FEEDING THE WORLD IN A SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT
Friday, October 17, 2003
Speaker: Dr. Jeffrey McNeely
Environmental Sustainability and Food Security
DR. JEFFREY McNEELY
Chief Scientist, IUCN – The World Conservative Union
So this meeting is about hunger. And as Richard Beahrs said in the previous session, we all care about hunger. But I’m here to talk to you about the environment. And you might say, “Well, wait a minute. Kevin Cleaver just told us in the previous session that the environment took all of his money away from agriculture and put it into the environment. So how can I possibly be one of your partners?”
Well, we know from the MDG-8 that partnerships are what we need. So what about a partnership with the environment? I think this partnership is sometimes a bit of a challenge. I spent a couple years working in Nepal, and I remember down in Chitwan in the lower part of Nepal, sitting up in a tree one evening watching the rhinos. A rhino came out of the forest, went into a beautiful rice field, and in about 45 minutes he’d eaten enough rice to feed a family of eight for the rest of the year.
You might say, “Well, wait a minute. How can this rhino be a friend of the farmer?” Well, that’s one of our challenges. How can we conserve biodiversity and also care about feeding the world?
But I think that we also need to look at the other side. The environmental movement has some concerns about farmers. The amount of land that is being used for domestic purposes sometimes impinges upon national parks. Sometimes land that isn’t really suitable for agriculture is being used for agricultural purposes for only a few years and then abandoned after the biodiversity is lost.
We all know about the agricultural pollution from pesticides and so on – DDT killing the birds. And those of us who worry about conservation worry about that kind of a problem.
So what’s the basis for our partnership? First of all, let me suggest some of the things that conserving biodiversity means for you, the farmers, or you the people who are going to deliver benefits to farmers.
First, what do we provide? Well, one thing real important – pollinators. There’s a whole new global initiative on conserving pollinators worth billions of dollars a year to ensure that the pollination services are delivered to farmers.
Second one, water. We just heard a long presentation about water, so I don’t need to repeat a lot of that. But when Kenneth Quinn was in the Mekong working with rice, trying to introduce new forms of rice, I was working elsewhere in the Mekong Basin, trying to design a system of national parks in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Northeastern Thailand – in the middle of the war. And I was asked to do that because the people who were developing the water resources of the Mekong were convinced that establishing a system of protected areas in the watersheds of the dams that were being developed would be a cost-effective way of ensuring the longevity of those dams.
If you look at the quality of water that comes out of a national park, this is high-quality water, very useful for the farmers who are developing irrigation systems downstream. And we just heard how important these irrigation systems are to people.
We’ve also, for many people in developing countries especially, and especially the poorest of the poor, are very dependent on the forest for food, for firewood, for construction materials, even for famine relief when things go wrong – so, a very important safety net.
We also look at things like medicinal plants. For many people – and this also applies especially to the poorest of the poor – they depend for almost a hundred percent of their medical needs for additional plants from the forest. So if we’re conserving the forest, we’re also conserving their pharmaceuticals. These drugs, by the way, are also useful to you. The latest figures I’ve seen, which are from 1997, are that 11 of the 25 leading pharmaceuticals that you use actually come from the wild originally, from a wild template, and these are worth $17.5 billion a year – so another value that comes out of the forest.
Another one is wild relatives of the domesticated plants and animals upon which all agricultural development depends. So the templates upon which the CGIAR is working, a lot of that is found in the wild.
And then, finally, integrated pest management. A lot of the pests that we need for IPM also come from natural ecosystems.
So that’s what we have to put on the table. Those are the kinds of things, the kind of benefits that conservation would like to provide to the farming system. But what can farmers do for wild biodiversity? I’d like to suggest a few things.
One is to reduce the habitat destruction by enhancing productivity on farms. Now, we’ve heard over the last day and a half about enhancing productivity. Those of us who work on the environment think that’s a great idea, but we’d also like to make sure that programs to enhance productivity are also designed explicitly to reduce pressure of the marginal agricultural land on the biodiversity so that more benefits can be provided from those systems.
Second point is to use farming methods that reduce pollution. And I know from talking to farmers (and I spent 12 years working in Southeast Asia), and I know from talking to those farmers that they don’t like to use poison on their land. They would much prefer not to use pesticides if they could possibly have any other alternative. They would like to have alternatives to using excess fertilizer, but of course they warmly welcome fertilizer when it’s necessary. So farming methods that reduce pollution.
Third thing – and many farmers that I know are actually happy to do this – and that is to mimic natural habitats by incorporating perennial plants within their systems. And the previous speaker talked about agroforestry systems – very important; that helps to maintain natural systems.
The fourth one is to enhance the habitat quality around farms – and this is also something that many farmers are happy to do – and even to enhance wildlife habitat on farms, so that they are able to get the benefits of wildlife for various times of the year. Now, this kind of approach where we can develop agricultural productivity and also conserve wild biodiversity is something that Sara Scherr and I have called ecoagriculture. We’ve published a book on this, which I’m sure you all have a copy, but if you don’t, there’s still a few left for sale.
