Towards a green economy 3 The case for greening agriculture

Both conventional and traditional agriculture generate substantial pressure on the environment, albeit in different ways. With very different starting positions, the pathways to green agriculture will vary substantially and will have to be sensitive to local environmental, social and economic conditions. Industrial agriculture needs to lessen its reliance on fossil fuels, water and other inputs. Both large and small farms can benefit from more on-farm recycling of nutrients by reintegrating livestock, which provide manure, and the cultivation of green manures to improve and maintain soil fertility (IAASTD 2009).

3.1 The cost of environmental degradation resulting from agriculture

Several studies have estimated the cost of externalities caused by current agricultural practices, which include those from use of inputs such as pesticides and fertilisers leading, or example, to the pollution of waterways and emissions from farm machinery and food-related transport.

Agricultural operations, excluding land use changes, produce approximately 13 per cent of anthropogenic global GHG emissions. This includes GHGs emitted by the use of inorganic fertilisers agro-chemical pesticides and herbicides; (GHG emissions resulting from production of these inputs are included in industrial emissions); and fossil fuel-energy inputs. Agriculture also produces about 58 per cent of global nitrous oxide emissions and about 47 per cent of global methane emissions. Both of these gases have a far greater global warming potential per tonne than CO2

(298 times and 25 times respectively).

Moreover, methane emissions from global livestock are projected to increase by 60 per cent by 2030 under current practices and consumption patterns (Steinfeld et al. 2006). The expansion of agricultural land at the expense of forests has been estimated to represent an additional 18 percent of total global anthropogenic GHG emissions (IAASTD 2009 and Stern 2007).

A study by Jules Pretty et al. (2001) estimated the annual costs of agricultural externalities to be US$ 2 billion in Germany and US$ 34.7 billion in the USA. This amounts to between US$ 81 and US$ 343 per hectare per year of grassland or arable land. In the UK, agriculture’s total environmental externality costs, including transporting food from the farm to market and then to consumers, have been calculated to be £ 5.1 billion per year for 1999/2000, a cost greater than annual net farm income (Pretty et al. 2005). In China, the externalities of

50

Not all agricultural externalities are quantified and thus the calculations above probably underestimate the total cost to society. Conventional agriculture, for example, causes millions of cases of pesticide poisoning per year, resulting in over 40,000 deaths (FAO- ILO 2009). It is important to note that most such cases remain unreported.

Farmers who use chemical/synthetic farm inputs are significantly more indebted, especially in developing countries (Eyhorn et al. 2005; Shah et al. 2005; Jalees 2008). For example, in Central India, cotton farmers bought inputs with loans at annual interest rates between 10-15 per cent (from cooperative societies) to over 30 per cent (from private money lenders). By contrast, those engaged in organic agriculture were far less likely to take loans owing to lower production costs and greater use of on-farm inputs (Eyhorn et al. 2005).

pesticides used only in rice systems have been estimated to amount to US$ 1.4 billion per year in health costs to people, and adverse effects on both on- and off-farm biodiversity (Norse et al. 2001). The national pollution census in China revealed that agriculture was a larger source of water pollution than industry, discharging 13.2 MT of pollutants (China’s National Pollution Census 2007; New York Times 2010). In Ecuador, annual mortality in the remote highlands due to pesticides is among the highest reported anywhere in the world at 21 people per 100,000 people. The economic benefits of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) based systems that eliminate these effects are increasingly beneficial (Sherwood et al. 2005). Land degradation is costing ten Asian countries an economic loss of about US$ 10 billion, equivalent to 7 per cent of their combined agricultural GDP (FAO 1994).

At the same time, as a result of the poor management of fertiliser usage during the last half-century, the phosphorus content in freshwater systems has increased by at least 75 per cent, and the flow of phosphorus to the oceans has risen to approximately 10 million tonnes annually (Bennett et al. 2001; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Rockstrom et al. 2009). The combined effects of phosphate and nitrogen water pollution, much of it linked to the use of inorganic fertilisers is the main cause of eutrophication, the human-induced augmentation of natural fertilisation processes which spurs algae growth that absorbs the dissolved oxygen required to sustain fish stocks (Smith & Schindler 2009). The estimated costs of the eutrophication in the USA alone run as high as US$ 2.2 billion annually (Dodds et al. 2009).