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Why is unsustainable agriculture a "top" environmental issue?

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Why is unsustainable agriculture a "top" environmental issue?

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Sustainable agriculture is the promotion of organic products in place of utilizing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This practice, not only provides us a healthy diet, but improves and renew our earth. Therefore, when faced with unsustainable agriculture practice, then it results in a negative way. Unsustainable agriculture is the greatest threat to species and ecosystems around the world.

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How does unsustainable agriculture correlate with other environment issues?

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How does unsustainable agriculture correlate with other environment issues?

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Unsustainable agriculture correlates with deforestation, habitat loss, land conversion, pollution, soil erosion and degradation, water inefficiency. These environmental issues intertwine with each other because without most of these natural resources it'll be difficult for farming to take place. Without farming it'll be difficult to have a sustainable planet, especially with all the trash lying around on the floor. Overpopulation also takes a major role in this. With the population of people on Earth increases we'll need a certain amount of food and other valuable resources for everyone, but we can barely provide ourselves with the resources we need already. Further more it leads us to the extinction/ endangerment of many species that live out in the world. Animals are having their homes taken away by humans cutting down forests which puts certain species at risk of extinction.

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Are there any possible measures we can exhibit in order to lessen our impact on the natural world? If so, how could we execute these measures?

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Are there any possible measures we can exhibit in order to lessen our impact on the natural world? If so, how could we execute these measures?

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In fact, there are numerous measures we can take in order to prevent our devastating environmental impact via unsustainable agriculture. Protection of natural resources, preservation of biodiversity, conservation of water, and restoration of soil can all benefit our environment and lessen our impact on the natural world. Unsustainable agriculture is becoming an increasing global issue as a result of a growing population and inclining demand for food. Monsanto, an American-based, international agriculture and food supply corporation, is utilizing biotechnology and genetic modification to weaken the effects of unsustainable agriculture.

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Read how we're promoting environmental sustainability while producing enough to feed a growing global population.

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How can unsustainable agriculture not be considered a primary environmental issue?

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How can unsustainable agriculture not be considered a primary environmental issue?

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Unsustainable agriculture can also not be considered a primary environmental issue because there can be some benefits from it and there are more primary issues that affects humans in a greater way. The main advantage of GM food crops is their potential promise of future food security in a fast and cheap way. Primary issues like global warming correlate with the issue of unsustainable agriculture, but it it a bigger concern in today's society. Global warming creates sustainable agriculture hard to be carried out, so unsustainable agriculture comes in to action which means that unsustainable farming may not be the primary concern in today's world.

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Further Research: Trophic Levels & Agriculture

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Further Research: Trophic Levels & Agriculture

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Google Slides Presentation

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A Video on Unsustainable Salmon Farming

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Documentary About Salmon Farms in Canada & Diseased Salmon

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Farmed Salmon: Unhealthy and Unsustainable

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While filming Call of the Killer Whale in British Colombia, Jean-Michel Cousteau and his team heard a consistent message from the scientific community, First Nations and marine conservation organizations. That message was that open-net salmon farms are killing many of the wild salmon runs of British Columbia and are creating biological and social degradation that could last for decades.

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Farmers are the main players in the game of unsustainable agriculture, and they hold the sole power of its desirable and undesirable effects.

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This story is part of National Geographic's special eight-month Future of Food series. To learn more about it, join our Food: A Forum live-streaming event on May 2 at 2 p.m. EST. The challenge is huge but the solution may be small-very small.
Faced with global warming and a population that will swell to nine billion by 2050, a growing number of experts say that the way to feed the masses as climate change makes growing our food more difficult is to focus on family farmers, who often can barely feed themselves.

When policymakers in the developed world talk about feeding billions of extra mouths in the decades to come, it's multinational agribusinesses-which operate industrial-size farms-that usually get most of the attention.

But in the long run, it's small-scale farmers in the developing world, using low-tech but sustainable agricultural techniques, who may be best poised to lead the way in adapting to a warmer world and ensuring the security of the global food supply.

There are more than 500 million family farmers who produce at least 56 percent of the world's food. Most are subsistence farmers, scratching out barely enough to feed their own families, with little or nothing left over to take to market.

