Pesticide use and climate crisis locked in ‘vicious cycle’ backed by polluting industries

Tractor spraying on crops. Photo by Ferencz Istvan, Pexels.
Tractor spraying on crops. Photo by Ferencz Istvan, Pexels.

While agrochemical corporations promote “flawed solutions,” said one advocate, “we need deeper, transformative approaches to actually solve the root problems of our broken food system.”

By Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams

Even though synthetic pesticides—the majority of which are derived from fossil fuels—contribute significantly to planet-heating pollution and increase the vulnerability of food systems, industrial agriculture interests continue to recklessly portray further pesticide use as a sensible response to the climate emergency’s worsening impacts.

That’s according to a recent report published by the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA), which details how agrochemical corporations exacerbate the climate crisis by refusing to admit that pesticides are part of the problem and instead promoting “false” solutions that enable them to keep peddling their highly profitable petroleum-based products.

The January report outlines how policymakers can help mitigate the climate crisis and build just and sustainable food systems by setting targets to drastically curb pesticide use, supporting agroecological farming practices, and protecting the rights of low-income individuals, disproportionately people of color, who are most harmed by pesticides, including farmworkers and residents of areas where the toxic substances are produced and applied.

“Governments are investing billions of dollars to address climate change, but these investments will fall woefully short unless they incorporate pesticide use reduction strategies and promotion of agroecological growing practices.”

“Reductions in pesticide use and the adoption of agroecology would decrease greenhouse gas emissions, while also reducing acute poisonings, long-term diseases like cancer, and other health impacts that rural communities face from pesticide exposure,” Nayamin Martinez, executive director of Central California Environmental Justice Network, said in a statement.

As the report explains: “Pesticides contribute to climate change throughout their lifecycle via manufacturing, packaging, transportation, application, and even through environmental degradation and disposal. Importantly, 99% of all synthetic chemicals—including pesticides—are derived from fossil fuels, and several oil and gas companies play major roles in developing pesticide ingredients.”

Pesticides, the offspring of a World War II-era marriage of Big Ag and Big Oil, help drive global warming to a greater extent than many realize, as the authors document:

Other chemical inputs in agriculture, such as nitrogen fertilizer, have rightly received significant attention due to their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet research has shown that the manufacture of one kilogram of pesticide requires, on average, about 10 times more energy than one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer. Like nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides can also release greenhouse gas emissions after their application, with fumigant pesticides shown to increase nitrous oxide production in soils seven- to eight-fold. Many pesticides also lead to the production of ground-level ozone, a greenhouse gas harmful to both humans and plants. Some pesticides, such as sulfuryl fluoride, are themselves powerful greenhouse gases, having nearly 5,000 times the potency of carbon dioxide.

Despite mounting evidence that pesticides are helping to accelerate planetary heating, “climate change impacts are expected to lead to increases in pesticide use, creating a vicious cycle between chemical dependency and intensifying climate change,” the report notes. “Research shows that declining efficacy of pesticides, coupled with increases in pest pressures associated with a changing climate, will likely increase synthetic pesticide use in conventional agriculture. An increase in pesticide use will lead to greater resistance to herbicides and insecticides in weeds and insect pests, while also harming public health and the environment.”

That agricultural production is a substantial contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is increasingly acknowledged, but the role played by pesticides is “infrequently addressed” and “many proposed solutions would not result in meaningful GHG emission reductions,” says the report.

It continues:

An example of a false solution is precision agriculture, which promises to reduce the use of petroleum-derived pesticides and fertilizers by using computer-aided technologies to more accurately determine need (pest presence) and then more accurately apply pesticides to intended targets. However, precision agriculture maintains a system dependent upon chemical- and energy-intensive technologies and materials, while diverting attention from and investment in more effective climate-friendly strategies in agriculture that have additional social and public health co-benefits, such as agroecology. Precision agriculture also increases the power and control of agrochemical companies, many of which own the precision agriculture platforms and the data inputted by farmers.

