Is local and organic farming really better for the environment?
Translated from the original article published in French by The Conversation
Agriculture has a heavy responsibility to feed billions of people under difficult conditions: the demography is growing, the climate is becoming less and less favourable, water resources are drying up, and soils are deteriorating. Despite immense progress, it leaves too many empty bellies while overpressuring nature.
To reform this untenable situation, many are encouraging a shift towards local, organic and peasant agriculture. Similarly, since the beginning of the pandemic, policies have been deployed everywhere to increase food self-sufficiency.
These perspectives miss the point.
Let's stand it out. I am not shy away from a casseau of organic strawberries bought in a nice local market. I am amazed by the ingenuity of farmers around the world to improve their ecological impacts, both in conventional and organic farming. However, by insisting on the aesthetic aspects of agri-food (greenwashing, peasant romance and gastronomic chauvinism) and the underlying political gambits, we come to defend misguided policies, which are not based on scientific data.
I'm an ecologist and an expert in agro-environment. My research concerns agro-environmental data science and the construction of ecological habitats in rural areas.
Worse for nature
As several others have done before, researchers at the University of Minnesota have published a meta-analysis comparing the ecological impacts of organically and conventional crops.
Their conclusions are consistent with what we have known for more than a decade: in general (therefore without considering individual cases), organic farming is worse for nature than conventional agriculture.
Why? Lower organic yields place the ecological burden of a farm on a smaller amount of food. Each certified organic food unit will require more territory, contribute more to water pollution and produce a little more greenhouse gases.
Producing more per hectare gives the advantage to conventional agriculture. However, this intensification of food production is insufficient without an ecological purpose. With this in mind, the ecological intensification of agriculture aims not only to minimize inputs (energy, soiling, fertilizers and pesticides), but also to concentrate food production on the smallest possible territory in order to free up surfaces for the conservation and regeneration of ecological areas and corridors.
Focusing on yield
Saving the territory from agricultural occupation has a much higher biodiversity potential than living with nature, whether through organic farming or permaculture. As long as it allocates agricultural land that necessarily disrupts their environment, it is better to concentrate food production.
Moreover, organic governance requires a great deal of resources for the production of fertilizers, which relies not only on large areas dedicated to producing plant fertilizers, but also on animal excreta, as well as residues from slaughterhouses and (over)fishing. Nutrient cycle analyses shows that organic crops are largely dependent on synthetic fertilizers that have previously been absorbed by plants and then passed through animal digestive systems. Organic farming is clearly a false trail.
Eating local is not a panacea
A Swedish study on greenhouse gases emitted for the production and transport of tomatoes and carrots has shown that it is better for Sweden to import tomatoes from Spain than to produce them in Sweden. But for carrots, it was better to produce them locally.
Local farming is not an ecological panacea: it is also a constraint to produce food under ecological conditions that are not necessarily favourable, sometimes within fragile ecosystems. If food transport were a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, consuming locally could, of course, be worth it.
But the transport of food from their place of production to the grocery store is only 6% of agri-food emissions. The greenhouse gas emissions sources of the agri-food industry are rather dominated by ruminants, manure, fertilizers and deforestation.
Local agriculture could even slow down the reallocation of crops to land where they abound while sparing sensitive biodiversity areas, a strategy that could feed humans while restoring to nature almost half of the land currently in cultivation (excluding pastureland).
However, a global approach is also justified from the point of view of international solidarity. With the COVID pandemic, the number of hungry people in the world is likely to double. At the moment, many regions are not able to meet their food needs with local agriculture, as others depend on their agricultural exports. It would be better to make the interdependencies between countries more united than cut them out for food autonomy, lest the other cut them off first.
Since an affluent population has more means to improve their agricultural practices and diversify their supplies, the improvement in economic conditions is by far what promotes the sustainability of agriculture the most. And it remains intimately linked to its industrialization. A return to the peasantry would be deleterious for the environmental, social and economic sustainability of agriculture.
A green diet
Even if every effort to improve agricultural practices will be able to address only a small proportion of its impacts: the most important levers are much more in the hands of consumers. Indeed, the efficiency gains of agriculture have made it possible to achieve an excessive appetite for meat and dairy products, with serious consequences for the environment and food safety.
A civilization that favors essentially plant diets would be able to return to nature an area of 3.1 billion hectares (equivalent to that of Africa), while halving the greenhouse gas emissions of the agri-food sector. Even if livestock (especially beef) were halved, we will greatly improve all our indicators. A meat diet based on best ecological practices will pollute much more than a vegetable diet, making ecological livestock the clean coal of agri-food.
But isn’t meat a necessity for food security? A scenario where agriculture was intensified on half of the world’s low-yielding land would, without a change of diet, just eliminate the hunger of the 820 million humans that are not now able to meet their food needs. The serious problem of food waste and loss, which was properly managed, would provide meals for 400 million people.
As for livestock, they globally subtract from the agri-food system the meals for 4,000 million people. Of course, even if multilateral agreements favoured better food-sharing, rapid migration to plant diets would be difficult in some situations, particularly in countries that are already suffering from hunger and malnutrition. In any case, special cases should not be used as pretexts to avoid changing an unsustainable global trend.
A big turn is needed
Thanks to the green revolution and the progress that has been made since then, we now have everything necessary to feed a little more than 12 billion people while significantly reducing our environmental impacts. A second revolution will have to draw on the first, by its successes and mistakes, to free the world from famine and malnutrition while ensuring the protection and expansion of the natural habitats necessary for the return of wildlife.
The democratization of precision agriculture and genetic engineering technologies, however beneficial they may be, will be in vain without the changes in food habits necessary to free up large territories from pastoral occupation and without major changes in the territory’s management and allocation policies.
Globalized, industrialized, intensive agriculture and providing modern plant-based diets: this is astonished with the prevailing discourse, which wrongly defends organic, local and peasant agriculture. On the contrary, it will be a progressive perspective, ecological awareness supported by science and global solidarity.