(no subject)
New blog post on a symposium I went to a few weeks ago: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/climate/2009/10/21/assessing-global-metrics-for-agriculture/
Which is really a heavily abbreviated critique of the symposium that I wrote. I'm pasting it below.
On October 1, I attended a conference entitled "Going Beyond Rhetoric: Metrics for Assessing Global Agriculture," hosted by the Earth Institute and convened at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Fifteen stories in the air, we were surrounded by miles of urban landscape -- Queens to the east, Manhattan to the west, and no farms in sight. In a room full of policy-makers, scientists, scholars, lobbyists, and economists, the vast landscape helped to emphasize the scope and scale of the decisions being made that day -- how far-reaching the ideas being discussed went, beyond the horizon.
By 2050 the Earth's population is expected to reach 9 billion people. With the majority of our world population now living in urban areas, and climate change already altering our agricultural landscape, how are we going to feed that many people while still meeting targets for real sustainability?
The goal of the conference was to determine the actual metrics -- the targets -- for determining desirable agricultural impacts. The conference was divided up into four sessions : where will our nutrient sources come for agriculture to feed 9 billion? How can we develop ecologically robust agricultural landscapes? What are the potentials and risks of GE crops? And what are the ways forward?
If anything were to be gleaned from this conference, it was that we have a vast array of problems involving agriculture's ability to meet the demands that will be made on it by 2050. It was also obvious that for however many problems we have to meet, we have a diversity of opinion on how to meet them.
Many at the conference emphasized the necessity of GE crops and the further extension of Green Revolution technologies. (Indeed, under the specter of Norman Borlaug, there were even calls for a New Green Revolution.) Others emphasized that inputs would need to be increased, and that those inputs would have to be industrially produced. Some argued those inputs (nitrogen, for example) would have to be implemented in vast scales of monocultures, while a few others in the minority highlighted the greater successes of local, community-based, and targeted pesticide and fertilizer application, organic or conventional.
Professor Catherine Badgley of the University of Michigan cited her own research indicating that true organic polyculture farming practices could increase yields up to or above current conventional high-intensity agricultural practices, thereby increasing yields in low-intensity farming in much of the developing world. This would also ensure maintaining ecological sustainability for community, regional, and global scales.
But I found myself asking certain questions -- when so many ecologists, economists, and scholars were calling for implementation of new agricultural practices on a village-to-village level, what did it mean that the conference was invoked under the guise of finding global metrics to address something that, according to these experts, would need community-oriented solutions?
John Reganold, professor of Soil Science at Washington State University, highlighted that the targeted implementation of pesticides and fertilizers could be beneficial to both the farmer and mitigate the runoff consequences of conventional application over vast monocultures. If we were able to solve the problems of agriculture on regional or global scales through the implementation of industrial and GE inputs on vast monocultures, perhaps the continued consolidation of agricultural lands and application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides would make sense. But one thing was clear from this conference: business as usual is not going to solve the problems facing us, and will likely exacerbate them!
Furthermore, little mention was made of the social metrics of agriculture; i.e., how does the implementation of agricultural reform (that focuses on yield, use of pesticides, runoff, efficiency, and soil loss and degradation) directly effect farmers and the poverty many of them face in the developing world? While we may be able to reform agriculture to have yields great enough to feed 9 billion people, and that do not have environmental impacts like chemical runoff, how will local peoples be effected in terms of control over their crops, their seeds, and the inequalities between the Global North, the Global South, and within their own communities? Where was the socio-political consideration in this discussion on global metrics? As mentioned above, perhaps the consolidation of agricultural lands for monocultures and GE seed/industrial inputs could feed our burgeoning population, but at what social cost? If land and seed is consolidated into the hands of the few for the sake of ecological sustainability, will that necessarily translate into social sustainability? To me, farmers losing control over their seed and centralization of their land seems inherently undemocratic.
With the presence of industry representatives from Monsanto, Unilever, Yara International, and the Keystone Center, and a heavy focus on monocultures and commodity crops over polycultures, several scholars in the audience and on the panels questioned the bias of the conference. Admittedly, agribusiness and Green Revolution technology has increased yields in places that would have otherwise faced great famine; for that, we should be grateful. But we've also seen the consequences of monocultures and industrial agriculture: excessive reliance on high yield varieties, waste of fertilizer and water and excess use of pesticides, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication, erosion, consolidation of land into the hands of the few, and mining of fossil water.
