Sustainability Science Textbook 2nd Edition

Bert J.M. de Vries

Chapter 152024-03-06T16:12:22+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Land and agro-food systems

Keywords

Food consumption Hunger Obesitas Security Trade Production Food system (dynamics)

Agro-food systems consist of a chain from land use and land cover(LULC), conversions and food production to waste flows and packaging debris.

  • Despite improvements in food production, a sizeable fraction of human population is still underfed. Another and growing part is obese. Both have serious health impacts. Food trade has grown enormously, with generally speaking positive effects on food security but novel risks of dependency and loss of resilience;
  • Food production has been a co-evolution in which hunter-gatherer, subsistence farming and pastoralism gradually changed into more intense practices such as rice growing, mixed farming and commercial grazing. The global output of cereals and animal protein has risen steadily and, in the last half century, exponentially. This has been achieved on only a slightly larger area because productivity did increase through expansion of irrigated area, use of fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, better land management and other achievements of Modernity;
  • There is a large spread in the types of farmers and their contributions to food output, but there are clear trends towards high-tech high-yield agriculture and concentration in the hands of a limited number of multinational corporations. This is driven by a few causal loops, notably cost competition, upscaling and innovation. Governments and corporations have become the major actors, with food security, innovations and profits as major objectives;
  • Scientific analyses indicate that there is little room for new agricultural lands (extensification) due to other claims on land. There is room for another 40-60% increase in food production (intensification), but it is dependent on feasibility and acceptance of new technologies;
  • The intensification had and has unintended and undesired side effects, such as input dependence and environmentally harmful It endangers long-term sustainability and causes (the need for) social, environmental and health regulations. A variety of directions and initiatives towards structural transformation can be experimented with and are necessary for the path towards more sustainable food systems. They differ in their underlying worldview and the search is for integrative pathways.

Test your understanding of this chapter by reviewing the study questions below.

Answer:

Food consumption has many relations with (individual) health, two of which are:

  • deficiency in food calories and other ingredients (‘hunger’, malnutrition) causes an individual to become underweight and increases the risk of a number of diseases and malfunctionings;
  • eating excess food causes an individual to become overweight (obesitas) and increases the risk of, amongst other conditions, diabetes.

Both deficiency and excess of (certain) food items also have negative psychosocial consequences.

Answer:

On the one hand, food trade has been from ancient times onwards a way to secure a population against the vagaries of the weather and other contingencies. In this respect, it tended to increase food security and the resilience of the food system. It was also a way to diversify the menu.

Trade flows can also make a population dependent on outside food sources, for instance on only one or a few suppliers of major staple crops. It happened in the Roman Empire with grain dependence on Egypt and, today, in parts of Africa with grain imports from Ukraine and Russia. Without spreading the places of import origin, food trade can thus cause new forms of food insecurity and diminish resilience of the food system.

Answer:

Agro-food systems are broadly defined as the planting and harvesting of crops and rearing of animals, the processing, transport, storage and selling of food and in a final stage consumption and excretion, losses and disposal after consumption. Historically over time and still across populations, one can distinguish:

  • Hunting and gathering
  • Shifting cultivation
  • Pastoralism
  • Commercial grazing (ranching)
  • Wet rice cultivation
  • Mixed farming

Answer:

There is a variety of farmer types, in the analysis by Malek and Verburg (2020) listed as the survivalist, subsistence smallholder, market-oriented smallholder, professional commercialist, professional intensifier and eco-agriculturist.

Evidently, the professional intensifier is closest to the A1-worldview: high-tech efficient provision and trade on global markets. They often grow out of market-oriented smallholders (A2), who in turn are the most successful ones among the subsistence-oriented smallholders. They adhere to or still have knowledge of traditional and local forms of agriculture (A2-B2), but are under pressure to modernize (→A1). Depending on context, e.g. subsidies and trade labels, the smallholders can engage in more professional agriculture with environmental and ecological concerns (→B2-B1). This route can be pursued more extensively and successfully by the eco-agriculturalist  (B1-B2), who will however permanently be challenged by the A1-forces.

Answer:

The yield gap is the difference between what theoretically can be produced on a given area of land and what actually is produced. It is determined by the local biogeography and by the actual management practices which are usually suboptimal. Besides, there are natural weather and other variations.

Answer:

Further intensification is confronted with limitations, such as excess pollutants. An often mentioned alternative is extensification, that is, forms of agriculture and livestock which use less land per output or animal. This is possible in most regions of the world and notably in Africa and part of Asia and South-America. However, it competes here with other uses and targets: urbanization, tourism, biosphere reserves, afforestation and land for renewable energy sources. It will therefore cause land-use related conflicts which may be aggravated by climate change and policies.

Answer:

Key mechanisms are the following positive feedback loops:

  • rising food demand because of growing populations (positive loop);
  • innovation-driven decline in costs and prices;
  • profit-driven globalization in search of market and demand expansion.

These dynamic processes are counteracted and/or regulated by:

  • negative side-effects or externalities with respect to environmental and social aspects;
  • national aspirations of food independence. With limits on trade.

Answer:

In a complex web of interactions, one can distinguish several groups of externalities:

  • Intensification makes food production more dependent on fossil fuel based input of chemical fertilizer, with impacts on climate, and on a finite resource of phosphorous;
  • The large-scale and still in many places increasing use of inputs pollute soils, rivers, lakes and seas, notably eutrophication from nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) compounds and a variety of chemical herbicides and insecticides;
  • Intensification depends in many places on massive and unsustainable withdrawal of (ground)water for irrigation;
  • In many places, soil quality and inherent fertility (organic content and other characteristics) is declining, with outflow of nutrients exceeding the rate of inflow by natural and human processes;
  • Agro-food systems are the most important cause of changes in land use and land cover (LUCC) and as such a major cause in loss of biodiversity.

Answer:

Important options and pathways are:

  • Changes in diet such as less meat and less sugars, with positive effects on health and environment;
  • small-scale, ecological and community-oriented forms of agro-forestry and animal husbandry, to avoid or reduce the externalities of large-scale intensive agriculture;
  • practicing ‘alternative’ farming philosophies, practices and techniques with different impacts on productivity and environment.

They interfere with other trends such as new and improved farming technologies (e.g. GMOs), more intense processing and increasing concerns about animal welfare.

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