Comments on the Draft V0
I have read this first draft with great interest as sustainable agriculture is a necessary condition for the adequate nutrition of the world’s human population, and its food security. Therefore, other things being equal, it is vital that we should adopt a holistic approach to identify the appropriate means of ensuring the sustainability of agriculture in its widest sense.
However, this draft seems to represent the traditional anthropocentric thought, i.e. all the world’s resources should be at the disposal of mankind irrespective of the environmental catastrophe it would inevitably entail. We already have sufficient evidence of this in observable climate changes and their consequences.
I plead here for a fresh look at what is necessary to make agriculture sustainable, not merely how to feed growing human population as though we can reconcile population increase and the sustainability of agriculture ad libitum.
Existence of life on earth as we know it, depends on the equilibrium between the living and the resources they require to sustain life. The portion of these resources accessible to the living is finite.
Those resources fall into two logically distinct categories, viz., mineral and biological. The former consists mainly of Oxygen, water, Carbon dioxide (for photosynthesis) and a variety of other inorganic compounds. All of these are in constant re-use as the used material is made available to the living via a set of well-known cycles, eg. Carbond and water cycles. How much agriculture depends on these is already well established.
Existence of all animal life depends on its access to certain mineral and biological resources. The latter may be plants required by the herbevores or the animal diet the carnivores need, while the omnivores require both types.
Meanwhile, the inorganic compounds the living have used are returned for re-use by the action of scavengers and the saprophytic organisms that live upon the dead and/or excreta of the living.
Hence, the possibility of the continued existence of the living depends on the equilibrium between them and the mineral resources they require, and the equilibrium among the living species themselves to accomodate animal and plant predation, scavenging and saprophytism.
This equilibrium among the living depends on their biodiversity and the population of individual species. The danger loss of biodiversity entails is now widely accepted. In nature reserves, authorities have to resort to culling some species in order to preserve the habitat for all the species living there.
Moreover, a quantatative reduction of plant life from a land area has a drastic effect on the water retention by the soil, loss of fertil top soil through increased errosion, and changes in the heat exchange between the land and the atmosphere. This last will result in a dramatic rise in the local temperature as well as a significant reduction in rain fall. Further, water errosion results in silting of streams, which in some areas already leads to floods even after a moderate rain fall.
As human population rises together with our expectations, the need for resources exclusively for human use also increases. Every current ’development’ scheme entails anyone or more of the following:
1. Changes in land topology owing to the building of roads, buildings, deforestation for timber and agriculture, etc.
2. Increasing emission of Carbond dioxide from the use of fossile fuels and animal husbandry.
3. Increased ocean pollution with Nitrogen and Phospherous from agro-industry that results in algal blooms that kills all marine life in large areas.
We already see the awful environmental degradation and its effects on global climate and the availability of water. It is difficult to see how one can realistically increase the global food production and achieve an equitable distribution of food to the current world population without more environmental degradation, whose consequences would be far more drastic and unpredictable than what we experience today.
I think this state of affairs arises from the belief that human kind is somehow excempt from laws of nature, and we have a ’right’ to exist at the expense of every other living thing.
The very possibility of sustainable agriculture depends on its full integration into the totality of human affairs, because current notions of development entails the use of an enormous quantity of diverse natural resources, whose extraction, conversion into good and/or services and use entail serious environmental degradation and its known consequences.
Indeed, loss of food due to several causes and its waste at domestic level could be minimised. But the question is whether this would go a long way to ameliorate the inequities in global nutrition.
I think the time has come to underline that growth of human population is also subject to the same constraints to which all other populations of the living are subject.
Unless active measures are undertaken to curb the global population increase immediately, preferrably to stop it, I think equity in nutrition can only be achieved at a very high price, viz., high incidence of serious natural catastropes and a general fall in the quality of human lives.
Even though it is stark realism that compels me to be pessimistic, it makes one sad all the same. And yet, I hope my comments may make people think a little more about the crucial subject of sustainable agriculture and the vital need to have it fully integrated into other spheres of human activity.
Best wishes!
Lal Manavado.
Lal Manavado