
Nairobi/Hyderabad, 16 October 2012 – Nairobi/Hyderabad, 15 October 2012 – The aim of achieving food security across the globe will become increasingly elusive unless countries factor the planet's nature-based services into agricultural and related planning, a report released today from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says.
Safeguarding the underlying ecological foundations that support food production, including biodiversity will be central if the world is to feed seven billion inhabitants, climbing to over nine billion by 2050 argues the study Avoiding Future Famines: Strengthening the Ecological Basis of Food Security through Sustainable Food System.
Inefficiencies along the food delivery chain further complicate the challenge, and the report highlights that an estimated one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, amounting to 1.3 billion tonnes per year.
The report aims to increase the focus on these crucial aspects, which are being undermined by overfishing, unsustainable water use, environmentally degrading agricultural practices and other human activities. It also frames the debate in the context of the green economy, calling for food production and consumption practices that ensure productivity without undermining ecosystem services.
“The environment has been more of an afterthought in the debate about food security,” said UNEP Chief Scientist Joseph Alcamo. “This is the first time that the scientific community has given us a complete picture of how the ecological basis of the food system is not only shaky but being really undermined.”
While pointing out the current challenges, the report also offers a clear way forward to shore up the ecological foundations and improve food security. It issues recommendations on the redesign of sustainable agriculture systems, dietary changes and storage systems and new food standards to reduce waste.
“The era of seemingly ever-lasting production based upon maximizing inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, mining supplies of freshwater and fertile arable land and advancements linked to mechanization are hitting their limits, if indeed they have not already hit them,” said UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. “The world needs a green revolution but with a capital G: one that better understands how food is actually grown and produced in terms of the nature-based inputs provided by forests, freshwaters and biodiversity.”
The report, produced in collaboration with other international organizations including the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Resources Institute (WRI), took a holistic approach to analyzing the food system. Twelve scientists and experts authored the report, covering many different areas of expertise including food consumption patterns, agricultural production, marine fisheries and inland fisheries.
They found that while agriculture provides 90 per cent of the world's total caloric intake, and world fisheries provide the other 10 per cent, these life-supporting industries face many threats, all of which are exacerbated by underlying driving forces such as population growth, income growth and changing lifestyles/diets linked to urbanization.
The report identified the following specific threats to these systems:
Agriculture
· Competition
for water. Some experts believe that future food demands need to be
met by additional irrigated land, but there is already strong competition
from rapidly growing domestic and industrial water withdrawals.
· Conventional
agricultural practices have a variety of ecosystem impacts, such as
a reduction of on-farm biodiversity and attendant increase in pests and
disease, soil loss, eutrophication and contamination of ground water.
· Traditional
agricultural practices, if practiced inappropriately, can lead to severe
land degradation.
· Climate
change and its impacts will compound the preceding threats to agriculture
by shifting crop-growing zones and bringing an eventual decrease in crop
productivity.
Marine Fisheries
· Overfishing
is the foremost force in undermining the ecological basis of fisheries.
The FAO estimated that as of 2008, 53 per cent of global marine stocks
are fully exploited, 15 per cent are either underexploited (3 per cent)
or moderately exploited (12 per cent), while 32 per cent are either overexploited
(28 per cent), depleted (3 per cent) or are recovering from depletion (1
per cent).
· Loss
of coastal habitat such as coral reefs and mangrove forests. At least
35 per cent of mangrove forests and 40 per cent of coral reefs have been
destroyed or degraded over the last decades.
· Bottom
trawling, dredging and destructive fishing practices such as the use
of dynamite and cyanide, which lead to habitat loss or modification.
· Degradation
of coastal water quality. Nutrient runoff causes coastal eutrophication,
zones of severely reduced dissolved oxygen and depleted aquatic life. Over
four hundred dead zones have been identified in coastal areas.
· Climate
change will lead to warmer water and a more acidified ocean, with many
impacts on marine fisheries. The IPCC projects a global loss of 18 per
cent of the world's coral reefs in the next three decades, shrinking a
crucial fish habitat.
Inland Fisheries
· Infrastructure
developments such as dam construction in river catchments are destroying
or modifying inland fishery habitats. More than 50 per cent of the world’s
large rivers have been fragmented by dams on their main channel and 59
per cent on their tributaries.
· Land-use
change and removal of vegetation cover leads to increased runoff, erosion
and sediment pollution of water. Human activities have increased sediment
flow into rivers by about 20 per cent worldwide.
· Agricultural
expansion disrupts connectivity between floodplains and rivers – floodplains
provide some of the most productive habitat for inland fisheries.