A report on family farms released in March by the sustainable agriculture group Food Tank credits these small-scale farmers with contributing to global food security-that is, having sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis-through the use of more sustainable agricultural practices.

For instance, while agribusinesses use fertilizers and pesticides to yield bumper crops of single grains like corn and wheat, smallholder farmers are growing indigenous plants that help protect increasingly stressed natural resources (like water) and that improve the density of nutrients in crops.

That helps explain why the Food Tank report, which crunched data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other sources, concluded that smallholder farms "are not only feeding the world, but also nourishing the planet."

The United Nations, for its part, has designated 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming to raise the profile of these unsung agricultural workers and spotlight the roles they could play in the face of challenges like climate change, malnutrition, and poverty.
Small-Scale Vulnerability-and Resilience
A sobering report released last month by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of cataclysmic consequences of global warming that are already being felt, including drought, extreme heat, and flash floods.

Those changes have an outsize impact on farmers.

For years, civil wars, corrupt governments, poor infrastructure, and other political conditions were the major impediments to food production and distribution.

But Jerry Glover, a U.S. Agency for International Development agroecologist, says there's been a "significant shift ... In many regions, an emerging cause of food insecurity is the lack of ability of those farm fields to support yields that are necessary because of land degradation and the effects of climate change."

Glover and sustainable agriculture experts like Danielle Nierenberg, president of Food Tank, see smallholder farms in the developing world-and sometimes on city rooftops in the developed world-as leading the way in navigating an increasingly uncertain agricultural landscape.

In its recent report, Food Tank cited the many low-tech "agroecological approaches" used by smallholder farms "to combat climate change and create resilience to food price shocks, natural disasters, and conflict."

Among them: agroforestry, which integrates trees and shrubs into crop and livestock fields; solar-powered drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to plant roots; intercropping, which involves planting two or more crops near each other to maximize the use of light, water, and nutrients; and the use of green manures, which are quick-growing plants that help prevent erosion and replace nutrients in the soil.

Former U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman recently returned from Guatemala, where farmers are adding vegetables-and biodiversity-to traditional corn and bean fields, rotating coffee with other crops to fight a deadly leaf fungus, and using drip irrigation techniques to grow mangos and plantains.

"What they need is fertilizers; they need better seeds," said Glickman, speaking at a Future of Food forum hosted at National Geographic's Washington headquarters on Friday. "They don't necessarily need GMO crops right now."

Genetically modified crops are the work of big agriculture, which has generally been more focused on increasing yields on some of the world's most productive lands.

Indeed, large-scale monoculture farming, with its heavy use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds, has contributed to the disappearance of about 75 percent of plant genetic diversity over the last century, according to the FAO.

At a time when Food Tank says that 30 percent of the world's arable land has been depleted of nutrients and has become less productive because of unsustainable agricultural methods, family farmers who plant a variety of indigenous crops are obtaining 20 to 60 percent higher yields than farmers who cultivate only one crop.

And "forgotten crops" like millet, sorghum, and the now-trendy quinoa -often staples of smallholder farms-can go longer without water and can better resist disease than mass-produced and resource-thirsty corn, wheat, soybeans, or rice.

"These are the crops often referred to as 'poor people's food' or sometimes even 'weeds,'" Nierenberg says, "but these are foods that can be resilient to the impacts of climate change."

Even as they demonstrate ways to help feed a more crowded, warmer world, small-scale farmers are among the most threatened by climate change and the surging population.

Many family farmers till two hectares (about five acres) or less, often on marginal lands susceptible to changing climate and catastrophic weather events in developing areas of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Central America.

And despite their vocation, they're among the world's poorest and most malnourished. To make matters worse, they live disproportionately in regions that are expected to see the largest population bumps by midcentury, making limited resources even scarcer.

"Most of the poverty in the developing world is in rural and agricultural areas," says Glickman. "To the extent that we can give family farms [and] smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia additional tools to use better farming methods, better seeds, better fertilizer, more technical information to grow better crops, we help pull them out of poverty."

According to a UN Millennium Project Task Force report cited by Food Tank, about half of the world's hungry live on smallholder family farms.

