Agro-ecology is the future

Its time to move away from chemical farming

Accounting for over 25 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), intensive agricultural practices over the past few decades have not only deepened the agrarian crisis, but has also taken a huge toll of the natural resource base. While a realisation that agriculture is a predominant reason for the climatic aberrations the world is witnessing is gaining ground, the world is slowly seeking a change in the way farming is being practised. The call for safe and organically produced food is growing.  

At the base of the environmental crisis afflicting agriculture are the massive subsidies being pumped in agriculture that have left behind a trail of destruction. This is the price the world has paid, often unknowingly, to keep food cheap so as to keep economic reforms viable. According to a study conducted by the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) 2019, a global coalition of scientists, experts and economists, cheap food comes at an enormous “hidden cost” on human health, natural resources and environment. Estimated at $ 12 trillion – equal to China’s GDP – the report warns that half the world may remain undernourished by 2030 if business as usual continues. The report goes much beyond ascertaining the reasons leading to the farm crisis and lists ten transformation measures that need to be adopted.

While growing undernourishment or ‘hidden hunger’ will be one of the tragic outcomes, the devastating impact it will leave behind by way of destruction of natural resources and the climatic havoc will be nothing short of an ecocide. The report ‘Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use’ estimates $ 700 billion a year is what is being spent on growing food. The figure may be still higher since it becomes difficult to decipher every explicit and implicit farm subsidy being provided. But before you form an opinion let me make it clear, not all these subsidies go to farmers. They hardly get a miniscule proportion as direct income support.

Yet another study has on the basis of producer subsidy equivalent (PSE), which measures the amount of support received by farmers, worked out that the richest trading block -- Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and China leads the table in 2016-17 with an annual subsidy support of $ 235 billion and $ 232 billion, respectively.

As the lead author of a report -- The first 10 years of Agreement on Agriculture of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – which was presented at the Hong Kong Ministerial in Dec 2005, my estimate was that more than 80 per cent of these subsidies (at that time the WTO had worked out close to $360 billion of farm subsidies that rich countries paid) actually went to agribusiness companies. Mostly for export-driven agriculture, these subsidies were for intensive farming practices which had devastated soil health, contaminated the ground water, and were also for clearing rain forests for cattle rearing and palm oil plantations, raising bio-fuel crops, industrial livestock farming, processing and trading which had not only polluted the environment, decimated biodiversity but also produced unhealthy diets.

Only 1 per cent of the $700 billion of global farm subsidies a year had gone in for environmentally safe farming practices. In India too, less than 1 per cent of the annual subsidy support goes for regenerative agriculture or for organic and holistic agriculture. “There is incredibly small direct targeting of [subsidies at] positive environment outcomes, which is insane,” Jeremy Oppenheim, principal at the Food and Land Use Coalition, told The Guardian, and added: “We have got to switch these subsidies into explicitly positive measures.”The challenge therefore is enormous, but small baby steps taken in the right direction can lead to a visible transformation in how food is safely grown.

Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appealed to farmers to shift from chemical fertilisers, the scientific fraternity thinks that such a move will jeopardise the gains of Green Revolution. On the contrary, as per a paper published in Nature (Mar 2018), China was able to increase crop productivity – by an average of 11 per cent -- in the rice, wheat and maize cereal crops by reducing the application of fertiliser by 15 per cent. But this remarkable turnaround happened when a mission mode approach was followed over the years with 14,000 workshops, engaging 65,000 bureaucrats, technicians, as well as 1,000 researchers. Meanwhile, it has also announced to achieve zero growth in fertiliser and pesticides subsidy by 2020. There is no reason why India cannot take a cue and re-orient the state agricultural extension machinery towards organic practices. At the same time, take firm steps to reduce fertiliser subsidy every year.

Besides cutting down on fertiliser subsidies, China’s effort is also to promote the use of crop rotations, crop residues and keeping the land fallow. Picking on the highly successful strategy of setting up demonstration plots at the time of Green Revolution, China has at least 40 sustainable agriculture demonstration farms. Not enough, but shows a determination to move away from chemical farming. Similarly, while Punjab and Haryana are faced with a serious water crisis resulting from the water guzzling cropping pattern it follows, Queensland province in Australia has established an Aus$500 million fund offering financial support to farmers who demonstrate reduction in water usage. Why can’t a similar stimulus package be given to Punjab farmers to switch from paddy to other less water consuming crops? If Rs 1.45 lakh crore stimuli can be given to the industry there is no reason why a similar economic package cannot be given to farmers.

But essentially it has to first begin by ensuring that agricultural universities undertake a complete redesigning of its research programmes shunning chemical inputs. This will require a mindset change, which may take some time but is certainly not impossible. At the same time, the budgetary support for agriculture too has to shift to ecological farming systems. At the global level, the FOLU report strives to redirect at least $500 billion of agricultural subsidies towards sustainable farming, poverty alleviation and ecological restoration. A tall order but certainly attainable. # 

Make most of farm subsidies, grow food safely. The Tribune. Oct 3, 2019

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/make-most-of-farm-subsidies-grow-food-safely/841721.html?fbclid=IwAR0dsBEzrITeLMPDSvLR3Q1iPnq-hYlgxQLbtWIj9UhiRkQn78pQ05r345c

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IPCC report on 'Climate Change and Land' -- Fails to provide policy guidelines

Painting by Michel Granger

At a time when half the country is recovering from a flood fury, especially in Kerala where massive landslides following incessant rains have taken a huge human toll; and much of the remaining half of the country is reeling under a continuing drought, the latest special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) titled ‘Climate Change and Land’ couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. The 1,300 page report, a summary of which was released last week, presents a lot of scary facts, which were being talked about, but perhaps needed an official endorsement.

