Opinion: We need more farmers, not less

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15 September 2014

We need more farmers, not less, says John D. Liu. But as farmers can help limit climate change and increase biodiversity, so shouldn’t they be paid for more than simply the food that they produce?

Productive landscapes within functional ecosystems are critical in being able to feed the human population, and will become even more valuable as the human population continues to rise. The assumption is often made that industrial agriculture is the only effective and efficient way to provide sufficient food in the modern world and the world of the future. There is, however, much less publicity surrounding the fact that large-scale industrial agriculture often degrades the environment, and that functional ecosystems are far more productive than dysfunctional ones.

Farmers are not just growing crops that feed people and animals. Farmers are also sequestering carbon in the biomass and necromass, helping to filter water and keep it in the soil to reduce flooding, and increasing or at least maintaining biodiversity. Or they are having the reverse effect. They influence the regulation of the weather and the climate by maintaining functional ecosystems, or they disrupt it by degrading ecosystems and increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

While the trend in mainstream agriculture has been towards more mechanisation and fewer farmers, we simultaneously see hugely increasing rural unemployment leaving so many people in our countrysides without anything meaningful to do. We badly need to look at how social organisation is changing the fundamental values of our societies and how we are creating degraded landscapes that reflect the state of our consciousness. If we value food that tastes good, contains few or no chemicals, is produced in ways that are not polluting, respects the rights of farm workers and treat animals ethically, sequesters carbon and regulates the climate, we can employ many more millions of people while simultaneously restoring ecological functions on a planetary scale, and help to ensure a more peaceful world.

This summer in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, I led a team that documented efforts that are engaging more people in agriculture and that simultaneously improve ecological functions in the area. Similar initiatives are happening around the world. The result is these local people who engage in agriculture are experiencing great satisfaction, making their families and communities more sustainable and resilient and this is what the world needs more of, in order to better mitigate and adapt to climate change.

We need to realise that farmers are on the front line of climate change, and that society depends on them to sequester carbon by massively increasing organic matter in the soils. But society cannot depend on something that it is unwilling to pay for. We need more farmers, not less, and they will have to be paid for more than simply the food that they produce.

John D. Liu

John D. Liu is Director of the Environmental Education Media Project and Visiting Fellow at VU University, Amsterdam.
Email: johnliu@eempc.org

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