Sustainable Food Sustainable Intensification

Sustainable Intensification?

The term 'Sustainable Intensification' is gaining more common usage. It aims to produce more food on existing agricultural land, but impact less on the environment. Is the term logical or an oxymoron?

Foresight Report[i] Recommendation  6. Promote sustainable intensification:

It follows that if (i) there is relatively little new land for agriculture, (ii) more food needs to be produced and (iii) achieving sustainability is critical, then sustainable intensification is a priority. Sustainable intensification means simultaneously raising yields, increasing the efficiency with which inputs are used and reducing the negative environmental effects of food production. It requires economic and social changes to recognise the multiple outputs required of land managers, farmers and other food producers, and a redirection of research to address a more complex set of goals than just increasing yield.

Clearly, the idea to produce more on limited ground using less resources sounds sensible. We may have a few debates about which bits if the environment are less impacted, but we certainly do need ‘research to address more complex set of goals than increasing yield’  At last! People realise it is not all about ‘output’. There is indeed a complex set of goals – not just one.

NB in the above statement spelling out the core of SI, starts with 3 ‘if’s in a row. We sort of agree with each. Although the same could be said with ‘More food, more sustainably’ The Select Committee into Securing Food Supplies used this as their headline [ii] But the two are quite different in approach.

Let’s start with 1) as this is the main assumption. It says IF ‘there is relatively little new land for agriculture’.  This gives the impression that it is all static out there, and that there is a line drawn between agriculture and non-agriculture. We tend to think of the division between farm/city  at that point, whereas the very long line between agric/non-agric is out on the hills, far from view. And from where I look I can see how the landscape could be transformed in all sorts of ways. But to do that we need the investment - In land and labour (not ‘the City’). But we don’t get it, as it is not very profitable.

If that line was redrawn, we could plant allotments, fruit orchards, grow crops like vegetables and oats, and then afforest the moors to make up for the carbon emissions after ploughing[iii]. Curiously the large land owners have not had much to say about ‘sustainable intensification’

And by redrawing that line, the food looks healthier. According to the 'Ecological Footprint of what we eat',[iv] by eating a healthy ‘5 a day’ diet, we reduce our burden on the environment by 22%, another 11% if it is local, a further 2% if it is organic, and another 5% if completely vegetarian. The newly drawn line also fulfills the two other Foresight ‘If’s - by producing more food, more sustainably

According to the WHO: "Fortunately, the strategies needed to create desired changes in nutritional and environmental patterns are often complementary and, as a whole, provide cost-effective, sustainable development for agricultural land....In addition, local strategies that seek to improve the availability of, access to and consumption of locally produced foods, particularly fruits and vegetables, also increase the interdependence and thus the social cohesion between urban and rural dwellers"[v]

The reason for the concentration on line drawn in the Foresight Report between agriculture/non-agric is that some crops do have limited growing horizons. In particular wheat/barley. There isn’t any more land in Britain that could grow grain in the same sort of quantities produced now. John Beddington asked for report into whether  wheat/rape productivity could be increased and was told that grain crop land is limited. While increasing tonnage/hectare of another 50% In next 5-10 years was possible, it would have increased environmental impact, particularly increases in carbon GHG emissions and loss of biodiversity[vi]. Hence we go down the route of ‘intensification’ – sustainably. But why  a priority?

Or Food Resilience?

The Foresight Report concludes: “The UK should seek to maintain a resilient and economically-viable food chain. This will require the sustainable production of food from within its own resources” It goes on the say that “land under cultivation is likely to fall because of flooding, sea level rise, urbanisation and alternative land use.” Yet this is trivial compared to redrawing the line between agricultural land and under-utilised land. The issue of shortage of land applies mainly to wheat and oilseed rape, especially as they are likely to be affected by droughts, whereas the other land – for fruit and veg is likely to become more abundant in north and west with climate change.

IF we went down the route of using lots more land lots more effectively, we could do with research backup in the form of developing lots of local varieties suited to all these climes. Could we grow pineapples in Paisley, seeing as Victorian gardeners managed it in Cheshire? The emphasis on sustainable intensification is all about the two big crops – wheat and rape and ignores the rest. Yet we are pretty well sufficient in wheat/rape, although could do with more bread wheats; whereas it is the fruit and veg where we are undersupplied. In the last 25 years, our contribution (less than 2% o total) to world food security has declined by 1/5  for grain, ½  for meat and 2/3 for veg (FAO stats[vii]).

In UK, we are importing £15 billion of food we could produce ourselves -and that doesn’t include pineapples (Spelman Dec 2010[viii]). And as the pound devalues, with more quantative easing, the costs of food inflation running at around 5%, will get worse. Producing a few more tonnes of grain in East is not the answer.

What shall we call the approach to we need - Food resilience[ix]? We want research for Resilience. That science would be interested in diversity and how chains become webs, and systems.  The first project could be calculating how much more food the SI approach could deliver, and compare with the FR approach, and assessing each for health and environmental improvements.

To do this, we would have to find out how much ‘waste’ land in UK could be made ‘agricultural’. Say 1/3 of 3.3m hectares of moorland could be turned to forest to reduce overall GWP of UK and offset 50k h turned from grass to fruit, and a further 50k for vegetables. Both these could come from 100k h of grassland that is going to ruin in front of our eyes. In the last 5 years, since the Single Payment, farmers are paid for just having the land; so about 50kh of pasture land  is turning to rush and ragwort and a further 50kh now provides  paddocks for horses – not yet classed as food. There are also the areas of ‘brownfield’ everywhere which too could go green growing things and teaching local children what it is all about. Look what they are doing in Todmorden. Our priority shold be to turn all this ‘waste’ land into productive land. Waste not want not.

The SI approach presumes that the use of land is pretty static - it is how it is. But it isnt. Land use changes all the time; it all depends on captal and labour. Look at Ways of Seeing the land for more of this in practice.