Agriculture: An ecological tightrope

"The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Global grain prices have doubled in the last two years, due to grain shortages in Australia and a significant increase in demand from China and India. In addition, arable land usage is increasing due to the burgeoning demand for bio fuels. Within Europe agricultural set aside, which fostered natural biodiversity, is diminishing rapidly. Agricultural farmers believe that a boom time is ahead and that output should be grown as quickly as possible to meet the increased global demand. This short term, economically dominated approach concerns me deeply.

It is undoubtedly true that agriculture has played a very important role in the development of man, providing surety of a food supply has afforded the opportunity to concentrate efforts on other things of which we might be proud but the our over population is also directly attributable to agricultural development and practices. Agriculture is responsible for the destruction of many rich and diverse habitats, soil erosion and water shortages. I believe that we must seriously re-evaluate the role agriculture plays and ensure that it is managed in such a way as to minimise its detrimental impact on the wider bio system.

I do not believe that simply producing more in response to an increase in demand is sustainable; everything we take out of the earth’s system for the consumption of man, ceases to be available for the remainder of the system. It has been calculated that, as a global population, we are already consuming approximately 1.2 times that which the earth can produce sustainably in any given year, so already, year on year; the earth is actually able to produce less and less. With our global population forecast to increase by yet another 50% by 2050, this situation can only get worse and the consequence will be starvation and water deprivation on an unimaginable scale. Instinctively, responding to fossil fuel shortages by replacing them with bio fuels seems fraught with danger, just how much land will be required to achieve this and what will the environmental implications be? For me the core issue is our excessive dependence on all types of energy, we should address this problem first and foremost and use the least damaging technologies to provide a stop gap whilst this is achieved.

It seems ironic to me that our response to addressing the problems caused by excessive growth in population and consumption appears to be to grow more! As Cicero suggests farming is a long term endeavour which spans generations, it is about the husbandry and stewardship of our natural resources. I feel we have over industrialised agriculture and that certainly in the developed world, the majority of the population has lost the ability to identify with the land and is therefore less sensitive to the negative impacts we are having on it. I also believe that the dominance of the supermarket chains has exacerbated these issues. One only has to walk around a supermarket to notice that the emphasis is on encouraging consumption rather than providing for basic food needs.

I believe that developing truly sustainable agriculture will be essential to our long term survival and collective well being.