Over the last two decades of the 20th century, a global movement took shape with the aim of defending and promoting more sustainable forms of agricultural production. Resulting from a decentralised and diversified movement, and building on the work of millions of farmers all over the world, agro‑ecology emphasises the development and maintenance of complex ecological processes. This has proved to have the potential to meet the food challenge in the 21st century.
The introduction of chemical fertilizers and the scientific genetic improvement of crop species in the final quarter of the 19th century heralded the possibility of surpassing the Malthusian limit, which predicted that the expansion of the world population would eventually be checked by the limited global capacity for food production.
At the end of the 20th century this promise appeared fulfilled. Despite the rapid expansion of the world’s population, the relative number of people suffering from hunger had fallen steadily to around 840 million.
This situation changed abruptly at the start of the 21st century. Just three years before the 2015 deadline established by the world community for halving the number of undernourished people in the world, the spectre of endemic hunger has come back to haunt us with a resurgence of problems with aggregate food production.
Not only has the pledged reduction in the number of hungry people not occurred, but there has been an increase in the absolute number of hungry people to over one billion. This situation is even more alarming when we consider that food production will have to increase 100% by the mid 21st century, when the global population is predicted to stabilise at between 9 and 10 billion inhabitants.
The roots of the food production crisis
The modernised production system that was so successful in surpassing the Malthusian limit also contained, within itself, the seeds of the present crisis. Firstly, it engendered an enormous concentration of land in the hands of small numbers of producers, excluding hundreds of millions of family farmers from access to land. Because production is capital intensive, it also denied access to work for millions of agricultural workers. However, the greatest vulnerability of this system is its dependence on the unsustainable use of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources.
This system has been depleting renewable resources for many years, and their loss is already being felt. Farming now occupies almost 30% of the global land area and has a bigger impact on natural ecosystems than any other human activity. Of the 8.7 billion hectares used for crop production, pasture and forests, 2 billion have been degraded since the end of the Second World War.
Farming consumes 70% of all water utilised by humans. Intensive irrigation systems, which are now widespread in many parts of the world, are exhausting the aquifers on which they rely. Estimates suggest that 75% of the world’s agricultural biodiversity has become extinct over the last century. Much of this loss has occurred in the last 50 years with the replacement of traditional varieties and species by commercial genotypes, developed for large-scale use and making substantial profits for the companies that develop and sell them.
This reduction in genetic variability makes farming more vulnerable to pests and diseases. And this steep decline in the genetic variability of cultivated species has been accompanied by changes in the agro-food system, which have further contributed to reducing the overall number of species consumed. Taken together, this narrowing of the food base and genetic variability is contributing decisively to the loss of food sovereignty and the increase in food and nutritional insecurity.
The accelerating degradation of non-renewable natural resources by conventional farming also poses a grave risk to the future capacity to feed the world’s population. Conventional food production, rooted in the technical-scientific principles of the Green Revolution, depends on the intensive and systematic use of fossil fuels and natural sources of phosphates and potassium, resources that are now becoming scarce.
Higher oil prices, caused by the growing depletion of the world’s reserves, directly inflate food prices. This is a result of the importance of this energy source in the production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as in operating farm machinery and the processing, storage, refrigeration and long-distance transportation of farm produce.
Fertilizer prices rose substantially between 1999 and 2008 and, although they fell with the recent global economic crisis, they remain 3 times more expensive than at the start of the 21st century and are likely to continue to rise. Pesticide costs have also continued to escalate, pushed upwards by high oil prices. These inputs are also becoming less effective in controlling “undesirable” organisms. Despite the systematic increase in the volume of pesticides applied to crops, harvest loss rates have risen in recent decades. Since the start of the 1990s, the imbalance has worsened, particularly due to the growing resistance of pests and weeds to pesticides employed in protecting transgenic crops.
The agro-ecological alternative
Over the last two decades of the 20th century, a global movement took shape with the aim of defending and promoting more sustainable forms of agricultural production. The emergence of this movement has been completely decentralised and diversified, and employs a variety of names and concepts. Explicitly opposing the conventional pattern of agricultural development founded on the paradigm of the Green Revolution, the movement was initially described as an “alternative agriculture”.
From the 1990s onwards, and especially in Latin America, this vague term has been replaced by the term “agro-ecology”. Defined as a science that applies ecological concepts and principles to the design of sustainable agroecosystems, agro-ecology emphasises the development and maintenance of complex ecological processes capable of enhancing soil fertility, as well as the productivity and health of crops and livestock.
The degree to which agro-ecology represents a rupture from conventional systems can vary considerably: some approaches simply seek to reduce or replace the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; others involve completely restructuring the logic behind the technical and economic organisation of farming systems. An agro-ecosystem designed in accordance with agro-ecological principles will establish a strong structural and functional correspondence with the natural ecosystems in which it is embedded.
Agro-ecosystems have a high degree of local specificity. This means that their development, which is along agro-ecological lines, requires much local innovation. This is in stark contrast to the diffusion of universal technical packages, the solution that is implicit in the Green Revolution paradigm.
