“Agriculture is both culprit and victim of climate change. We need to urgently change the way we produce and consume food if we are to nourish the world’s growing population while respecting nature. If we continue to squeeze the maximum out of the earth’s resources, more people will face hunger and the future of mankind and the planet will be at risk,” said CIDSE Secretary General Bernd Nilles.
According to the report “Agriculture: from Problem to Solution”, the benefit of investing in sustainable food production systems is twofold: GHG emission reductions would slow down human contribution to climate change (mitigation) and would also increase the capacity of agriculture to cope with it (adaptation). Many of the technical solutions currently put forward, like the inclusion of agriculture in carbon markets, are false solutions because they are out of reach for the most vulnerable.
“Food produced via industrialised methods contributes considerably to GHG emissions through synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, methane from farm animals, as well as large-scale land clearing and deforestation.
“We must apply ecological principles to reduce emissions, but also to increase agriculture’s resistance to changing weather conditions, like erratic rains, droughts and floods. Ecological production systems are more diverse and support biodiversity which increases their capacity to respond to erratic climate compared to monocropped systems which characterise industrial agriculture.” said CIDSE Food Policy Officer Gisele Henriques.
Agribusiness argues that increasing food supply via the intensification of production is the solution to the food crisis, but this fails to go to the heart of the matter. In fact, despite global population growth, today we produce 17 percent more calories per day per person than 30 years ago.
“The world’s poorest go hungry despite 30% of food being wasted in rich countries where obesity is already a major health threat. We can only eradicate hunger if we tackle its root causes, namely inequality and exclusion. For this we need to pay special attention to small producers, many of whom are women. They not only provide food to the majority of people worldwide, but are also those most at risk of food insecurity,” said Henriques.
