Agriculture and Climate: Real Problems False Solutions

The first presentation I went to in Copenhagen actually wasn’t even with COP15 but with Klimaforum09 the people climate summit. Klimaforum is one of numerous other side conferences taking advantage of all the climate-interested people and professionals who are in COP and haven’t numerous talks open to the public. While I felt very overdressed for the event it turned out to be one of my favorite panels of the day because they were the most open to comments from the audience and there were many people from across the world who were quite vocal about their opinions. Below is a summary of some of the main points I got out of this event.

Their main argument was that many of the large scale agriculture solutions currently being proposed by the UN simply are not truly sustainable and often in the interest of agribusiness. Instead they believe local solutions are the answer and the best way to make agriculture more sustainable and sequester carbon is to engage farmers locally. (As you can tell Klimaforum was clearly the hippier version of COP put on by NGOs but most of the presenters and even audience members were well versed in agricultural research and gave firsthand accounts) Some of the proposed false solutions they brought up were:

Biochar-Biochar involved growing forests to sequester carbon then converting them into charcoal and burying the charcoal to provide a carbon sink, essentially creating fossil fuels that we won’t use. The problem is that creating biochar can actually produce up to 30% black carbon and most importantly will destroy many additional acres of land to create biochar. Some audience member brought up valid points that on the local level this could be very sustainable but many people said the same thing about biofuels and that evolved into a very inefficient industrial agricultural problem.

GM Crops- Their biggest concern with GM crops were that much of the research in GM crop show that they actually don’t increase yields nearly as much as they claim and they often are accompanied by massive herbicide use (if this plant can survive chemical X then we can duse the field in it to kill all the weeds). Also they brought up how GM crop require much energy to develop.

Seed Intellectual Property Rights- Seeds these days often don’t come from plants but instead from contracts. Much of modern agriculture is controlled by these seed manufacturers who have managed to do wonders in creating seeds to make bigger crops with higher yields and many other fun accessories but to fund all this research they must sell these seeds away. Even after farmers buy the seeds they cannot save them and replant them next year because many of them have been made so that the 2^nd generation seeds are ineffective and they must buy more. This can be a major problem in undeveloped nations where farmers can use the seed technology but can’t afford the high costs of the seeds and if they can must risk everything to keep up with the contracts. They also argued this seed manufacturing decreases crop biodiversity and we should involve farmers in the process of creating new seed varieties. While in many ways seed intellectual property rights are injust and corrupt they never really addressed how seed companies would be able to continue producing the seeds they do if they converted to some of these new programs.

Biofuels- Many of us have already heard this argument and it wasn’t discussed in too much depth but still must be address because it is on the much of the negotiation table at COP but biofuels simply rely too heavily on fossil fuels for their production and they keep promising technological breakthroughs but it seems to be eternally 5 years down the road.

There were also some interesting points about how they were working to engage women in some of the agricultural decision making in countries where women still cannot own land, and how many programs support some of the farming rituals or practices of elders which have underlying sound ecological principals allowing for sustainable agriculture.