Another flawed solution, carbon markets, allows agribusinesses or farmers to sell carbon credits to corporations to “offset” continued greenhouse gas emissions—perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels. Carbon markets have a poor track record in terms of long-term climate mitigation, and have been shown to worsen economic and racial disparities.

Co-author Asha Sharma, organizing co-director at PANNA, said that “our new report reveals how oil and gas companies and pesticide manufacturers have followed a similar playbook—strategically promoting flawed solutions to the climate crisis, like carbon capture and storage and new digital agriculture tools, which in reality offer minimal climate benefits.”

“Corporations tout these novel technologies to protect their reputation, while they continue to profit from fossil fuels,” said Sharma. “We need deeper, transformative approaches to actually solve the root problems of our broken food system.”

The report makes the case for agroecology, which it defines as “a way of farming rooted in social justice that focuses on working with nature rather than against it.”

Agroecology “relies on ecological principles for pest management, minimizing the use of synthetic pesticides, while prioritizing the decision-making power of farmers and agricultural workers,” the report notes, adding that such an approach improves “the resilience of our agricultural systems to better withstand climate change impacts.”

The report makes three key recommendations for policymakers:

  • Establish measurable goals in climate policies to reduce synthetic pesticide use in agriculture;
  • Promote the transition to biodiverse, agroecological food and farming systems, such as by establishing and funding programs that provide increased technical assistance and incentives to farmers to adopt or continue these farming practices; and
  • In line with international law, adopt regulations that uphold and promote the rights of groups most impacted by synthetic pesticide use.

“Transitioning our agricultural systems to those that uplift ecological and social justice principles will not only help mitigate climate change, but also reduce the negative health impacts of industrial agriculture,” says the report. “While the work toward future policy and practice change continues, we can collectively support the advocacy work of impacted communities and organizations fighting for more equitable and sustainable food and farming systems right now.”

Co-author Margaret Reeves, a senior scientist at PANNA, argued that “governments are investing billions of dollars to address climate change, but these investments will fall woefully short unless they incorporate pesticide use reduction strategies and promotion of agroecological growing practices.”

Our food systems are failing. Can trees and forests dish up better diets for everyone?

VI Agroforestry in Masaka, Uganda. September 2013. NatureDan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
VI Agroforestry in Masaka, Uganda. September 2013. NatureDan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists argue for greater inclusion of trees and forests in the race to transform global food systems.

By Monica Evans, Forests News (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Despite all of the technological and informational advancements of recent decades, we’ve so far failed to feed our global population sufficiently, safely, nutritiously and sustainably.

Over 2 billion people experience food insecurity; almost 700 million are undernourished; and 39% of all adults are classified as overweight or obese.

A significant factor in these health challenges is that there’s a serious lack of food diversity: just 15 crops provide 90% of humanity’s energy intake and not enough nutrient-rich foods are being produced to go around. For instance, just 40 countries, representing 26% of the global population, have a sufficient supply of fruits and vegetables to meet recommended daily consumption.

Meanwhile, our global food system generates more than a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions; takes around 70% of all freshwater withdrawals; and is to blame for about a quarter of ocean acidification, alongside serious soil depletion and the destruction of natural habitats and biodiversity.

“It is increasingly evident that nothing short of a radical transformation of food systems will end global hunger and malnutrition while reversing to acceptable limits the environmental damage our food systems have already caused,” state the authors of a new Viewpoint in the July 2022 edition of leading journal, Lancet Planet Health. “A new global food system must produce greater quantities of a more diverse range of nutrient-dense foods rather than only providing more calories. It must also produce these diverse foodstuffs sustainably, reversing current trajectories of land degradation so that production acts as a net carbon sink and reservoir of biodiversity.”

So, how can we help to bring that shift into being?

As the authors highlight, trees and forests have a critical role to play.

To date, this has been largely overlooked in food-system transformation conversations “because of the absence of a comprehensive and system-wide approach to food systems, problems related to measuring and recording multiple contributions from trees and forests, and a focus on forests as sources of timber rather than food… A perspective we consider to be in danger of being mistakenly replicated in current discourses in the international development community that see trees and forests primarily as global carbon stores,” write the authors.

