This post is part of the series EU Agriculture 2020.
No more important issue exists concerning agriculture around the world. I’ve had discussions with people in many different places over the last few months, from mountain tops in Italy to the US pacific northwest. Climate change is destroying fragile local ecosystems, causing widespread drought, flooding, forest fires and many other natural disasters. It’s changing growing regions, for example allowing rice to be grown further north, or wine to be produced in Holland. It’s causing widespread devastation to crops like coffee. It’s requiring seeds and plant varieties be adapted to new climates and diseases, almost faster than it’s humanly possible to do the breeding work.
It’s inconceivable that Europe is still pursuing biofuels, or that we are still producing electricity from coal.
It’s time to stop conflating air pollution with greenhouse gases, the latter being far more important. Of course air pollution is important too, but climate change must have priority. It’s time to stop talking, and time for action. We know what we need to do.
As well as a threat to agriculture, agriculture is also a major cause of climate change. Healthy crops, grown sustainably, builds topsoil, which is the most effective way to sequester greenhouse gases. Wasteful agriculture like crops for biofuels, animal feeds, bioplastics and other non-human foods, are not only wasteful in fossil fuel, pesticide and chemical fertilizer use, but they also generally degrade the topsoil, releasing stored greenhouse gases.
Sustainable agriculture also reduces air pollution. Nitrogen based air pollution is removed from the air at the same time as carbon based greenhouse gases, and these are combined to form healthy topsoil. If you’re a gardener, you’ll certainly understand this is how compost is formed, combining the greens (N) with the browns (C). Of course we have to deal with the sources of pollution too, but sustainable agriculture is the solution to healing the planet.
Unsustainable agriculture causes air pollution! Mega-greenhouses in The Netherlands discharge nutrient solutions that are very damaging to the environment. These discharges contain a lot of nitrogen, a great deal of which ends up in the air as pollution. Factory farm feed lots are also a major source of air pollution.
It’s time to make a complete shift to sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture is not a threat to food security, food security is threatened by unsustainable agriculture. It’s simply false to suggest we are living in a world of scarce food, or that we need more food to feed a growing world population. We already produce roughly twice as much food as we need to feed the world. We need to produce food smarter, with less impact on the planet, less emphasis on meat, and make more efficient use of what we have.
This is the most important thing to do, starting now.
