GFAR Talks is a showcase for debate on challenging and provocative topics related to agrifood system transformation, climate change and innovations in agriculture.
Our food system has never been less diverse. Just three Green Revolution’ crops (wheat, rice and maize) now provide over half of the calories consumed by humanity. Wherever we live, our diets increasingly depend on the productivity of these elite staple’ crops, grown in a few exporting regions and transported along a few supply chains to consumers around the world. A handful of multinational corporations control each stage of the agrifood system from seeds through to the production, processing, distribution, trade and retailing of food and livestock `commodities’ as well the genetics, breeding, fertilizer and agrochemical industries that underpin them. Its advocates, investors, researchers and policy makers argue that there is no realistic alternative to the Green Revolution model, that it has saved billions from famine and led to huge benefits in economies of scale, uniformity and quality of products and savings to consumers. Based on this logic, can we consolidate the agrifood system even further? How few crops do we actually need? If we have already reduced agriculture from over 7000 crops that we have grown throughout our history to just a handful of elite species, can we reduce it further? Can even fewer mega corporations maximize economies of scale? Can even larger farms maximize efficiency gains? How few farmers are necessary if we mechanize more operations and utilize artificial intelligence and digital technologies across the value chain?
This consolidation of the agrifood system to a handful of crops also relies on its reduction to just one production system — monoculture. Having only one crop per field allows synchronized planting and crop harvesting, timely application of fertilizers and pest and disease control chemicals, irrigation, agronomic expertise, and advisory services to all be targeted to the needs of a specific crop variety. Machines for soil preparation, crop management and harvesting are designed specifically for monocultures, especially crops such as wheat, maize, and soybean that can be harvested using a combine harvester. This level of coordination allows for the economies of scale and efficiency gains that are the lodestar of the Green Revolution and would be unthinkable without mechanized monocultures. Growing a single crop variety in the same field, often over several years, supported by high inputs of fertilizers, agrochemicals and irrigation is now the modus operandi for `conventional’ agriculture in which the soil is seen as a medium (preferably inert) from which to extract resources (water and nutrients) to maximize only the economic (usually grain) fraction of crop productivity. In this system, non-grain components (stems, leaves) are an inconvenience and all other species are a threat. This means removing all competitors (weeds, pathogens, microbes, insect pests) and adding inputs (fertilizers and irrigation) that provide the maximum returns on their investment on grain yield alone. In this reductionist model, nature is there to be controlled, biodiversity to be curtailed and fossil fuels committed at each stage of the value chain from cultivation to consumption. The result is that our globalized food system is both a principal cause, through its carbon emissions, and a primary victim, from extreme weather, of the climate crisis. Its significance is now so visible that the food system was a major theme of the recent COP28 Climate Change Conference in Dubai.
15 July 2023, Western Bahr el Ghazal State, South Sudan –
Photo credit copy; FAO/Akuot Mayak. Editorial use only. Copyright FAO.
Many now see that the requirements of the Green Revolution model are at variance with the tendency of natural processes towards diversity not uniformity. Questions are increasingly asked about whether this `one size fits all’ extractive model of agriculture is fit for our uncertain political, economic and climate future. Decades of extraction have left the world’s soils impoverished, eroded, lifeless. Without more and more inputs and greater and greater protection, our modern crop varieties can no longer achieve the yields that we demand from them. The vicious cycle of higher inputs and diminishing returns means that, without even more inputs, monocultures of our favoured crops are vulnerable to disturbances from extreme weather, heat and drought, floods, pandemic diseases and pests. Is an arms race with nature the future that we want for humanity and the planet and a legacy for our children?