Ecoagricultural systems where agricultural productivity is enhanced and so is the environment – that’s a good partnership. We both win. We found 36 examples around the world, both in developed countries and in all parts of the developing world, where farmers were in fact enhancing productivity, making more money, and conserving the environment. It’s doable, it’s possible, it’s going to help us address our problems.
The rural poor are often very happy to contribute to this kind of conservation because they recognize the benefits that they get from it. Indigenous communities often have tremendous local knowledge about how to manage their local resources in an integrated way. Empowered communities that are able to have ownership over their resources will manage them in a more sustainable way. And, of course, they can earn benefits, earn money from conserving nature and then harvesting the benefits.
So how can we do this? I’d like to suggest three things.
The first is to be sure to involve the farmers in finding the solutions. No farmers are very happy to have things imposed upon them from on top. They know very well what their restraints are, and when you’re conducting research and you talk to them about what their restraints are and how we might work together to address those constraints, they’re very happy to collaborate in the research.
We also might talk about developing local, protected areas that benefit farmers. I was at a meeting last month in South Africa, the World Parks Congress, where we had literally hundreds of local people through something called the Equator Initiative who have been setting up their own protected areas for the benefits that those provide to them. So, not national parks to benefit the nation or to benefit foreign tourists, but national parks are local protected areas to deliver benefits to those farmers, areas that they’ve identified for themselves and that they manage for themselves.
Use rights are incredibly important. And one of the things that I’ve learned from working in 60-70 countries around the world over the last 30 or 40 years is that where the ownership rights are held by the local people, they’re much more likely to be able to manage those resources in a reasonable way. So this issue – and I think it’s been identified by other speakers as well – this issue of tenure is extremely important.
And, finally, invest in research that links biodiversity and development. I think that we are seeing at the World Agroforestry Center, the World Fish Center and the CIFOR, the Center for International Forestry Research, we’re seeing more of these kinds of examples of research that is leading to these multiple benefits. Multiple benefits lead to a stronger partnership and a stronger constituency to influence the decision-makers.
You might say, “Well, hey, that all sounds great, but who’s going to pay for all this?” Well, we’ve heard that there are agricultural subsidies amounting to about a billion dollars a day being paid right now. We’ve also heard that a lot of those subsidies are distorting. They’re providing disbenefits to people in developing countries for all of the reasons that we’ve heard.
But these are political tools. These subsidies are there for reasons. Maybe we still have to have some kinds of subsidies, but maybe we could redirect those subsidies and redirect them towards conservation, toward having soil banks, toward doing some of the things that I’ve just been talking about. And I know that here in the U.S. a substantial proportion of the new Farm Act is in fact being devoted to these kinds of conservation activities. Many parts of Europe are also using these kinds of subsidies to subsidize conservation, subsidize conserving biodiversity, while benefiting the farmers so that they can live in a healthier relationship with their environment. That’s one.
Another one, especially for developing-country farmers, is called “the clean development mechanism.” Now, here’s something that we haven’t been talking about much at this meeting – climate change. But climate change is something that is of very great concern to lots of decision-makers. They’re willing to put some serious money in trying to sequester carbon. Now, some of that carbon can be sequestered through something that has been established under the Kyoto Protocol, which maybe is not a very popular word in this country, but in many other parts of the world they are investing serious money into clean development, into sequestering carbon.
Agriculture is one of those ways where the clean development mechanism can help. So linking biodiversity and livelihoods is a very appropriate sort of thing for the CDM. Sara has been working a lot on this, and I’m sure she’ll be happy to tell us more about that when the time arises.
And then, finally, I think that we could look at ecoagriculture as something that’s actually profitable. We have a lot of examples in our book of people who have been able to do this and make more money.
I started this little talk about the problem I had in Nepal. Well, what happened in that situation – a couple of years later the government of Nepal started to realize that these problems needed to be addressed in a different way. And so they encouraged the farmers to establish their own ecotourism activities. The farmer that I saw who was having his rice crop being eaten by rhinos has now built a big tourist camp where you can sit up there and you can watch the rhinos come and feed on things that he has planted to make the tourists happy. So he’s making money now out of the rhinos more than he did out of the rice.
So we need lots of partners. I think we’ve heard about water, the private sector, health. And these partnerships, I think that we can look at them – to use a term that you’re all very well familiar with – hybrid vigor. This is a sort of intellectual hybrid vigor, where we bring people from different disciplines together, and I think we get some productive new ideas.
So we’re living in times that are changing. They’re going to continue to change, and probably the rate of change is going to accelerate. Economic technology, climate, security – these things are going to continue to change.
How do we adapt to changing conditions? We adapt to changing conditions by maintaining diversity, diversity in nature, diversity in our approaches to management, diversity in forms of development. These times are going to change. Diversity is going to be the secret for adapting to those changes.
Thank you very much.