As was pointed out in the conference, there are proposals for metrics of agricultural sustainability: horticultural performance, profitability, soil quality, environmental impact, energy efficiency, and pests, diseases, and disorders. But there should be indicators for social sustainability as well. If we are to create a sustainable agriculture, we must develop systems that are 1. holistic, 2. restore the land more than they take from it; 3. do not produce byproducts that cause environmental degradation elsewhere; 3. ensure the livelihood of local farmers; and 4. help support diverse and vibrant local cultures, political systems, economies, and agricultures -- in other words, to help build strong local communities on farmer's terms, not ours; where farmers stay on their lands and in their communities, rather than migrate to the cities.
These were some of the terms for sustainable agriculture set out or implied by a minority of the panelists; for the majority of panelists at the conference, I saw a continued emphasis on monoculture, GE development, and chemical fertilizer input to increase yields. To me, this indicates business as usual. Ultimately, what agricultural reform comes down to is this: yes, we must increase yields to feed a population of 9 billion without further deforestation or development of wild places; but increasing yield for the sake of yield is not an end in itself, and in addition to the ecological considerations of increasing yield, we must make sure to consider the social implications of what we are doing. Increasing yield and decreasing environmental impact does not inherently imply sustainability, community-wise or agriculturally. Unfortunately, I saw little consideration of this at the conference on metrics. Unless "sustainability" is to become anything more than a buzzword for policy-makers, we must adequately determine what is sustainability in agriculture. Considering the sometimes divisive opinions on this at the conference, it is apparent that the issue is not resolved. Establishing metrics for success is not the same as envisioning what a sustainable agriculture will look like, and until we delve more seriously into recognizing that, we will have no vision of where we need to be going.
Despite these criticisms, the conference proved useful in some very important ways: it brought together some of the brightest, best, and most experienced minds in one room to really consider the problems of agriculture and our growing population. It hopefully inspired many people there to more aggressively pursue research and implementation of agricultural reform. And it did establish that there are tried and tested alternatives that can be implemented: organic systems, integrated farming, low-input, targeted-input, low/no-till, mixed crop/livestock systems, and animal-based systems.
As we continue to explore issues of climate and agriculture in this series, it will be important to remember that even the definition of what agriculture is and how it can adapt to sustainability is not a resolved issue. While agriculture continues to contribute to climate change, we are still divided over how to make agriculture sustainable. And though the establishment of metrics to measure what we will consider the success or failures of reforms is crucial to the achievement of real sustainability, we have a very, very long way to go and, unfortunately, not much time to get there.
As Lindsay Patterson of EarthSky put it, "Good ideas floated 15 stories above New York don’t necessarily translate to sustainability on the ground. " And personally, I question whether or not some of those floated ideas are even good, in the first place.
Which is really a heavily abbreviated critique of the symposium that I wrote. I'm pasting it below.
On October 1, I attended a conference entitled "Going Beyond Rhetoric: Metrics for Assessing Global Agriculture," hosted by the Earth Institute and convened at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Fifteen stories in the air, we were surrounded by miles of urban landscape -- Queens to the east, Manhattan to the west, and no farms in sight. In a room full of policy-makers, scientists, scholars, lobbyists, and economists, the vast landscape helped to emphasize the scope and scale of the decisions being made that day -- how far-reaching the ideas being discussed went, beyond the horizon.
By 2050 the Earth's population is expected to reach 9 billion people. With the majority of our world population now living in urban areas, and climate change already altering our agricultural landscape, how are we going to feed that many people while still meeting targets for real sustainability?
The goal of the conference was to determine the actual metrics -- the targets -- for determining desirable agricultural impacts. The conference was divided up into four sessions : where will our nutrient sources come for agriculture to feed 9 billion? How can we develop ecologically robust agricultural landscapes? What are the potentials and risks of GE crops? And what are the ways forward?
If anything were to be gleaned from this conference, it was that we have a vast array of problems involving agriculture's ability to meet the demands that will be made on it by 2050. It was also obvious that for however many problems we have to meet, we have a diversity of opinion on how to meet them.
Many at the conference emphasized the necessity of GE crops and the further extension of Green Revolution technologies. (Indeed, under the specter of Norman Borlaug, there were even calls for a New Green Revolution.) Others emphasized that inputs would need to be increased, and that those inputs would have to be industrially produced. Some argued those inputs (nitrogen, for example) would have to be implemented in vast scales of monocultures, while a few others in the minority highlighted the greater successes of local, community-based, and targeted pesticide and fertilizer application, organic or conventional.
Professor Catherine Badgley of the University of Michigan cited her own research indicating that true organic polyculture farming practices could increase yields up to or above current conventional high-intensity agricultural practices, thereby increasing yields in low-intensity farming in much of the developing world. This would also ensure maintaining ecological sustainability for community, regional, and global scales.
But I found myself asking certain questions -- when so many ecologists, economists, and scholars were calling for implementation of new agricultural practices on a village-to-village level, what did it mean that the conference was invoked under the guise of finding global metrics to address something that, according to these experts, would need community-oriented solutions?
