Special Issue Article: Advancing Environmental Conservation: Essays In Honor Of Navjot SodhiGlobal food security, biodiversity conservation and the future of agricultural intensification
Highlights
► The land sparing vs sharing dichotomy fails to account for real-world complexity. ► Small-, but not large-scale farming is the backbone of food security for the poor. ► Reducing food usage by waste, biofuels and livestock improves food security. ► Intensification with agrochemicals can cause huge environmental costs. ► On-farm functional biodiversity provides many services, e.g. pollination and biocontrol.
Section snippets
Introduction: setting the scene – land sparing vs wildlife friendly farming?
Combining efficient agricultural land use with biodiversity conservation is a challenge. With the global population approaching 9 billion people in the next few decades, it is often asserted (e.g., from United Nations (UNs) and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)), that there is a need for 70–100% more food (Godfray et al., 2010). At the same time, the UN declared the current decade (2011–2020) the ‘Decade of Biodiversity’ with the EU (2011; the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020) setting the
Food production from smallholder farms, not large-scale commercial farms, is the backbone of global food security
Food security and food sovereignty are needed where the hungry live, which is often within a landscape matrix of ecosystems that are rich in biodiversity (Perfecto and Vandermeer, 2010). Hunger – somewhat counter intuitively – is not so much linked to the quantity of food that is globally produced but to poverty (Adams et al., 2004, Sachs et al., 2009). The majority of poor people live in rural areas with little or no access to productive agricultural lands. Hence, hunger is linked to farm
Increasing yields need not translate into biodiversity loss or more land spared for nature
The land sparing vs sharing dichotomy is based on the argument, demonstrated mostly for temperate regions, that yields are negatively correlated to wildland biodiversity (Kleijn et al., 2009, Geiger et al., 2010). High yields and high biodiversity, however, can co-exist in tropical smallholder agricultural systems (Perfecto et al., 2007, Perfecto and Vandermeer, 2010, Clough et al., 2011). In cacao agroforestry, for example, management could be further optimized for more diversity in the
Wildlife-friendly farming sustains cultural ecosystem services
Last but not least, cultural ecosystem services need to be taken into account. Often, religious and ethical attitudes are important drivers of choosing agricultural practices (Sodhi and Ehrlich, 2010). In developed countries for example, people value traditional heterogeneity and complexity of their surroundings such as hedges, flowering field margins, fallows, and forest margins – all of which benefit biodiversity (Brodt et al., 2009, Soliva et al., 2010). In addition, people appreciate the
Conclusions
In conclusion, conventional (“industrial”; de Schutter, 2011) intensification of agriculture increasing yields in the developed world does not necessarily contribute to global hunger reduction. Food security and food sovereignty need to increase in areas where the hungry live, based on robust, eco-efficient approaches (Keating et al., 2010) and “agroecological intensification” (or “ecological engineering” increasing sustainable productivity), which incorporates natural biodiversity patterns and
Acknowledgments
We note with sadness the passing of our friend, colleague, and mentor Navjot Sodhi; working with him was wonderful and we strongly believe that he would have loved to coauthor this opinion paper – we miss him. Ben Phalan and an anonymous reviewer provided very helpful comments. Author sequence follows the “sequence-determines-credit” (from T.T. to T.C.W.) and the “equal-contribution” norm (from L.J. to A.W.) (see Tscharntke et al., 2007b). Financial support for T.T. came from the German
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