So, how can we help to bring that shift into being? As the Viewpoint highlights, trees and forests represent a critical, but as-yet-underacknowledged, part of the solution.

“We’ve been surprised and disappointed that despite all that we have learned and what seem to us to be the obvious important roles of forests and trees, that they still seem to be largely ignored,” said Amy Ickowitz, the study’s lead author and a senior scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF).

“Conserving forests and promoting trees for food security and nutrition are some of the obvious ways to achieve ‘win-wins’, which are quite rare in addressing the tremendous challenges of global malnutrition, dwindling biodiversity, and climate change,” she said. “Of course, there are obstacles — institutional, economic, and logistical — but these can all be addressed, once there is agreement that food systems should be nudged in this direction. In our Viewpoint we offer some suggestions of how to do this”

Silent service-providers

The authors draw attention to the multiple ways that trees and forests already contribute towards healthy diets and sustainable food systems. Tree cover, for instance, has been linked to greater dietary diversity and higher consumption of nutrient-rich foods, such as fruits and vegetables. All nuts, and over half of all human-consumed fruits, grow on trees. Forests provide particularly important sources of wild foods — including fruits, vegetables and meat — for the 1.6 billion people around the globe who live within 5 kilometres of them. Trees and forests also provide fodder for animals, supporting the production of meat and milk.

Trees and forests also provide wood fuels, which are a critical source of energy for cooking for around 2.4 billion people, thus, enabling the consumption of nutrient-rich foods such as meats and legumes. They also provide incomes that can support food security and nutrition, such as through cultivating and selling tree crops like coffee and cocoa; employment in logging or ecotourism; and collecting and selling non-timber forest products. Agriculture benefits from the ecosystem services provided by trees and forests, such as pest and disease regulation, pollinator habitat, micro-climate control, water and nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, protection against soil erosion, and nitrogen fixation.

What’s more, trees and forests contribute to the stability and resilience of food systems, for example, through their tendency to survive extreme weather events better than annual crops; their role in supporting ‘lean-season’ diets through the provision of wild foods; their ability to fill seasonal gaps in food production; and the ‘safety net’ they provide in terms of offering wood and non-wood products that can be sold for income.

“Whether directly consumed as food or sold for food purchases, forest and tree products are, in many cases, the only resources accessible to women and other marginalized groups when hardship strikes and are therefore key resources to reduce their vulnerabilities,” state the authors.

Areas for intervention

To maximize the multiple benefits of including trees and forests more broadly and explicitly in food-system transformation, the authors list four key areas for intervention. First, they recommend building on current knowledge by increasing the scale of existing tree-based agricultural system solutions. Many of these solutions are not yet being adopted at sufficient scales to make decisive impact but could do so with appropriate support. This will in many cases require secure tree and land tenure, “which is not yet the case for many tree growers,” they write.

“To be effective, measures to increase land-tenure security should be connected with incentives for sustainable practices, including for tree maintenance on farms.”

Drivers for the adoption of agroforestry measures were also found to be highly context-specific, highlighting the importance of working with, and building on, existing local knowledge in any kind of agroforestry intervention.

Second, the authors recommend reorienting agricultural investments from staple crops to more diverse, nutrient-dense foods.

Over the past half-century, staple crops — such as wheat, maize and rice — have received billions of dollars in investment, which has enhanced their productivity and decreased their purchase prices in comparison to those of more nutritionally-important foods such as fruits, nuts and vegetables. In order to increase consumption of these, it will be critical to improve their productivity and lower their costs, alongside using education and social marketing to raise awareness of the health and environmental benefits of better food choices.

Third, there is a need to repurpose producer and consumer incentives towards nutrient-dense foods and more sustainable production practices. This will require policy shifts at both national and international levels. Currently, incentives such as direct price support and targeted fertiliser subsidies distort production towards staple crops.

“These incentives should be reduced or removed and direct and indirect price interventions by governments, which are designed to consider more closely both nutritional needs and environmental impacts, should be implemented,” write the authors.

