Goodbye farming?

While soil is often treated with no more importance that mere dirt in which to grow our crops, soil health is vital to our survival. Soils are not only crucial for the growth of natural and managed vegetation but they also help balance larger ecosystems by playing a vital role in climate regulation and oxygen production.

While generating healthy soils is a very slow process (generating three centimetres of top soil takes around 1,000 years), destroying it does not take long. About a third of the world’s soil has already been degraded according to estimates released by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, while marking the International Year of the Soils this past year. If current rates of soil degradation continue, all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years.

It seems like common sense for agriculturalists to have a self-interest in looking after soil, but commercial farming, and contract farmers have exhausted soils for the sake of making a quick profit. Ploughing removes protective vegetation and exposes soil to wind and rain, allowing soil erosion to accelerate. Chemical-heavy farming techniques, which have been championed since the Green Revolution, have however wreaked havoc to soil health. Mono-cropping and water-logging have caused further soil degradation.

Soil erosion is also accelerated when livestock is allowed to overgraze, or when forests are cut down which exacerbate flooding, and also erodes more soil cover. Deforestation not only increases soil erosion, it is also causing global warming. Conversely, soils play a key role in absorbing carbon and filtering water. Thus, soil destruction creates a vicious cycle, whereby less carbon is stored, and the world even gets hotter, and the land is further degraded, compelling people to cut more forests to grow their crops.

Soils are of course vital for growing food. To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, almost 15 million acres of new farmland is needed every year. Instead, twice that amount of land is being lost due to soil degradation. To make up for this lost land, we push into rainforests and other precious habitats. Thus, unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960, due to the combination of growing populations and ongoing soil degradation.

There are means to produce crops without ploughing, and without degrading soils. For example, permaculture and organic farming techniques can work with complex natural systems rather than seeking to simplify or replace them. Experimenting with such techniques, pioneers have achieved impressive yields of fruit and vegetables in places that seemed un-farmable. Alternative farming techniques may not be the only solution, but they should be given more attention. Every year, billions of dollars are being spent on agricultural research and development being conducted using techniques that are wreaking havoc on our soils. On the other hand, alternative and sustainable farming is only considered a fringe science, given the policy attention and resource allocation it receives.

Supporting more organic farming techniques is particularly suitable for developing countries, where a large proportion of the rural poor are dependent on agriculture. Yet, it is ironic that agricultural productivity in such countries continues to rely on capital intensive and elite-led farming techniques to boost growth, rather than focusing efforts on small-scale producers growing food organically.

It is unfortunate that globalisation and use of international aid to promote agricultural liberalisation has spread the same soil degrading processes to agricultural fields in even the most far-flung parts of the world. Unless there is a broader rethink about the prevailing mode of agricultural production, with its current emphasis on cash cropping and boosting yield through more capital intensive farming, we seem to be facing a threat to global food security at a scale which has not been witnessed before.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2016.

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