Part of engaging with this problem is for the food industry to recognise the relationship between farming and the problems and solutions of biodiversity loss. Oddly enough, plants and animals are not disappearing because we eat too many of them, but rather because we eat too few in terms of variety.
It’s believed that the abundance of species on the planet has declined by 40% between 1970 and 2000 (IUCN), and the financial value of ecosystem services from biodiversity has been rated at $3-5 trillion by Pavan Sukhdev on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB).
The first explanation that comes to mind for this grim picture is that we overuse plants and animals for direct human consumption. Paradoxically, the problem is the fact that we exclude too many of them, focusing on a narrow selection of crops, fish and animal products at the cost of the variety of ecosystems and the abundance of living species within them.
Modern agriculture is based on monocultures. They explicitly aim at reducing the variety of plants. An unintended consequence is that animals and insects directly dependent on them disappear, too. The role of annual crop rotation, but also bacteria and fungi, in increasing soil fertility is replaced by chemical fertilisers. The higher risk of spread of disease among monocultures with high density of plants is mitigated by using pesticides, which further contaminate the ecosystem.
It isn’t just the cultivated land that’s used in an unsustainable manner, but also the uncultivated, since the need to clear land for monocultures represents one of the main causes of deforestation, leading to climate change and loss of biodiversity of ecosystems. Take the Mato Grosso region in Brazil, whose name ‘thick forest’ is beginning to sound like cruel irony. The surface of soy plantations has increased by 400% in the last 10 years at the expense of large parts of the Amazon forest and the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland.
The reason why monocultures thrive is, to a large extent, due to domestic subsidies in industrialised countries such as the US and those of the EU. They make farmers concentrate disproportionately on one crop. The most subsidised crops, corn, wheat and soy, are those used in the global animal feed industry. Unsurprisingly, they feed rapidly growing ‘monocultures of animals’ – chickens, pigs and cows mainly – while the International Union for Conservation of Nature warns that about 30% of breeds of the main farm animal species are currently at high risk of extinction.
The interconnection between the growth of industrial farming, the rise of monocultures and economic incentives such as subsidies adds up to a deadly cocktail for biodiversity.
According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, “the challenge of the 21st century is to transform agriculture into a good administrator of biodiversity and reverse its destructive capacity without restricting its mission to feed a growing world population”.
The food industry has the power to make a big impact in helping to maintain a world of diversity and abundance. Any strategy of poverty reduction should include concerns for the protection of biodiversity.
In terms of the famous analogy, it comes down to not only giving the poor the rod instead of the fish, but also making sure the lake doesn’t disappear.
Emma Herman is spokesperson for Fairfood International and sits on the supervisory board of Humanity in Action.
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