Investing in these "stewards of the land," as Nierenberg calls them, so that they can grow more nutritious food will not only help raise them out of poverty but also help a warming planet.
Editor's note: Glickman, Glover, and Nierenberg were all panelists at Friday's Future of Food forum at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C.

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Family Farmers Hold Keys to Agriculture in a Warming World

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This story is part of National Geographic's special eight-month Future of Food series. To learn more about it, join our Food: A Forum live-streaming event on May 2 at 2 p.m. EST. The challenge is huge but the solution may be small-very small.

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Unsustainable agriculture is a key result of a growing international population and increasing food demand.

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The northern region of Gujarat State in western India (map) is semi-arid and prone to droughts, receiving almost all of its rain during the monsoon season between June and September. But for the past three decades, many crop and dairy farms have remained green-even during the dry season.
That's because farmers have invested in wells and pumps, using massive amounts of electricity to extract water from deep aquifers. The government has artificially propped up the agricultural sector through power subsidies and price supports.

The pumping hasn't occurred without dire environmental impacts. Groundwater tables have fallen precipitously, 600 feet below the ground in some places, requiring even more powerful pumps to bring water to the surface. Over-consumption has taxed the power grid, constraining the electricity available for others.
Rising Thirst for Energy on Farms
North Gujarat is a well-documented, extreme example of groundwater depletion and an unsustainable agricultural sector. But there are many other hot spots in places such as India, China, and the Middle East where energy demands are rising so enough water can be pumped to produce food. In essence, experts warn, agriculture in those areas is in peril because of its unsustainable relationship with energy and groundwater.

Potential impacts include not only dry aquifers and failing farms, but increased soil salinity and carbon dioxide emissions. Climate change exacerbates the situation. Poor farmers often are hit the hardest, because they can't afford to invest in expensive technologies to drill wells and pump water from them.

"I think what is forgotten-the farmers themselves [in Gujarat] are facing constraints," said Vijay Modi, a professor at the Columbia Water Center, part of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "This is their livelihood, so figuring out a way that is a win-win-win for the farmer and the utility and the environment is key."

Modi said there is reason for concern, but he believes the problem can be fixed.

The challenge for Gujarat and other areas lies at what is commonly known these days as the water-energy nexus. Broadly speaking, the term refers to the ways in which water and energy resources are interdependent.

The goal is to find solutions to the constraints of both-to optimize resource use and eliminate the "slack," or inefficiencies in the system, said Holger Hoff, senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an independent international research institute.

The knowledge largely is there, "but implementation is very difficult," Hoff said, given the long history of the energy and water sectors, as well as various government ministries, sticking within their own silos rather than working together.

Meanwhile, as world population burgeons, demand for resources continues to rise. Agricultural production will need to increase by about 70 percent by 2050, and primary energy by 50 percent by 2035, barring significant changes to the way food and energy are produced and consumed on the planet, according to an SEI briefing paper and data by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

In China, the use of groundwater to irrigate crops has grown more than tenfold since 1950, according to research released in March by the University of East Anglia in England. The researchers estimated that pumping systems-operating from an average depth of 230 feet (70 meters) in some areas-emitted more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to the amount emitted in all of New Zealand every year. The researchers blamed the massive expansion of groundwater pumping on cheap energy and improved access to pumping technology.

In India, the largest groundwater user in the world, agricultural electricity consumption increased more than 25-fold between 1970 and 2009, more than twice the pace of overall electricity consumption, according to government figures.

New research by the International Water Management Institute characterizes nine states in India, including Gujarat, as having "critical" groundwater condition, where pumping exceeds the long-term recharge of the aquifers.

"Agriculture, groundwater and electricity sectors in much of India are now bound in an invidious nexus of mutual dependence where the growth of one sector (agriculture) is being supported by unsustainable trends in the other two sectors (groundwater and electricity), so much so that even growth in agriculture is now threatened," wrote IWMI senior researcher Aditi Mukherji in Delhi.

