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Agriculture and Biodiversity: Challenges and Opportunities for Agribusiness
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Agriculture is one of the key motors of the global economy. It is a source of foods, fibers and, increasingly, fuel. It provides livelihoods and subsistence for the largest number of people worldwide. It is vital to rural development and therefore critical to poverty alleviation.
Cultivated land, including arable lands and shifting cultivation, covers approximately 24 percent of the world's land area. Partly or fully irrigated agriculture claims 70 percent of the world's developed fresh water supplies. Today, agriculture accounts for over 38 percent of global employment.
Biodiversity and the ecosystem services it supports are crucial for successful agriculture. Agriculture relies on biodiversity for pollination, the creation of genetically diverse plant and crop varieties, development of robust, insect or disease-resistant strains, crop protection and watershed control. In short, agriculture has a high level of dependence on the whole range of ecosystem services.
Competition
It is estimated that a significant amount of the world's wild biodiversity is found in or around agricultural landscapes. Historically, agriculture served to attract and create new strains of biodiversity. It led to the creation of new plant and seed strains, attracted new animal species and fashioned fresh habitats for biodiversity. Together agriculture, biodiversity and ecosystems constitute a finely interwoven mesh of cross-cutting impacts and challenges.
Today, they face a plethora of common threats. Climate change is driving species loss and leading to desertification. Likewise, a growth in the number of alien invasive species is threatening biodiversity and compromising agricultural produce. At the same time, demands on agriculture and pressure on biodiversity are forcing the two into competition.
The last 150 years have witnessed large-scale conversion of land to make way for agricultural and other activities to address demand from the growing world population. Land-use change has both positive and negative impacts. Biodiversity can benefit from agriculture. Making land productive often helps to attract greater biodiversity, while conversion of land for agro-forestry also encourages greater levels of biodiversity.
By that same token, negatives can become positives, land that was once considered unproductive because it lacked the necessary nutrients for crop production, often supports a high number of species; this is now widely acknowledged as very important. But deforestation, for example, to make way for agricultural activities has been a significant driver of biodiversity and ecosystem loss.
Global agriculture is under tremendous pressure. Population growth alone is not solely responsible for driving demand for food and non-food crops. As populations are becoming wealthier, consumption patterns are changing and demand for protein such as meat and milk products is going up.
The production of 1 kg of chicken meat requires 2 kg of grain, for example, which further amplifies the demand on grain, not to mention increased demand for virtual water. It is estimated that world cereal stocks are currently at their lowest peacetime levels for more than two decades. Similarly, rural-urban migration is reducing the availability of agricultural labor.
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