{"id":33488,"date":"2015-12-21T11:24:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T11:24:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-10-27T14:41:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T14:41:00","slug":"8488-is-industrial-farming-a-tech-fix-or-dead-end-for-tackling-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/food\/8488-is-industrial-farming-a-tech-fix-or-dead-end-for-tackling-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Is industrial farming a tech-fix or dead end for tackling climate change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

GRAIN,\u00a0<\/strong>an international NGO, which supports small farmers and sustainable agriculture<\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers estimate that\u00a0between 44% and 57% of all greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) come from the global food system. Agriculture and deforestation caused by agriculture account for 26-33% of total emissions, making it a major contributor of climate change.<\/p>\n

Chemical\u00a0fertilisers\u00a0are the main source of climate-changing\u00a0gases. No country uses\u00a0more of them than China<\/a>, which now accounts for a third of global\u00a0fertiliser\u00a0use. These are mostly nitrogen\u00a0fertilisers, which are produced from coal. The average Chinese farmer applies over\u00a0600 kilogrammes of chemical\u00a0fertilisers\u00a0per hectare<\/a>\u00a0— more than triple what the average farmer uses in Brazil and nearly five times that used in the US, where fertiliser use is also a growing problem.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, only a third of the nitrogen fertiliser applied to China’s wheat and rice crops is absorbed by plants. The rest ends up in rivers or the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Fertilisers are responsible for numerous\u00a0environmental and health calamities<\/a>. Our research shows that, because of its destructive impacts on soil fertility, fertilisers are contributing to dwindling yields. Over the past 40 years, the efficiency of nitrogen fertilisers has decreased by two-thirds globally, and their distribution per hectare has increased by seven times.<\/p>\n

Kicking the fertiliser habit will require more than a technological\u00a0fix. For decades, global agricultural policies and research and extension programmes have focused on a \u2018Green Revolution<\/a>\u2019 model of farming [large-scale crop production], based on a narrow set of seed varieties that only produce high yields when doused with fertilisers and pesticides.<\/p>\n

The Green Revolution was implemented throughout Asia but the most emblematic cases would be India and the Philippines.\u00a0In China, farmers can achieve similar yields without chemicals using agro ecological practices but they will need a lot of support in rebuilding their systems of farmer knowledge and of diverse seeds. They also need access to land.<\/p>\n

Throughout Asia, the mass migration of peasants to urban centres has been driven by industrialisation and policies favouring imported foods and\u00a0agribusiness companies<\/a>.\u00a0Just 6% of Asia’s farm owners hold around two-thirds of its farmland.<\/p>\n

In China alone, there are now over 120 million landless people, up from 40 million just ten years ago, and the\u00a0overall rural population has dropped<\/a>\u00a0from 80% to less than half today. Rural poverty has worsened despite galloping national economic growth, and the richer urban population has faced a spate of food scandals and new health issues, such as bird flu and obesity.<\/p>\n

Some of the problems caused by China’s shifting food system are\u00a0now being exported<\/a>\u00a0to countries like Brazil and Indonesia, where the expansion of plantations to provide China with soybeans and palm oil has caused deforestation, pesticide pollution and violent land conflicts.<\/p>\n

At home, agribusiness and meat corporations have boomed; small farms and local butchers have been decimated. Take the case of China’s most important meat, pork. Through the 1980s and 1990s consumption of pork increased markedly, and that demand was supplied by small farmers, raising “backyard” pigs. Environmental problems were limited because these pigs were largely fed with household waste and local crops and farmers earned an important additional source of income that helped sustain rural communities.<\/p>\n

But by the end of the 1990s, production shifted towards large factory farms that rely on imported feed crops and that generate tonnes of fecal waste and disease outbreaks, not to mention greater GHG emissions and rural exodus.<\/p>\n

The situation is similar in other Asian countries and with other farmed animals. In the Philippines, for\u00a0example<\/a>\u00a0 the entire supply of chicken and eggs came from small farms forty years ago, but today 90%\u00a0of the chicken meat in the country is imported or produced on large, factory farms.<\/p>\n

For more information read GRAIN\u2019s new book,\u00a0<\/em>The Great Climate Robbery. See\u00a0<\/em>website<\/em><\/a>\u00a0for details.<\/em>
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