So, if our current agrifood system cannot meet our future needs without causing irreparable damage to the planet, what should we replace it with? The problem is that whilst the Green Revolution model is so alluring in its simplicity (higher yields, more profits) there is a multiplicity of alternatives, each with their own advocates, principles and boundaries. Most (but not all) alternatives are based on the premise that agriculture must operate within the ecological principles on which natural biological systems work; this means harnessing rather than taming nature. But how? Ecology is the study of how living organisms interact with the environment and agroecology is that branch of ecology that relates to the behaviour of living organisms in agricultural systems. Agroecology requires an intimate knowledge of the complex relationships between agricultural species and their environments to guide decision making on what grows where, with and without what, when, and how. The first source of such knowledge is, not in the corridors, disciplinary silos and publications of academia, but in the communities that have maintained complex agroecosystems for millennia without scientific support. However, such indigenous knowledge is often vernacular (unwritten), beyond the rules of conventional scientific disciplines and unacceptable to the peer-reviewed publications that enable the career paths of aspiring academics. Advocates of agroecology further complicate their message by using a plethora of definitions, for example, with terms such as regenerative agriculture, climate smart agriculture, organic farming, permaculture, ecoagriculture, evergreen agriculture, restoration agriculture and conservation agriculture, often for overlapping or very similar approaches and solutions.
As well as difficulties in publishing their research and the terminologies that they use to describe them, proponents of agroecological solutions face two further obstacles. The first, is that without heavy investments in fertilizers. irrigation and crop protection chemicals, their critics argue that complex agroecosystems composed of multiple species cannot achieve the potential yields of crop monocultures. In fact, at any location a complex agroecosystem is usually more productive and biologically more efficient than a monoculture — that is it makes more total products without external inputs. The question is what do we mean by yield? The primary aim of the Green Revolution model is to maximize that fraction of outputs from an agroecosystem that are useful to humans (food, feed, fodder, or fuel) and minimize the economic cost and effort involved in producing them. This approach comes with `negative externalities’ through the loss of biodiversity, (including ‘ecosystem services’ such as pollinators and predators of crop pests), damage to the environment, (including pollution of soil and surrounding water bodies), and harm to humans (through exposure to harmful compounds). Such negative externalities are paid for, not by the producer, agrifood industry or investor, but by us as citizens and our fellow species on the planet.
The second main criticism of complex agroecosystems is that there are many practical hurdles to mechanizing their management. In the past, the need for manual labour was clearly a deterrent. However, new agricultural machinery, the use of remote sensing, robotics, and artificial intelligence can all improve management operations, and mathematical modelling and big data can help researchers identify the most suitable species combinations, spatial configurations, and management techniques that suit local growing conditions. The missing ingredient in the adoption of complex agroecosystems is the will of the agricultural industry and the commitment of researchers to seek innovative solutions rather than find reasons for why they should be ignored.
Finally, advocates of agroecological solutions have set themselves a higher benchmark than the universal metric of the Green Revolution i.e. achieving the highest grain yield per unit area of ground for a small range of high yielding crop varieties. They seek a transformational change in the very basis of agriculture. For this, they propose a new paradigm for the agrifood system that includes as many as thirteen principles of agroecology (recycling, input reduction, fairness, participation, land and natural resource governance, soil health, animal health, biodiversity, economic diversification, synergy, co-creation of knowledge, social values and diets, connectivity) each with its own challenges, trade-offs and metrics. Whilst not compromising on these principles can advocates of an agroecological approach provide a more compelling narrative and vision than listing thirteen principles?
Beyond a certain level of simplification, something vital is lost to a system. In our rush towards a uniform and commoditized agrifood system, we now have too few crop and animal species, too few farmers, too few farming systems, too few supply chains and too few decision-makers. In this process, what we have lost includes trust, culture, taste, identity, knowledge, talent, nature, resilience, sustainability, and even joy in what, how and why we eat. To rely on so few species grown as industrial monocultures through a single globalized agrifood system is already risky, to allow its further consolidation for more people on a hotter planet is sheer folly. Instead, we need to move from the concept of using nature as an extractive resource to seeing it as an ally in the difficult times ahead. This means putting soil health at the core of the agricultural system, preserving its natural biodiversity, and increasing the biodiversity of the crops and other species that we add to it. To articulate this vision, the advocates and practitioners of agroecological solutions need to work together towards a common framework, simpler nomenclature and more compelling narrative both to the wider public and to themselves.
Watch the recording of the eighth GFAR Talks webinar, featuring Emile A. Frison (Agroecology Coalition) and Romano De Vivo (CropLife International).
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