UNCCD Calls For A Shift From The Current "Age of Plunder" Toward An "Age of Respect" of Biophysical Limits

HAPPY WORLD SOIL DAY!

Roughly half of the world's surface area has been converted to land grazed by domesticated animals, cultivated crops, or production forests resulting in the loss of more than half of the world’s forests. 

Soil health can be defined as “the continued capacity of the soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.” At present, land degradation and desertification are rampant threats to the sustainability of livelihoods, a phenomenon mostly experienced in drylands, which support over 44% of world food production.

Degraded dryland ecosystems increase vulnerabilities. Photo: Binh Thuan, Thien Anh Huynh/Vietnam/UNEP

Drylands are fragile ecosystems characterized by infertile soils and sparse vegetation cover and where average rainfall is counterbalanced by evapotranspiration. In 2000, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimated drylands to cover 40% of the global land surface. Recent studies (Huang et al., 2015) have shown that this figure will increase to 48% by 2025 and 56% by the end of the century. Such an expansion will further undermine soil's carbon sequestration potential and enhance regional warming. Land degradation and desertification will be exacerbated in drylands located in developing countries ''where 78% of dryland expansion and 50% of the population growth will occur under'' (Huang et al., 2015).

The UNCCD Global Land Outlook report published this year qualifies our current food system as inefficient, highlighting the current patterns of food production, distribution, and consumption as highly unsustainable. It criticizes the current agribusiness model which ''benefits the few at the expense of the many: small-scale farmers, the backbone of food production for millennia, are under immense stress from land degradation, insecure tenure, and a globalized food system that favors concentrated, large-scale, and highly mechanized farms'' (GLO, p.11).

The Monopoly of Food Supply: Social-Ecological Costs

If 20 years ago around 600 companies were manufacturing seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, in 2011, just 10 companies controlled 75% of the seed market share and 11 companies controlled 98% of the pesticide and fertilizer market share.

High-yielding varieties (HYV’s) are at the core of the Green Revolutions as they require less land area than traditional varieties to achieve the same yield. The HYV’s increase the productivity of capital and are referred to material-biased innovations, relating to the large material inputs required to sustain the growth of the new seeds (fertilizers, pesticides, controlled supply of water from irrigation). Some chemical inputs can severely undermine the health of soils and ecosystems, remaining in the ecosphere for long periods of time.

The Patent on Nature 

Let's take the example of Cargill's expansion in India, as per documented by Brewster Kneen in Invisible Giant- Cargill and its Transnational Strategies. India's 'New Policy on Seed Development' in 1988 (created in the context of an economic crisis and an IMF-guided structural adjustment) fuelled partnerships between domestic and foreign companies. A Cargill press release in the 1990's stated ''all Cargill hybrids sold in India are derived from imported germplasm as part of the Cargill strategy of providing the best genetics of the world to the Indian farmer''. According to the author, ''such statements expresses a deeply colonial attitude'' and ''contempt for indigenous knowledge in general and traditional plant selection and genetic conservation in particular''.

Protesting against patented Cargill hybrids in the 1990s

The author reports, from his conversation with the managing director of Cargill Seeds India at the time, that the company's intentions were clear: ''industrial use of corn is on the increase, and if we grew more corn there would be more industrial use [...] through the Seed Association of India we have been lobbying the government (Page 133). 

Agrobiodiversity

While an entire section of the FAO's CSA sourcebook highlights the importance of ''genetically diverse varieties and breeds'' to boost the resilience of agroecosystems, it also acknowledges that very few crops currently provide most human energy needs (5 grains provide 60%).

Agrobiodiversity (the genetic resources for food and agriculture, resulting from natural selection processes and careful selection by farmers over time) is under threat by industrial agriculture. For instance, only 10% of the 10,000 varieties of wheat recorded in 1949 are being produced in China today; more than 95% of apple varieties recorded in the 1900s in the United States are no longer cultivated. 

Fertilizer pollution

Chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds have revolutionized agricultural production but they are accompanied by heavy social-ecological burdens.

Did you know that India is the second largest emitter of CH4? The country produces about 20% of the world’s rice and has the largest ruminant population in the world! 

About 73% of Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) emissions are accounted by agricultural activities. Anthropogenic N₂O, a potent GHG which has a GWP 296 times that of  CO₂  at a 100-yr time horizon, largely comes from reactive nitrogen inputs from synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use, but also manure applications, cropland expansion, fossil-fuel combustion and biomass burning related to these activities (Tian et al., 2015). Globally, atmospheric N₂O has increased by 18% since industrial levels and contributes approximately 7% to the radiative forcing (Forster et al. 2007). 

The addition of nitrogen into the atmosphere disrupts the global nitrogen cycle and undermines biosphere integrity, with ''cascading effects'' as Nr (reactive nitrogen) moves along its biogeochemical pathway (Smil, 2001). Nitrate, one of the major forms of Nr, is especially mobile in the soil and is more susceptible to being lost through leaching. Hence, its an important source of groundwater contamination, which is used for irrigating most crops in India.

Also, it has been estimated that increased air temperatures will, on the one hand, result in increased N₂O emissions in most land ecosystems due to ''stimulations of nitrifiers and denitrifiers activity and nitrogen supply through mineralization'', but may, on the other hand, reduce N₂O emissions through soil drying and stimulation of plant growth and nitrogen uptake (Luo et al., 2013).