Such subsidies could be reoriented towards producing nutrient-rich foods and integrating trees on farms.

Fourth, food and nutrition objectives ought to be explicitly integrated into forest restoration and conservation practices and policies. The global forest restoration agenda has to date been largely dominated by carbon-mitigation considerations. However, restoration initiatives that focus too narrowly on that objective — and neglect the needs of local people — often fail. Planting food trees, write the authors, could help to address multiple objectives at once, supporting local involvement and sustainable livelihoods alongside carbon sequestration.

As the authors make clear, trees and forests already contribute positively to diets and ecosystems across the globe and there is potential to scale up those contributions much further to address our multiple crises.

Natural Resources Necessary to Feed World Are at a ‘Breaking Point,’ Warns FAO

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain.”

By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A United Nations report released Thursday detailing humanity’s degradation of natural resources warns swift and sweeping reforms are needed to keep feeding the growing global population.

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point.”

The new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report argues that “a sense of urgency needs to prevail over a hitherto neglected area of public policy and human welfare, that of caring for the long-term future of land, soil, and water.”

“Taking care of land, water, and particularly the long-term health of soils,” the publication explains, “is fundamental to accessing food in an ever-demanding food chain, guaranteeing nature-positive production, advancing equitable livelihoods, and building resilience to shocks and stresses arising from natural disasters and pandemics.”

Entitled The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture: Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021), the report declares that “time is of the essence.”

That tone is echoed by FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a foreword to the report, which he says provides “evidence of the changing and alarming trends in resource use.”

“The pressures on land and water ecosystems are now intense, and many are stressed to a critical point,” Qu writes. “It is clear our future food security will depend on safeguarding our land, soil, and water resources.”

Already, human-induced soil degradation affects 34% of land used for food while water scarcity threatens 3.2 billion people—nearly half the total human population—in agricultural areas, according to SOLAW 2021.

Alongside its broad warning that “the interconnected systems of land, soil, and water are stretched to the limit,” the report emphasizes that “current patterns of agricultural intensification are not proving sustainable,” and “farming systems are becoming polarized,” with an “increasing concentration of land under a relatively small number of large commercial farming enterprises.”

Recognizing the need to better manage and safeguard land and water resources essential for food production, the report offers four key takeaways:

  • Land and water governance has to be more inclusive and adaptive;
  • Integrated solutions need to be planned at all levels if they are to be taken to scale;
  • Technical and managerial innovation can be targeted to address priorities and accelerate transformation; and
  • Agricultural support and investment can be redirected towards social and environmental gains derived from land and water management.

“Current patterns of agrifood production are not proving sustainable,” Qu said Thursday at the report’s launch event. “Yet, agrifood systems can play a major role in alleviating these pressures and contributing positively to climate and development goals.”

In his foreword, Qu notes that “a meaningful engagement with the key stakeholders—farmers, pastoralists, foresters, and smallholders—directly involved in managing soils and conserving water in agricultural landscapes is central.”

“These are nature’s stewards and the best agents of change to adopt, adapt, and embrace the innovation we need to secure a sustainable future,” he adds.

Some of those same stakeholders have been critical of the U.N. agency in recent months.

A coalition of food justice advocates last week sent a letter to Qu calling on the FAO to cut ties with CropLife International, warning that any collaboration with the agrochemical trade association “undercuts your agency’s critical—and urgently needed—support for agroecology, which FAO itself notes ‘can support food production and food security and nutrition while restoring the ecosystem services and biodiversity that are essential for sustainable agriculture.'”

Earlier this year, the FAO leader’s remarks at the U.N. Food Systems Summit were among those flagged by justice campaigners as evidence that the September event was “paving the way for greater control of big corporations over global food systems and misleading the people through corporate-led false solutions.”

Just before the summit, during a counter-mobilization, Razan Zuayter of the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty had said that “food systems can be transformed through the respect of food sovereignty via the will of landless peasants, small farmers, and fishers.”

“We have shown that the people are hungry for real change,” Zuayter added, “and are willing to do whatever it takes to fight for and reclaim their land, their rights, and the future of food systems.”