecological”
approach to farming focuses less on purchased chemicals and
technological fixes and more on taking advantage of freely
available ecological processes in the field, including
leguminous crops that boost soil fertility and beneficial
insects to control pests.
The potential of
agroecological techniques to combat hunger and poverty has
been confirmed by two recent surveys. The first, by
researchers at the University of Essex, looked at over 200
agricultural projects in the developing world that utilize
ecological approaches. They found that for all the projects—9
million farms, covering nearly 30 million hectares—yields
increased an average of 93 percent, and substantially more in
some cases. A majority of these projects succeeded in boosting
production in the Sahel of Africa, the hills of the Andes, the
rainforests of Southeast Asia, and other so-called “marginal”
areas where chemical inputs have proven unaffordable,
inappropriate, and unsuccessful.
The second
survey, by the World Conservation Union-IUCN, cited examples
from around the world showing that farmers who reintegrate
biodiversity into the farm—in the form of grass hedges for
fodder or habitat for pollinators—will often realize gains in
productivity as well as ecological benefits. Coffee growers
who reintroduce trees into their farm landscape not only
preserve rainforest and the resident biodiversity, but can
also reduce their production costs and their vulnerability to
pest attack and erratic weather.
The Biotech
Question
Politicians,
industry leaders, NGOs, and farmers discussing the future of
agriculture often get bogged down in a polarized discussion in
which some argue that biotechnology will help clean up
agriculture and serve the poor, while others see biotechnology
simply as an extension of the flawed status quo. (While there
was no commercial area planted in genetically engineered crops
in 1992, the year of the Rio Summit, farmers planted
genetically engineered crops on over 50 million hectares
worldwide in 2001, largely in the United States, Argentina,
Canada, and China.)
Biotechnology is
a powerful tool, but if it has a role in improving the way we
farm and reducing hunger, researchers will have to change its
current emphasis. The major biotech products commercialized to
date have reinforced monocultural farming and chemical
dependence and are largely irrelevant to the needs of poor
farmers and the world’s hungry. The biotech industry, which
controls the technology with patents and other proprietary
obstacles, has funneled most of its investment into crops and
traits designed for the large-scale farms of the First World,
such as herbicide-resistant soybeans or insecticide-producing
corn.
In contrast, the
ability to map and study the genetic code of agricultural
plants and animals—the field called “genomics”—can greatly
enhance traditional breeding or improve our understanding of
how plants respond to drought or how animals respond to
disease. This informational role for biotechnology is
inherently less risky and less politically controversial than
swapping genes between wholly unrelated
species.
While only four
nations—the United States, Argentina, Canada, and China—have
significant commercial area planted in genetically engineered
crops, farmers in virtually all of the world’s nations are
expanding organic cultivation, which rests on agroecological
principles and goes a step further to limit all chemical use.
Consumer demand for organic produce has exploded into a
multibillion dollar global
market.
Governments that
support the growth of organic area are investing not only in a
growing economic opportunity, but also in an effort to keep
their water supplies free of pollutants and to return
biodiversity to the farm landscape. German water supply
companies in Munich, Osnabruck, and Leipzig now pay
neighboring farmers to go organic—a cheaper solution than
removing farm chemicals from the
water.
Policy
Priorities
At this week’s
World Food Summit in Rome and the upcoming World Summit in
Johannesburg, governments have an opportunity to commit to
agricultural policies to enhance incentives for agroecological
techniques, to create disincentives to polluting farm
practices, and to reform international policies accordingly.
Among the top priorities will be shifting agricultural
subsidies away from support of commodity production and
rewarding farmers for meeting ecological goals; supporting the
growth of organic farming; taxing pesticides, synthetic
fertilizers and factory farms; redistributing land and
guaranteeing secure ownership rights; and assuring women equal
rights and support in
agriculture.
Shift
agricultural subsidies to support ecological
farming.
- Industrial
nations collectively pay their farmers over $300 billion
each year in subsidies, primarily tied to a handful of
commodities. These payments entrench farmers in prevailing
farm practices that are low on diversity and high on
chemical use. The payments also tilt the table towards the
largest and wealthiest farmers—in 1996, 25 percent of farms
in the OECD got nearly 90 percent of total
support.
- Governments
should shift these subsidies to stewardship payments that
reward farmers for meeting certain ecological goals. (The
latest US Farm Bill goes in precisely the opposite
direction.)
- National
governments should work with farming organizations to
increase the share of their land under organic production to
10 percent over the next ten years, by improving organic
certification programs; boosting organic know-how at
agricultural universities, research centers, and extension
agencies; and providing subsidies or tax credits to farmers
in the first few years of
conversion.
- Governments
should consider taxing pesticides, synthetic fertilizers,
factory farms, and other polluting inputs or farm practices.
Cuba and Switzerland are exceptional among the world’s
nations for using a variety of economic measures to promote
sustainable agriculture at the national
level.
Eliminate export
subsidies, food dumping, and other unfair trade
practices.
- Current
international trade agreements restrict the ability of
nations to protect and build domestic farm economies by
forbidding domestic price support and tariffs on imported
goods. At the same time, these agreements leave considerable
wiggle room on other forms of trade distortion, including
the ability of wealthy nations to dump subsidized crops on
the world market well below the cost of production—an
economic weapon that can squash local food
production.
- Trade
agreements should ban hostile trade tactics like food
dumping and export subsidies.
- In order to
combat hunger or maintain family farms, trade agreements
should give nations sovereignty over what does and does not
enter their borders.
Redistribute
land and guarantee secure ownership rights.
- Where land is
equitably distributed and farmers have secure ownership
rights, the incidence of poverty and hunger is lower and
food production is higher. Farmers also have a greater
incentive to invest in tree planting, soil improvement, and
other conservation practices.
- Roughly 100
million farm families, comprising about 500 million people,
lack ownership or owner-like rights to the land they
cultivate, including a near majority of agricultural
populations in South Asia, Central and South America, and
Southeast Asia.
- Among the
priorities are accelerating reform in East and Southern
Africa and Central and South America where land distribution
is particularly inequitable, and supporting services
(credit, extension, market access) for the beneficiaries of
land reform.
Assure women
equal rights and support in
agriculture.
- Women play an
integral role in producing the world’s food—particularly as
men migrate to towns and cities—but rarely receive the same
financial and technical support as male farmers. This
discrimination remains one of the strongest obstacles to
eradicating hunger and poverty in the countryside. When
women have the same access to agricultural resources as men,
their yields, income, and ability to feed their families all
increase.
- Guaranteeing
that women can own and access land, water their fields, and
take advantage of credit and extension services should all
be national and international
priorities.
Support public
sector agricultural research that is farmer-centered and
ecologically-focused.
- Both public
and private agricultural research spending is heavily tilted
toward farms in rich countries. Rich nations currently spend
five times as much as developing countries on agricultural
research and development as a share of agricultural
production, even though the predominantly rural populations
of the developing world stand to benefit most from
agricultural research.
- Simultaneously,
investment in public agricultural research is falling, as
agricultural research is being privatized. The private
sector tends to invest little in research relevant to the
developing world, as it sees little potential for
profit.
- All nations
should reinvigorate public agricultural research. Since the
private sector tends to focus on innovations that are
patentable and marketable, rather than improved farming
systems or farm management, public sector research should
focus on agroecological approaches. Such research should
involve farmers, including women farmers, as central
players.
FOR
MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Worldwatch
Institute
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800
Washington, DC 20036
telephone: (202)
452-1999
fax: (202) 296-7365
e-mail: worldsummit@worldwatch.org
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