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Farms Must Curb Reliance on Fertilizers, UN's De Schutter Says
2010-10-15 11:32:05.83 GMT
By Rudy Ruitenberg
Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Farming must cut its reliance on
chemical fertilizer and machinery to ensure future populations
can feed themselves, said Olivier de Schutter, a special
representative for the United Nations on the right to food.
"Giving priority to approaches that increase reliance on
fossil fuels is agriculture committing suicide," De Schutter
said in an e-mailed statement today to mark World Food Day. "A
fundamental shift is urgently required."
Current efforts to boost agricultural production focus on
fertilizer and great mechanization, which De Schutter said is
"far distant" from a professed commitment to fight climate
change and support small-scale family agriculture.
The number of undernourished people in the world will fall
this year to an estimated 925 million from a record 1.02 billion
people this year, the first decline in 15 years,
the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization reported last month.
Hunger remains "unacceptably high," it said.
"The worse may still be ahead, since current agricultural
developments are also threatening the ability for our children's
children to feed themselves," De Schutter. "The solutions
pushed today by many public and private actors replicate a model
unfit to cope with the climate change challenge."
De Schutter said agriculture is directly responsible for 14
percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, and as much as
one-third of the emissions with the inclusion of carbon dioxide
produced by deforestation for the expansion of farmland.
'Low-Carbon Agriculture'
The UN representative said "low-carbon agriculture"
including better water-use technology and farming that combines
crops, should be promoted globally. Agriculture must help
mitigate the effects of climate change rather than contribute to
it, he said.
"There are promising alternatives to the dominant model,"
De Schutter said. "In Japan, farmers found that ducks and fish
were as effective as pesticides in rice paddies for controlling
insects, while providing an additional source of proteins."
"Low-technology, sustainable techniques may be better
suited to the needs of the cash-strapped farmers working in the
most difficult environments," De Schutter said. "Classic
'Green Revolution' approaches should be fundamentally
rethought."
Policy should stop dealing with climate change and
agricultural development separately, he said.
"We need to resist the short-termism of markets and
elections," De Schutter said. "What today seems revolutionary
will be achievable if it is part of a long-term, democratically
developed plan, one that will allow us to develop carbon-neutral
agriculture and to pursue everyone's enjoyment of the right to
food through sustainable food production systems."
For Related News and Information:
Top commodity stories: CTOP <GO>
Top agriculture stories: TOP AGR <GO>
Global agriculture statistics: GCSD <GO>
Agricultural commodity futures: CRPM <GO>
--Editors: Claudia Carpenter, Nicholas Larkin
To contact the reporter on this story:
Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at +33-1-5365-5039 or
rruitenberg@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Claudia Carpenter at +44-20-7330-7304 or
ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net.