· Agricultural
runoff and domestic and industrial wastewater discharges are degrading
the quality of many inland waters. Wastewater loadings to inland waters
in Africa may increase by a factor of four to eight between the 1990s and
2050.
Biodiversity
The variety and variability of animals, plants
and micro-organisms at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels are necessary
to sustain key functions of the ecosystem. For example, a diverse range
of soil organisms interact with the roots of plants and trees and ensures
nutrient cycling.
Many food production activities negatively
impact on this supporting biodiversity, such as:
· Fertilizer
run-off, which causes eutrophication, poses a threat to the diverse life
of lakes and coastal areas.
· Excessive
tillage – tilling to greater depths and more frequent cultivations –
has an increased negative impact on all soil organisms, in particular organisms
living in surface areas, such as earthworms.
· Deforestation
and pesticide contamination of lands adjacent to farmland degrade "off-farm
biodiversity", impacting pollinators and natural pest control of crops.
· Overfishing
may result in the removal of important components of the ecosystem, such
as algal-feeding fish in coral reef systems, with a consequence of altered
biodiversity and ecological states that may be impossible to restore.
· Aquaculture
activities are also a source of pollution and biodiversity concerns as
they may lead to the introduction of pathogens, strains and/or species
that can alter marine habitats and diversity.
· The
destructive fishing methods mentioned above can disrupt marine ecosystems,
and it may take hundreds of years for vulnerable habitats such as cold
water corals and seamounts to recover from such practices.
While the problems are many and varied, the
report issues a raft of recommendations that can shore up the ecological
foundations and create the conditions for sustainable food production.
“The solutions are to be found along the
whole food value chain - from the farms that need to grow food more sustainability,
through the large companies that need to ensure that their products are
from sustainable fisheries and farms, up to the consumer who needs to think
seriously about switching to a sustainable diet and reduce food wastage,”
said Prof. Alcamo.
“Of course, we have to deal first and foremost
with all the socio-economic issues having to do with food security - questions
of access and affordability of food, and so on,” he added. “But ultimately
we won't have enough food to distribute unless we find out a way to produce
it sustainably without destroying its ecological foundation.”
Recommendations
Among the key recommendations for ushering in more sustainable agriculture and fisheries are the following:
· Build centralized storage and cooling facilities for small-scale farmers to help get their produce to market faster, thus avoiding food loss.
· Promote sustainable diets so as to avoid unhealthy eating habits and the associated health effects, and reduce impact on natural resources. In particular, lower consumption of meat and dairy products in developed countries should be promoted.
· Re-consider food quality standards that lead to unnecessary wastage.
· Design
sustainable agriculture, not only on individual farms, but scaling up to
the landscape and national level. Examples include improving soil management,
making agricultural water use more efficient and promoting integrated nutrient
management.
· Sustainable
agriculture can be scaled up by supporting farmers, extending land tenure
rights to farmers to encourage stewardship and rewarding farmers and farming
communities for ecosystem stewardship.
· Economic
strategies consistent with green economy thinking are also fundamental
to scaling up sustainable agriculture, such as:
o Eliminating
subsidies that contribute to overfishing (the global fishery sector receives
up to US$25-30 billion) and habitat destruction, and redirecting funds
into investment for sustainable fishery management and capacity building.
o Providing incentives for sustainable fisheries such as beneficial subsidies for conversion of fishing gears to less-damaging alternatives.
o Introducing fiscal measures such as taxation and levies on harvest volume and increased fines on illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing.
o Draw small shareholders into the global food economy and make them part of the system of sustainable practices in agriculture and fisheries.
· Where technically feasible, maximum sustained yields" of marine fisheries should be calculated and adhered to with enforcement arrangements and economic incentives. In poorer countries and for small-scale marine fisheries, a "co-management" approach can work in which fishers might agree to fish size or species limitations, seasonal closures of fisheries.
· Establish networks of Aquatic Protected Areas.
· Protect marine fisheries by reducing land-based pollution sources that lead to "dead zones" in coastal areas.
In summary, the scientists pointed out that to neglect the ecological aspects of food security would hamper efforts in its other four pillars. While we can’t avoid famine simply by making the food system environmentally friendly, neither can we go on producing food by wearing away its ecological foundation. In the end we’ll find – no foundation, no food, says UNEP Chief Scientist.
Additional information
The full report can be downloaded here: http://www.unep.org/publications/ebooks/avoidingfamines/
Overfishing, unsustainable water use, environmentally degrading are BIG BIG problems but even if we go more green the poluation will stil exist
Posted by: Polish Faruri | October 16, 2012 at 05:30 PM