The phenomenon is driven by the use of millions of electric pumps that run on cheap power. Farm power subsidies in India are estimated at $9 billion annually, up from $6 billion a decade ago. In Gujarat, tariffs have been raised over the years, but farmers still pay only about 20 percent of the true cost of electricity, according to Modi of the Columbia Water Center.

Jon Strand, senior economist for the World Bank's environment and energy team, said in a policy research working paper that the optimal scheme to combat aquifer depletion would be tariffs that cover the full cost of electricity, with an extra charge to cover the "external cost" of groundwater pumping. That refers to the additional electricity costs to bring groundwater to the surface as water tables fall because of over-pumping.

"When a groundwater basin is exploited by a large number of farmers, acting independently, each farmer has little incentive to practice conservation that would primarily benefit other farmers," Strand wrote.

India's government is in the process of revising its national water policy, and a draft recommends changing the "heavy under-pricing of electricity" to more closely reflect actual costs. But if farmers in north Gujarat paid for the full cost of their electricity, the agricultural sector wouldn't be economically viable, according to Columbia Water Center.

In north Gujarat, changes have occurred, although it may be too early to draw firm conclusions.

A decade ago, the region was marked by rapidly depleting aquifers, a nearly bankrupt utility, and an agricultural lobby strong enough to fight efforts to meter electricity. Electricity theft and unreliable power were issues.

Researchers at the International Water Management Institute recommended a scheme to supply uninterrupted power on a rationing schedule designed to match the supply to irrigation needs as closely as possible.

The state government of Gujarat acted on IWMI's recommendation by investing about $260 million for separate electrical feeder lines for farming and non-farm uses. While that may seem like a wasteful investment to make, the "Jyotigram Yojana" or "Lighted Village" initiative met the government's goal of developing rural electrification to stimulate the region's economy. The feeder lines also were metered to curb theft.

"While the economics of the Jyotigram program is unclear, it is certainly smart politics," Madar Samad, IWMI principal researcher for water policy and institutions, said of the investment to split the electricity lines.

The scheme made it possible for farmers to keep to certain irrigation schedules and, at least theoretically, conserve water depending on how much they pumped during the rationing period.

Gujarat experienced 9.6 percent annual growth in its gross domestic product from agriculture between 2000 and 2007-the highest in India-compared with less than 3 percent for India as a whole, according to a joint publication by IWMI and the International Food Policy Research Institute.

But groundwater continues to be depleted, and the Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy in Hyderabad, India, countered that the growth was more the result of a strong recovery from a "major dip" in production that had occurred during droughts of 1999 and 2000. The institute argued that the "real growth" in agricultural production in Gujarat already had occurred between 1988-1999.

Additional efforts are being made to improve the groundwater situation in Gujarat. The Columbia Water Center, for example, has been advising a local utility and government on a pilot project that meters water and energy use (meters are attached to wells) and rewards farmers who cut consumption to a certain historical baseline. The project, which started last year, also helps farmers identify ways to save water, such as using tools to measure moisture content in soil, drip irrigation, and planting crops more suitable to the area. More than 800 farmers have agreed to be part of the project.

Preliminary results are encouraging, but Modi of the Columbia Water Center is cautious. He said that before conclusions are reached, the project must measure rigorously the energy use of a larger group of farmers over multiple years. That's now under consideration by the utility.

Hoff of the Stockholm Environment Institute and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research also is cautious when it comes to solving such water-energy nexus issues as groundwater depletion. He recently attended the Planet Under Pressure conference in England where, he said, one message was that there's about a 10-year window of opportunity to deal with some of these problems.

He said he wants to be optimistic, but "my experience tells me that action only happens if things become urgent."
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge. An earlier version of this story featured a photo of a diesel irrigation pump that was incorrectly identified as an electric pump.

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Growing Food Demand Strains Energy, Water Supplies

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The northern region of Gujarat State in western India (map) is semi-arid and prone to droughts, receiving almost all of its rain during the monsoon season between June and September. But for the past three decades, many crop and dairy farms have remained green-even during the dry season.

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Indian "water farmers" sustain a decent living by mining water from underground reservoirs and selling the water to several agricultural and industrial agencies.

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To learn more about global water wars, watch Parched.