John Reganold, professor of Soil Science at Washington State University, highlighted that the targeted implementation of pesticides and fertilizers could be beneficial to both the farmer and mitigate the runoff consequences of conventional application over vast monocultures. If we were able to solve the problems of agriculture on regional or global scales through the implementation of industrial and GE inputs on vast monocultures, perhaps the continued consolidation of agricultural lands and application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides would make sense. But one thing was clear from this conference: business as usual is not going to solve the problems facing us, and will likely exacerbate them!
Furthermore, little mention was made of the social metrics of agriculture; i.e., how does the implementation of agricultural reform (that focuses on yield, use of pesticides, runoff, efficiency, and soil loss and degradation) directly effect farmers and the poverty many of them face in the developing world? While we may be able to reform agriculture to have yields great enough to feed 9 billion people, and that do not have environmental impacts like chemical runoff, how will local peoples be effected in terms of control over their crops, their seeds, and the inequalities between the Global North, the Global South, and within their own communities? Where was the socio-political consideration in this discussion on global metrics? As mentioned above, perhaps the consolidation of agricultural lands for monocultures and GE seed/industrial inputs could feed our burgeoning population, but at what social cost? If land and seed is consolidated into the hands of the few for the sake of ecological sustainability, will that necessarily translate into social sustainability? To me, farmers losing control over their seed and centralization of their land seems inherently undemocratic.
With the presence of industry representatives from Monsanto, Unilever, Yara International, and the Keystone Center, and a heavy focus on monocultures and commodity crops over polycultures, several scholars in the audience and on the panels questioned the bias of the conference. Admittedly, agribusiness and Green Revolution technology has increased yields in places that would have otherwise faced great famine; for that, we should be grateful. But we've also seen the consequences of monocultures and industrial agriculture: excessive reliance on high yield varieties, waste of fertilizer and water and excess use of pesticides, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication, erosion, consolidation of land into the hands of the few, and mining of fossil water.
As was pointed out in the conference, there are proposals for metrics of agricultural sustainability: horticultural performance, profitability, soil quality, environmental impact, energy efficiency, and pests, diseases, and disorders. But there should be indicators for social sustainability as well. If we are to create a sustainable agriculture, we must develop systems that are 1. holistic, 2. restore the land more than they take from it; 3. do not produce byproducts that cause environmental degradation elsewhere; 3. ensure the livelihood of local farmers; and 4. help support diverse and vibrant local cultures, political systems, economies, and agricultures -- in other words, to help build strong local communities on farmer's terms, not ours; where farmers stay on their lands and in their communities, rather than migrate to the cities.
These were some of the terms for sustainable agriculture set out or implied by a minority of the panelists; for the majority of panelists at the conference, I saw a continued emphasis on monoculture, GE development, and chemical fertilizer input to increase yields. To me, this indicates business as usual. Ultimately, what agricultural reform comes down to is this: yes, we must increase yields to feed a population of 9 billion without further deforestation or development of wild places; but increasing yield for the sake of yield is not an end in itself, and in addition to the ecological considerations of increasing yield, we must make sure to consider the social implications of what we are doing. Increasing yield and decreasing environmental impact does not inherently imply sustainability, community-wise or agriculturally. Unfortunately, I saw little consideration of this at the conference on metrics. Unless "sustainability" is to become anything more than a buzzword for policy-makers, we must adequately determine what is sustainability in agriculture. Considering the sometimes divisive opinions on this at the conference, it is apparent that the issue is not resolved. Establishing metrics for success is not the same as envisioning what a sustainable agriculture will look like, and until we delve more seriously into recognizing that, we will have no vision of where we need to be going.
Despite these criticisms, the conference proved useful in some very important ways: it brought together some of the brightest, best, and most experienced minds in one room to really consider the problems of agriculture and our growing population. It hopefully inspired many people there to more aggressively pursue research and implementation of agricultural reform. And it did establish that there are tried and tested alternatives that can be implemented: organic systems, integrated farming, low-input, targeted-input, low/no-till, mixed crop/livestock systems, and animal-based systems.
As we continue to explore issues of climate and agriculture in this series, it will be important to remember that even the definition of what agriculture is and how it can adapt to sustainability is not a resolved issue. While agriculture continues to contribute to climate change, we are still divided over how to make agriculture sustainable. And though the establishment of metrics to measure what we will consider the success or failures of reforms is crucial to the achievement of real sustainability, we have a very, very long way to go and, unfortunately, not much time to get there.
As Lindsay Patterson of EarthSky put it, "Good ideas floated 15 stories above New York don’t necessarily translate to sustainability on the ground. " And personally, I question whether or not some of those floated ideas are even good, in the first place.