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Challenges for Agriculture (.pdf 156K)
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While the demand on agriculture expands, concern over human activity and the impact on our physical environment is reaching a crescendo. In 1999, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that 200 scientists in 50 countries identified water shortages and global warming as the two most worrying problems for the next century17. The practice of agriculture is the single greatest interaction of humankind with our physical environment. Both of these issues confront the business-as-usual approach for everyone connected to agriculture.
About 40 percent of our global food supply is drawn from the 18 percent of the agriculture area that is irrigated. In order to meet increasing food demand, the irrigated area of agriculture increased from less than 100 million hectares in 1950 to more than 270 million hectares in 2005. Accessing more water and providing it to crops has been an essential and productive tool of the Green Revolution. Today, agriculture makes 70 percent of the freshwater withdrawals on a global basis, with up to 90 percent in some regions of the world18. However, the World Water Council suggests we will need 17 percent more water than is available if we are going to feed the world in 2020. Water availability has historically been addressed through global trade, creating sources of “virtual water” for arid countries in the form of grain imports. For example, the water required to produce grain amounting to the annual imports into North Africa and the Middle East is roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River19.
Associated with the present and future water constraints on agricultural production is the expected adaptation requirements brought on by global warming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the impacts will be felt most acutely in Sub-Saharan Africa where 75 million to 250 million people will be subjected to water stress and crop yield reductions of 50 percent by 202020. Large river basins in Asia and North America that are diverted to irrigation and crop production are also projected to be reduced – exacerbating the existing competition for water resources and creating new levels of stress for crop and livestock producers in all areas of the world21.
The 2007 IPCC summary report also suggests agriculture contributes 13.5 percent of the total global greenhouse gases; however, another 17 percent of CO2 equivalent emissions are attributed to deforestation and land use changes22. “As I understand the statistics, somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of all the deforestation that takes place, takes place because people are trying to survive,” says World Food Prize Laureate Dr. Per Pinstrup-Anderson23. “They’re cutting down trees in order to use the land to produce food and other agricultural commodities.” Global net forest loss per day currently stands at 20,000 hectares – an area twice the size of Paris24.
“Continued improvement in efficient land use will be critical if we’re going to meet ever growing demand for food and fiber without putting more pressure on our environmental resources,” says Dr. Jason Clay of World Wildlife Fund. Agriculture is already the predominant use all habitable land, yet grain producing land per capita in 2030 is projected be just 0.08 hectares, or one-third of what was available in 195025. Topsoil is the living ecosystem upon which all of humanity is most utterly dependent, yet 40 percent of all existing agricultural lands are considered seriously degraded. While topsoil can be renewed, it takes 200 to 1,000 years to create 2.5 centimeters of rich topsoil26. “Soil erosion is any nation's enemy—far worse than any outside enemy coming into a country and conquering it because it is an enemy you cannot see vividly,” says Dr. Harold R. Watson, an award-winning soil scientist. “It's a slow creeping enemy that soon possesses the land.”
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17 BBC News: Dawn of a thirsty century
18 Feeding a World of 9 Billion – PeopleandPlanet.net
19 Growing Numbers Face Water Poverty; Lester Brown, 2001 – PeopleandPlanet.net
20 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers, IPCC
21 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers, IPCC
22 Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers, IPCC
23 Interview with Dr. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, 2006
24 Feeding a World of 9 Billion – PeopleandPlanet.net
