Food Production and Biodiversity

Last week, an editorial in the New York Times opened with some sobering projections: “According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, feeding humanity in 2050 — when the world’s population is expected to be 9.1 billion — will require a 70 percent increase in global food production, partly because of population growth but also because of rising incomes.” As author Verlyn Klinkenborg explains, the Food and Agriculture Organization hopes that this increase can be met by upping productivity on present farmlands and by cultivating land that is currently unsuitable for farming. While these goals are related, they present very different challenges for individual farmers, national infrastructures, and international organizations.

Klinkenborg then relates these goals to biodiversity aims. What is biodiversity, exactly? As the United Nations Environment Programme explains, “An estimated 40 per cent of the global economy is based on biological products and processes. Poor people, especially those living in areas of low agricultural productivity, depend especially heavily on the genetic diversity of the environment. The effective use of biodiversity at all levels – genes, species and ecosystems – is therefore a precondition for sustainable development. However, human activities the world over are causing the progressive loss of species of plants and animals at a rate far higher than the natural background rate of extinction.”

Just six years ago, 123 countries proclaimed their support for the 2010 Biodiversity Target to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss. But as Klinkenborg points out, scientists are now saying that this goal will not be met. He raises a key question: How can we respond to growing population needs by significantly increasing food production without further threatening the world’s biodiversity?

In terms of land size, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that agricultural land will need to increase by 297 million acres (or about three times the size of California). When this increase in agricultural land is coupled with the sprawling residential areas and deforestation, a crisis is not far off. While the United Nations and its member countries think in terms of policies and initiatives (and we’ve seen how successful that has been), Klinkenborg suggests instead that individuals need to look at their own activities.

What does he mean, exactly? Well, he says that Americans may need a less meat-focused diet and that the world needs a “fairer and far more balanced way of sharing and distributing food to reduce the devastating imbalance between the gluttony of some nations and the famine of others.” Above all, it means achieving a delicate balance between maintaining or increasing biodiversity while localizing and intensifying food production.