Speaking to The Guardian, Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC report summed it up: “This is a perfect storm. Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat.” Although integral to the discussions on climate change, the direct relationship land has with climate change had never been so loudly emphasised. It however restrains from making any policy recommendations and that in my thinking is its biggest drawback. To illustrate, if fossil fuel subsidies have grown to $ 400 billion in 2018, unless a phase out programme accompanied by adequate public sector investments in sustainable food production systems or land management etc is provided, it is futile to expect any meaningful contribution towards protecting the climate from going haywire.

The report says that since the pre-industrial period (1850-1900) the global mean land surface temperature (till 2006-15) has almost doubled when compared with the global mean surface temperature, which is the average for land and ocean temperatures. While the land surface temperature has increased by 1.53 degree C, the rise in the mean land and ocean temperatures had hovered around 0.87 degree C. In other words, this report shows that to cap the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees, the world will have to ensure that any further rise in the land surface temperature is kept under control. Further, global warming has already brought shift in climatic patterns in many parts of the world, including expansion of the arid climate zones and contraction of polar zones, and has also unleashed extreme weather fluctuations, inducing long dry spells, prolonged heat period, heavy floods, enhanced frequency of cyclones, permafrost thaw thereby resulting in massive land degradation, loss of biodiversity and posing a threat to global food security. The gloom that has descended following the rapidly changing climatic patterns has to be contained by rapidly evolving policy fixes.  

Recent studies have shown that ever since the time man started recording temperatures, July has been the hottest month. The Himalayas are losing more than one and a half foot of ice every year since the year 2000, and Swiss glaciers have lost more than 0.8 billion tonnes of snow and ice in the month of June. While the IPCC report says that cultivated soils are being lost at a rate 100 times faster than it is being formed (and 10-20 times in no till areas), a major study by ETC Group had earlier shown that nearly 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost every year to erosion, with damages costing Rs 400 billion a year. In another report, published in Scientific American, a UN official was quoted as saying that if the current rate of degradation continues, the world’s top soil would be gone in 60 years.

Global food production systems, and that includes, agriculture, forestry, livestock and other land uses account for 13 per cent carbon dioxide, 44 per cent methane and 82 per cent nitrous oxide emissions, accounting for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. However this appears to be quite a scaled down estimate from another UN report on the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) for Agriculture and Food released last year which pegged greenhouse gas emissions from the same activities to be somewhere between 49 to 57 per cent. Nevertheless, the challenge to reduce emissions without any negative fallout on food security remains paramount. It has socio-economic as well as political implications.

The IPCC report does suggest sustainable agricultural practices, increasing crop productivity, moving away from bio-energy programmes, and for shifting dietary preferences from meat based to plant based foods among measures that could make a significant dent on the greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, almost a quarter of the food produced, is either lost or wasted. Several studies earlier have pointed to the enormous damage resulting from food wastage and in turn the environmental footprint it leaves behind. If food wastage was a country, it would have ranked third in greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the food that goes waste in US for instance is good enough to meet the needs of sub-Saharan Africa.

Between 1961 and 2013, an additional 1per cent of world’s drylands had turned into drought. This however cannot be entirely blamed on climate change. In India, for instance, increasingly the drylands are getting into the drought zone because of a large number of water guzzling hybrid crops that are cultivated with impunity. Common sense tells us that drylands need crops which require less water. But it is just the opposite – crops that require more water are being grown in water scarce regions for several decades now. In Maharashtra, 76 per cent of the available irrigation is consumed by sugarcane alone, which occupies only 4 per cent of the cultivable area. The remaining 96 per cent of the crops that are cultivated are therefore faced with a terrible water stress which has little to do with global warming.

The IPCC report clearly mentions desertification, deforestation, industries, and urbanisation to exacerbate global warming. It also lists draining wetlands to be responsible for releasing carbon dioxide back into atmosphere. Kerala is particularly a victim of flawed policies that have drained wetlands, and by encouraging rampant quarrying in fragile areas of Western Ghats turned it vulnerable to landslides. In a quest for higher economic growth, natural resources are being ruthless devastated. 

I found the report to be very useful for academic purposes. Environmentalists will surely lap it up. But in the absence of any mandatory guidelines and policy directions that G-20 countries must be asked to adhere to more so at a time when the world is faced with a climate emergency, the IPCC simply let the opportunity go. #

IPCC report comes up short. The Tribune. Aug 21, 2019
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/ipcc-report-comes-up-short/820230.html?fbclid=IwAR0mPWda_EGCkdvlQIqiY0poYObXr8j2zggrpmOmwT7nnDhJwuqDdqE57X0

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