The Future of Food and the Planet
Agriculture Can Minimize Land Use and Reduce Environmental Harm
Industrial agriculture has a bad reputation— making us sick and obese, polluting our waterways, causing widespread deforestation, reducing biodiversity, generating one-fourth of greenhouse gases, contaminating our soil with toxic chemicals, and creating large-scale animal suffering in dense feedlots. A UN report documents that big agriculture causes $3 trillion in damage to the global environment each year.
Some, however, defend industrial agriculture as producing enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of land. As we add more than two billion additional people to the planet in the next 25 years, much more food will be needed. Many scientists claim that the most damaging environmental impact of agriculture is the carbon dioxide released by converting wildlands into farms. These same scientists say that to meet future demand, we need to make more food per acre instead of using more acres to make food. This will preserve as much of our remaining natural treasures as possible, including their invaluable carbon sinks. The Green Revolution that started in the 1960s with its high yields didn’t end deforestation, but few forests would still be standing without it.
There are no magic solutions to the problems of agriculture. If we ate less meat and grew fewer biofuels, we would reduce agriculture’s hunger for land. Although the number of vegans (4 percent) and vegetarians (about 25 percent) is growing rapidly, the world shows no signs of giving up meat. Shockingly, three-fourths of agricultural land is used to feed livestock. Cattle require about 10 times as much land as chickens or pigs, and nearly 100 times as much as plant protein.
The goal needs to be to produce more and protect more. Agriculture in much of the world is heavily subsidized. Governments could use some of these monies to encourage all kinds of land-sparing and emission-reducing approaches. Hundreds of startups are developing genetic engineering tools to reprogram crops for higher yields, better resistance to pests and diseases, and higher tolerance to heat, drought, and floods. These innovations are already reducing chemicals (pesticide use has declined 40 percent) and synthetic fertilizers (down about 5 percent).
Some ranches in Brazil are integrating regenerative farming and grazing practices with conventional practices to produce enormous yields, thus helping spare the Amazon. Denmark recently instituted a nationwide tax on agricultural emissions, earmarking the revenues for helping farmers become even more efficient and for reconverting one-fifth of Denmark’s farmland to forests and wetlands.
In the past decade, farmers have been forced to accept the reality of climate change, as their yields are threatened by increasing temperatures, and pests and diseases invade new regions. Many are starting to shift away from practices that harm the environment. Governments, consumers, and philanthropic organizations need to push them along this path to help them become as green as possible. Many across the political spectrum demonize industrial agriculture and want to replace it, but it needs to be part of the solution. Climate-smart agriculture will reduce emissions, while becoming more resilient and adaptive.