Agro-ecological efficiency involves developing and maintaining agro-ecosystems with a wide diversity of livestock breeds and crops, the latter of which is achieved through crop combinations, rotations and successions. Managing the complexity inherent to this type of agricultural system sets limits on the size of the production units and the possibilities for mechanising farm work.
For this reason, the system requires highly skilled and flexible labour that is attentive to detailed management issues, implying that labour in agro-ecological systems is highly involved in the management of the system. This is also in stark contrast to conventional systems, where much of the work is essentially mechanical and separated from the management process. Small- and medium-sized family units are well placed to indivisibly integrate work and management, a basic condition for managing the complexity inherent to agro-ecological systems.
Even though agro-ecological principles can be employed by large private sector producers, the level of economic and ecological efficiency in these larger production units tends to be much lower than in small familymanaged units. In summary: peasant family farming is the ideal socio-cultural base for promoting the agroecological alternative on a large scale.
The potential to meet the food challenge in the 21st century
According to a survey conducted by Jules Pretty, professor at the University of Sussex, more than 1.4 million farmers across the world have adopted agro-ecological approaches. His study identified average increases of 100% in the productivity of hundreds of projects after adoption of these principles with records of 400% increases in more advanced agro-ecological systems.
As well as high productivity levels, the agro-ecological systems also showed other benefits, countering many of the factors responsible for the crisis in conventional farming: they have a positive energy balance and low fossil fuel energy use; they are economic in their use of water; they recuperate and conserve soil fertility without the use of external inputs, as well as being resistant to soil erosion; they function as “carbon sinks” and emit few greenhouse gases; they are functionally integrated with the natural vegetation, providing greater stability to local microclimates and they do not generate chemical or genetic contamination.
Taken as a whole, these positive effects indicate that promoting agro-ecology is a strategy that is consistent with providing a comprehensive structural response to the crisis in the conventional farming model, and specifically with meeting the challenge of feeding an expanding world population while respecting the constraints imposed by considerations of sustainability conditions. This potential was confirmed by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, an initiative financed by organisations linked to the United Nations. This research project combined the efforts of a group of 400 scientists from various different disciplines and countries from every continent in the world over a period of three years.
More explicitly, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Food issued a statement in 2010 in which he argues that agro-ecology can simultaneously increase agricultural productivity and food security, improve the incomes of family farmers and contain the genetic erosion created by industrial farming.
A political challenge
The main challenge to widespread adoption of the agro-ecological approach is not technical but political. It involves the need to overcome the political, economic and ideological might of the agribusiness sectors that drive the continued expansion of the industrial farming model.
Among the many well-documented negative effects of this approach, the expansion of the agribusiness model has been the main factor responsible for the disappearance of small-scale family farming worldwide. This disappearance not only means fewer family production units capable of making the much-needed agro-ecological transition, it also implies the loss of the traditional culture of rural peoples and communities, an essential element in the construction of agro-ecological knowledge that can be adapted to a wide variety of socio-environmental contexts.
The crisis engendered by the unsustainable nature of globalised agriculture based on industrialised monocrops has been masked by the constant rise in public subsidies for agribusiness. However, the permanent accentuation of this crisis, along with the continuing depletion of natural resources and the increase in global demand for food, are indisputable and inescapable facts. In the context of the Rio+20 Summit, it remains to be seen what, if any, concrete measures are taken to move humanity away from this destructive yet entirely avoidable trajectory.
In practice the question is: how do we create the conditions needed for agro-ecology to supersede the agribusiness model? An assessment conducted in the United States found that the country would need 40 million production units in order for U.S. agribusiness production to be supplanted by agroecological family farming.
As the current number of farming units in the United States is around 2 million, this difference would have to be filled by “neopeasants”. The difficulties in incorporating so many people in farming activities would make this transition extremely difficult and painful for U.S. society.
Yet, despite its radical nature, such a change is not entirely inconceivable. We already have the example of Cuba, a country forced to create a new class of peasants after the abrupt cessation in the supply of inputs and energy subsidised by the Soviet Bloc. The initial difficulties encountered by these neo-peasants when learning the principles and practices of agroecology were partly responsible for the drop in the efficiency of the country’s food production system for some years and the consequent supply deficit. The most serious social consequences of this were only averted by the government’s capacity to distribute the available food among the entire population.
The Cuban experience should be taken as a planet-wide alert on the enormity of the challenges faced by humanity as a whole. Many countries still have peasant farmers with the knowledge needed for developing agro-ecology, especially if they are supported by adequate public policies. But, in many other regions, policies that will protect or re-establish peasant farming are urgently needed, for example through agrarian reforms and measures that guarantee territorial rights as well as other measures.
The sooner we implement measures for promoting agro-food systems based around agro-ecology peasant farming, the less painful the transition from an economy based on fossil fuel energy to an effectively sustainable economy will be.
Text: Jean Marc von der Weid
Jean Marc von der Weid works as co-ordinator of the AS-PTA Public Policies Programme.
E-mail: jean@aspta.org.br
References
De Schutter, O., 2010. Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. UN General Assembly. Human Rights Council Sixteenth Session, Agenda item 3 A/HRC/16/49
IAASTD, 2009. Synthesis report: a synthesis of the global and sub-global IAASTD Reports. Washington, DC. Available at http://www.agassessment.org.
