| |
In this guest blog post, our friends at Fairfood International look at the link between biodiversity, hunger and poverty.
As biodiversity is being lost at an accelerated pace, we should rightly look at our plates to find part of the answer. Oddly enough, plants and animals are not disappearing because we eat them – but rather because we eat too few of them.
According to The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the abundance of species has declined by 40% between 1970 and 2000. The first explanation for this grim picture that comes to mind is that we overuse them for direct human consumption. Paradoxically, the problem is the fact that we exclude them, focusing on a narrow selection of crops, fish and animal products that expands rapidly at the cost of the variety of ecosystems and abundance of living species within them.
Modern agriculture is based on monocultures, which drastically reduce the variety of plants in the respective ecosystems, and of animals and insects directly dependent on them. The role of annual crop variation, but also bacteria and fungi, in increasing soil fertility is replaced by chemical fertilizers and the higher risk of disease spread among monocultures with high density of plants is mitigated by using pesticides, which further contaminate the ecosystem. Not just the cultivated land is used in an unsustainable manner, but also the uncultivated, since the need to clear land for monocultures represents one of the main reasons for deforestation, leading to climate change and loss of bio diverse ecosystems. Take the Mato Grosso region in Brazil, whose name “thick forest” is beginning to sound like cruel irony. The surface of soy plantations has increased by 400% in the last ten years, at the expense of large parts of the Amazon forest and the Pantanal, world’s largest wetland.
The reason why monocultures thrive is to a large extent due to domestic subsidies in industrialized countries such as the US and those of the EU, which distort the allocation of resources and make farmers concentrate disproportionately on one crop, while at the same time artificially lowering prices and pushing smaller producers out of the market. The most subsidized crops, corn, wheat and soy, are used in the global animal feed industry. Unsurprisingly, they feed rapidly growing “monocultures of animals”: chickens, pigs and cows for the most, while the IUCN warns that about 30% of breeds of the main farm animal species are currently at high risk of extinction.
The interconnection between the growth of industrial farming, the rise of monocultures and the economic incentives such as subsidies constitutes a deadly cocktail for biodiversity. According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, “the challenge of the 21st century is to transform agriculture into a good administrator of biodiversity and reverse its destructive capacity, without restricting its mission to feed a growing world population”
Nonetheless, the fact that the variety of living life on Earth is at risk seems to pass by largely unnoticed. This is why the United Nations proclaimed 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity, and May 22nd the International Day for Biological Diversity, with this year’s focus on Biodiversity, Development and Poverty Alleviation. Contributing to poverty alleviation and effectively reducing its most dramatic manifestation, hunger, is the mission of Fairfood International. Within this mission, the protection of biodiversity is an underlying concept, without which sustainable development of people, the planet but also business and trade cannot be envisaged. Any strategy of poverty reduction should include concerns for the protection of biodiversity in order to be sustainable and make a positive change in the long run. In terms of an already famous analogy, it comes down to not only giving the poor the rod instead of the fish, but also making sure the lake does not disappear.
|
Design by 
