Agroecology and Environmental Approaches to Agriculture
Last week Provenance was invited to attend a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture and Food for Development (APPG). The subject of the meeting was agroecology, a systems approach to agriculture born of ecology and taking into account sustainability, resilience and equity as well as production.
The speakers, Prof. Martin Wolfe, Patrick Mulvany, Dr. Julia Wright and Dr. Michel Pimbert, argued that taking an agroecological approach to agriculture could help address environmental issues while maintaining and increasing food production: indeed, this was a key finding of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which DFID Ministers approved in June 2008. More recently the APPG report “Why no thought for food” has recommended that DFID should implement (as well as approve) the IAASTD findings. The implications of the IAASTD and APPG findings are a need for fundamental changes to agricultural policy and practice, if hunger is to be averted in ways that will ensure equity and restore the environment.
Patrick Mulvany, senior policy adviser to Practical Action and co-chair of the UK Food Group, began the meeting with an overview of agroecology and a call for an increase and strengthening of agricultural knowledge, science and technology (AKST) towards agroecological sciences (as recommended by the IAASTD). He wryly observed that agroecological approaches – often farmer controlled, invariably low cost, generally focusing on smaller landowners and never dependent on expensive proprietary inputs – unlike new crop varieties or synthetic inputs, do not generate income through licensing. As a result they were of little interest to ‘UK Plc’.
The two presentations that followed focused on examples of agroecological approaches in action. In the first Prof. Martin Wolfe of the Organic Research Centre , talked about Waklyns Agroforestry, his own research farm in Suffolk. Martin explained that modern agriculture tended toward monocultures which are high yielding and require little labour input but are not particularly resilient (to, for example, climate variability or disease) and so are reliant on the unsustainable use of artificial inputs. By contrast diverse systems (both within and between species) like Waklyns produce high (complex) yields, are resilient and sustainable but do require a higher labour input.
For the last 12 years Dr. Julia Wright has carried out ground-breaking work on the coping strategies of Cuba’s food system in the absence of fuel, agrochemical and food imports (this research is captured in her 2008 book: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba
Finally Dr. Michel Pimbert, Director of the Sustainable Agriculture, Biodiversity and Livelihoods Program at the UK based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), posed two questions:
Why are agroecological approaches to farming and land use not more widespread in both industrialised and developing countries?
and
What changes are needed to scale up and mainstream agroecological approaches for global food security?
The answers to both, he suggested, are linked.
Agricultural research and development, Pimbert asserted, emphasizes genetic modification/engineering ‘solutions’ at the expense of agroecological approaches which lack funding, trained scientists and facilities available for long term work on agoecology and locally based innovations. In addition research priorities for agricultural machinery and food processing technologies favour controllable uniformity and high volumes of single products – neither features of agroecological outputs.
At the same time policy tends to favour biological uniformity in food and farming, emphasize proprietary technologies and encourage seed legislation that hinders the use of diversity. Meanwhile, food standards further encourage uniformity and subsidies exist for large monoculture farms whilst there is little support for small scale diversified farming. These policies encourage the over-production of commodities in the minority world which are then often dumped in developing country markets undermining local systems and biodiversity.
To conclude Dr. Pimbert drew our attention to a report produced by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) in 2006, in a press release announcing the report the EAC said:
“If DFID continues to fail to meet the challenge of incorporating the environment and sustainability into its work on a planet where fish stocks are plummeting, water tables are falling and the pace of climate change is accelerating at an alarming rate, the £5.3 billion a year the UK will be spending by 2008 on development will at best result in only temporary successes.” (EAC Press Release, 16 August 2006)
In Pimbert’s view little has changed and DFID “remains environmentally blind today – neglecting agroecology and ecoliteracy in food and farming”.