This piece is part of Water Grabbers: A Global Rush on Freshwater, a special National Geographic Freshwater News series on how grabbing land-and water-from poor people, desperate governments, and future generations threatens global food security, environmental sustainability, and local cultures.

Suresh Ponnusami sat back on his porch by the road south of the Indian textile town of Tirupur. He was not rich, but for the owner of a two-acre farm in the backwoods of a developing country he was doing rather well. He had a TV, a car, and a maid to bring him drinks and ensure his traditional white Indian robes were freshly laundered every morning.

The source of his wealth, he said, was a large water reservoir beside his house. And as we chatted, a tanker drew up on the road. The driver dropped a large pipe from his vehicle into the reservoir and began sucking up the contents.

Ponnusami explained: "I no longer grow crops, I farm water. The tankers come about ten times a day. I don't have to do anything except keep my reservoir full." To do that, he had drilled boreholes deep into the rocks beneath his fields, and inserted pumps that brought water to the surface 24 hours a day. He sold every tanker load for about four dollars. "It's a good living, and it's risk-free," he said. "While the water lasts."

A neighbor told me she does the same thing. Water mining was the local industry. But, she said, "every day the water is reducing. We drilled two new boreholes a few weeks ago and one has already failed."

Surely this is madness, I suggested. Why not go back to real farming before the wells run dry? "If everybody did that, it would be well and good," she agreed. "But they don't. We are all trying to make as much money as we can before the water runs out."

Ponnusami and his neighbors were selling water to dyeing and bleaching factories in Tirupur. The factories once got their water from a giant reservoir on southern India's biggest river, the Kaveri (see picture). But the Kaveri was now being pumped dry by farmers and industry farther upstream. The reservoir was nearly empty most of the year. So the factories had taken to buying up underground water from local farmers.

It is a trade that is growing all over India-and all over the world.

We are used to thinking of water as a renewable resource. However much we waste and abuse it, the rains will come again and the rivers and reservoirs will refill. Except during droughts, this is true for water at the surface. But not underground. As we pump more and more rivers dry, the world is increasingly dependent on subterranean water. That is water stored by nature in the pores of rocks, often for thousands of years, before we began to tap it with our drills and pumps.

We are emptying these giant natural reservoirs far faster than the rains can refill them. The water tables are falling, the wells have to be dug ever deeper, and the pumps must be ever bigger. We are mining water now that should be the birthright of future generations.

In India, the water is being taken for industry, for cities, and especially for agriculture. Once a country of widespread famine, India has seen an agricultural revolution in the past half century. India now produces enough food to feed all its people; the fact that many Indians still go hungry today is an economic and political puzzle, because the country exports rice.

But that may not last. Researchers estimate that a quarter of India's food is irrigated with underground water that nature is not replacing. The revolution is living on borrowed water and borrowed time. Who will feed India when the water runs out?

Nobody knows how much water is buried beneath our feet. But we do know that the reserves are being emptied. The crisis is global and growing, but remains largely out of sight and out of mind.

The latest estimate, published in the journal Water Resources Research this year, is that India alone is pumping out some 46 cubic miles (190 cubic kilometers) of water a year from below ground, while nature is refilling only 29 cubic miles (120 cubic kilometers), a shortfall of 17 cubic miles (70 cubic kilometers) per year. A cubic kilometer is 264.2 billion gallons, or about enough water to fill 400,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Close behind India, Pakistan is overpumping by 8.4 cubic miles (35 cubic kilometers), the United States by 7.2 cubic miles (30 cubic kilometers), and China and Iran by 4.8 cubic miles (20 cubic kilometers) each per year. Globally, the shortfall is about 60 cubic miles (250 cubic kilometers) per year, more than three times the rate half a century ago. Egypt, Uzbekistan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Australia, Israel, and others are all pumping up their water at least 50 percent faster than the rains replenish. In some places, water that you could once bring to the surface with a bucket on a short rope is now a mile or more down.

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To learn more about global water wars, watch Parched. This piece is part of Water Grabbers: A Global Rush on Freshwater , a special National Geographic Freshwater News series on how grabbing land-and water-from poor people, desperate governments, and future generations threatens global food security, environmental sustainability, and local cultures.