A Fight Over the Future of Farming: U.N. Ag Group vs. Big Ag

By Tom Laskawy

"The present paradigm of intensive crop production cannot meet the challenges of the new millennium," says a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In other words: Big Ag, step aside. It's not as if the world is being fed particularly well at the moment -- and prospects are dimming for chemical agriculture in a resource-restricted, warming world.

The FAO has been very active in attempts to make world agriculture more sustainable. It published an influential 2006 report on animal agriculture's environmental and climate impact, and it was behind the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development report, which laid out a vision of the future of agriculture in the developing world based on the principles of agro-ecology rather than on chemically intensive industrial agriculture.

Building on that work, the FAO has now published a "policymaker's guide" for developing-world agriculture called "Save and Grow" that begins like this:

 The Green Revolution in agriculture, which swept much of the developing world during the 1960s, saved an estimated one billion people from famine. Thanks to high-yielding crop varieties, irrigation, agrochemicals and modern management techniques, farmers in developing countries increased food production from 800 million tonnes to more than 2.2 billion tonnes between 1961 and 2000. Intensive crop production helped to reduce the number of undernourished, drive rural development and prevent the destruction of natural ecosystems to make way for extensive farming. Those achievements came at a cost. In many countries, decades of intensive cropping have degraded fertile land and depleted groundwater, provoked pest upsurges, eroded biodiversity, and polluted air, soil and water. As the world population rises to a projected 9.2 billion in 2050, we have no option but to further intensify crop production. But the yield growth rate of major cereals is declining, and farmers face a series of unprecedented, intersecting challenges: increasing competition for land and water, rising fuel and fertilizer prices, and the impact of climate change.

Interview with Renowned Scientist David Suzuki on the Future of the Planet

By Joseph Roberts

Joseph Roberts: How did it all begin?

David Suzuki: We started when the Worldwatch Institute said it's the turnaround decade. We thought we were only going to be here for 10 years. So we said every dollar we raise we're going to spend because we don't have time. Who would've imagined that 20 years later we'd still be here and that conditions would be worse.

JR: And it hasn't turned around.

DS: No. We've had five years now of the most anti-environmental government we've ever had. We have a leader who claims the economy is his highest priority, proroguing parliament to focus on the economy and yet a leading economist like Sir Nicholas Stern says if we don't deal with climate change it's going to destroy the global economy. Our prime minister has never, ever, said this is an important issue affecting Canada and we've got to do something.

JR: My concern now is the way global economics is actually speeding up the destruction. With the UN declaring 2011 the International Year of the Forest and we have less than a third of the forest left on this planet, what is to be done?