World population will grow to more than 9 billion by 2050. Because of this rise and our sedentary nature, our food needs will also increase. It is a real arm wrestle between the supporters of a movement for better eating for our health or for nature (organic, fresh, and local foods) versus those for whom it is essential to ensure food security of everyone or a maximum number of people (intensive food). Yes, you have to eat to live, not to live to eat! Although…!
On February 21, 2020, at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, a debate took place on agriculture in rural territories and efficiency when taking into account the concept of sustainable development.
Beet field (France)
Do agriculture and biodiversity conservation work well together?
This “confrontation” is reinforced by a complex context. On one hand, each country and individual has its own vision of what is rural nature, agriculture, or biodiversity. On the other hand, the rural world is facing different pressures: a galloping urbanization, the emergence of a need for nature, for security and traceability, for knowledge about what we eat and find in our plates. Is nature synonymous with “green” or is nature the opposite of artificial? If we take the train and leave a big city, for example Paris, are we in a rural area? From the moment there are fields, is it the countryside?
This profusion of questions reflects the difficulty behind the definitions of nature, of the rural, of landscape, or of agriculture. Because the trends in the uses of landscape and territory vary depending on the country, the management of these spaces are implemented accordingly. For example, sustainable development and Common Agricultural Policy illustrates such findings. Furthermore, the objectives are common at the global or European level but the implementation of each policy corresponds to the identity of each country and, therefore, may ultimately be different.
In agriculture, we ask farmers to produce more for more people and to produce better quality food but with less space and labour by adding more rules to respect sustainable development. This concept includes two words: “development” which makes us think of a demand for growth, of integration into globalization, of technological use, and “sustainable”, which is a notion of time, since the development must be pursued without leading to a depletion of natural resources for next generations. Do such notions coincide in practice?
One of the main points of the debate is the confrontation between two ways of producing food, which cover a large diversity of production systems. At one end of the debate, the interventionist approach aims to control most aspects of production by technological and chemical interventions. At the other end, agro-ecological systems consist of using and managing biodiversity to produce food with minimum disturbance on the environment and that appear more sustainable (FAO). The current stake is to meet demand at different scales, from local to global, which implies the need to ensure productivity. But it is also to protect biodiversity from an increase in productivity and from the pollution that agricultural systems generate. This debate can be summarized by a choice made between two ways to organize the territory in order to combine efficient agricultural land use with biodiversity conservation:
- land sparing: separating intensive agricultural land from biodiversity. It would require a strong increase in crop yield (which is not the case today, as the field’s productivity is decreasing), or else we will quickly need more and more land to grow food, meaning less space to preserve nature.
- land sharing: integrating production and conservation on the same land – or wildlife-friendly farming. In this option, we still need to increase productivity, but even more, we would have to reinvent the way we produce food, to shift away from the intensive farming method.
In the second case, the agro-ecological model could be a more sustainable way to produce food, as this model aims to maintain productivity, but on a smaller scale. Permaculture for example is a really efficient farming method in really small exploitations. However, this does not seems to be the path we chose at the moment. Instead, a kind of “business as usual” way of doing things seems to emerge, thanks to new technologies and the automatisation of tools.
AgriDrone
Cutting-edge technology?
A second strong point in the debate concerns sustainable development and in particular the use of technologies like Decision Support Tools (DST). This change in the environment and the contribution of technologies to agricultural systems was developed between 1945 and 1950 in a context of food self-sufficiency, when the goal of agriculture was to ensure the security of the food supply. With technical advances, improved quality of life, and rural exodus, food demand increased and agriculture intensified and modernized (modernizing the factors of production or other farming practices, improve land quality with drainage and irrigation among other). Now, in the era of sustainable development, the economic share is still up to date so as not to lag behind other countries; to be behind in technology would be inconceivable! These technologies can, for example, help us forecast the weather with a connected weather station, or reduce the quantities of phytosanitary product like plant-care products and pesticides, among others, used in intensive and conventional agriculture through an Integrated GPS. In the department of the Eure, farmers use AgriDrone (see image above) or intelligent control and measuring systems for irrigation to better spread resources according to the needs. But technologies can also be avoid! Only 49% of farmers use a decision-support tool to inform decisions, while modes found most useful for farmers are software for 28%, paper-based for 22%, and apps for 10%. This “encapsulation of knowledge” in technological products can be an interesting decisional help but can lead to dependance and loss of autonomy of farmers, especially given the decrease of greenhouse gas emissions we have to aim for. On the contrary, “incorporation of knowledge” aims to increase individual skills. Skills related to observation and interpretation will help to ensure the land’s resilience in a changing environment because of global warming, which impacts ecological and climatic conditions.
The technological path seems at first to help us ensure sustainability in farming. But when you really think about it, it does not create a shift in the way we produce food: it is just a step towards intensive farming. In the end, we would still have to face the same problems, regarding the size of exploitations, the decrease in yields, or the sanitary crisis due to the over-standardization and over-sanitization of monocultures. What we need is a more radical change in the way we produce food, conceptualized outside of the traditional shackles.
To conclude, this debate questions the implications of our consumption habits. What we eat needs to be produced by someone and it is the farmers that will produce the food to meet our needs. Various production methods have been set up in a very specific context. Due to the change of mentality, the modes will be gradually modified but such change will take time and require political regulation!
This article was written by Hervine BADIN in collaboration with Marion LE BOUARD and Alban NARBONNE, all Master’s students in the Muséum’s “Biodiversité et Aménagement des territoires” specialization.
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Muséum national d'histoire naturelle 