Rethinking Agriculture

We are faced with two crises on a planetary scale — climate change and species extinction. Our current modes of production and consumption, which started during the Industrial Revolution and grew worse with the advent of industrial agriculture, have contributed to both. If no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, we could experience a catastrophic temperature increase of four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. But climate change is not just about global warming. It’s also about the intensification of droughts, floods, cyclones, and other extreme weather events. Climate extremes are already costing lives, as we witnessed in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, where more than 200 people lost their lives due to flooding in 2014, and in the nearby state of Uttarakhand, where floods in 2013 took nearly 6,000 lives.Over the course of human history, levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere never exceeded 280 parts per million until the Industrial Revolution, but they have risen sharply in recent decades: current carbon dioxide levels are at 395 parts per million. Levels of nitrous oxide and methane — which are also greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, only more potent — have also increased dramatically due to industrial agriculture because nitrous oxide is emitted through the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, and methane is emitted from factory farms. According to a report from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, nitrous oxide has roughly 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, while methane is roughly twenty times stronger.The spread of monocultures and the increasing use of chemical fertilizer in agriculture, combined with the destruction of habitats, have also contributed to the loss of biodiversity. Paradoxically, this biodiversity would have helped sequester greenhouse gases. Four years after the United Nations Earth Summit held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, the UN International Technical Conference on Plant Genetic Resources in Leipzig assessed that 75 percent of the world’s biodiversity had disappeared in agriculture because of the Green Revolution — the widespread turn toward agrochemicals and high-yield cereal grains — and industrial farming. Industrial agriculture has also eroded biodiversity by killing off pollinators (such as honeybees) and beneficial soil organisms.Climate change, agriculture, and biodiversity are intimately connected. Biodiversity in our agriculture can help mitigate climate change while industrial agriculture can only aggravate it. As I have shown in my book Soil Not Oil, chemical agriculture and a globalized food system are responsible for 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Chemical monocultures are also more vulnerable to failure in the context of an unstable climate — for example, if a farmer grows only one kind of plant and it turns out that plant is particularly sensitive to drought, then a short drought could wipe out the entire food supply. As a result, monoculture-based agriculture is hardly a system we can rely on for food in times of uncertainty.Adapting to unpredictable climate change requires diversity at every level. Biodiverse systems are more resilient to climate change and are more productive in terms of nutrition per acre. Feeding the world is more about providing nutrition than it is about harvesting commodities to be shipped globally, thus adding to emissions. Decentralized systems have more flexibility to respond to uncertainty as well. That is why participants in Navdanya, the Indian biodiversity conservation movement that I founded, promote the creation of community seed banks at a local level, as well as other steps to intensify biodiversity within farming systems.It is not that humanity was unaware of — and did not take steps to avert — the climate and biodiversity crises. At the UN Earth Summit in 1992, the international community signed two legally binding agreements: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Both treaties were shaped by knowledge from the emerging ecological sciences and the growing ecology movement. The first was a scientific response to the ecological impact of atmospheric pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels. The second was a scientific response to the erosion of biodiversity caused by industrial, chemical monocultures, as well as a response to the potential for new threats to biodiversity, including genetic pollution caused by genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Article 19.3 of the Convention on Biological Diversity led to the implementation of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which requires exporters to label GMO goods and enables countries to ban GMO imports. At the invitation of the United Nations Environmental Program, I served as a member of the expert group that created the framework for the Cartagena Protocol.Cutting-edge interdisciplinary science and democratic movements created the momentum for international environmental law. Today, science and democracy continue to be the forces that will protect the planet and our lives. Since 1992, the big polluters — the fossil fuel industry and the agrichemical industry (which is now also the biotechnology industry) — have done everything they can to subvert the legally binding, science-based, international environmental treaties on climate change and biodiversity. Lawless transnational corporations are violating international law and then covering their tracks through propaganda and public relations tactics. The fossil fuel industry (and its supporters, who are in denial about climate change), and the agrichemical/biotech industry (and its supporters, who are in denial about biosafety hazards) seem intent on following the same path that caused the crises in the first place.Those who deny all threats to biosafety are ignorant of the scientific assessments of the impact of GMOs on the environment, public health, and socioeconomic conditions. The PR attack on ecological science stands on unscientific grounds. It is irresponsible because it pushes us closer to disaster and prevents a change in spite of scientific evidence showing we have better alternatives that work. Biosafety science — along with the emerging paradigm of agroecology, which seeks to conserve biodiversity, increase health and nutrition per acre, provide food security, and increase climate resilience — has the power to ensure the social and ecological sustainability of our agriculture and food systems.We must move away from industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture and a centralized, global, commodity-based food system that contributes to emissions. Biodiversity conservation is central to adaptation. Instead of creating biodiversity-destroying industrial monocultures, including those based on GMO seeds, we need to adopt agroecological practices that conserve biodiversity and ensure biosafety. A transition to biodiversity-intensive, ecologically intensive agriculture addresses both the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis simultaneously, while also addressing the food crisis. Even though industrial agriculture is a major contributor to climate change and more vulnerable to it, the biotechnology industry is attempting to use the climate crisis as an opportunity to further push GMOs and to deepen their monopoly through biopiracy-based patents on climate-resilient seeds that were bred by farmers over generations.We cannot depend on a mechanistic worldview and its unscientific denial of the interconnected nature of living systems and ecosystems to get us out of the crisis. As Einstein is believed to have said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Centralized, monoculture-based, fossil-fuel-intensive approaches, including that of GMO agriculture, are not flexible. They cannot adapt and evolve. We need flexibility, resilience, and adaptation to survive a changed reality. This resilience comes from diversity. This diversity of knowledge, economics, and politics is what I call “Earth Democracy.”