What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Deep emissions cuts needed by 2050 to limit warming: U.N. draft, Reuters

Teaching a humongous foundation to listen to small farmers, Grist

New report links aquaculture and poverty reduction, WorldFish

The MDG Hunger Target and the Contested Visions of Food Security, Fukuda-Parr & Orr

The Power of Numbers: Why the MDGs were flawed (and post2015 goals look set to go the same way), From Poverty to Power

At last, some evidence on the national impact of the MDGs. In Zambia, rivalry with other governments and measurable indicators have made a difference, From Poverty to Power

The GMO Fight Ripples Down the Food Chain, The Wall Street Journal

How GMO crops conquered the United States, Vox

Coming soon: Genetically edited fruit?, EurekAlert

Let’s Use Organic and GMOs to Feed the World, Huffington Post

The Sustainable Intensification of Aquaculture

Two new reports out this week urge greater integration of fish in achieving food and nutrition security and sustainable food systems.

The World Resources Institute in their fifth instalment of the soon to be released World Resources Report, partnered with WorldFish, the World Bank, INRA, and Kasetsart University to explore how aquaculture can grow sustainably, reducing its environmental impact and contributing to food and nutrition security.

Aquaculture is a rapidly growing industry and production between 2000 and 2012 more than doubled. Aquaculture output is growing at 6.6%  per cent per annum worldwide. As wild catch fish stocks decline, peaking in the 1990s, aquaculture becomes ever more important for meeting demands for fish, which contribute one sixth of animal protein consumed across the globe. To meet future demand it’s estimated that aquaculture production will have to increase by over 100% by 2050.

Aquaculture has been linked with some serious environmental concerns particularly for high-input high-output intensive systems – the eutrophication of lakes and transformation of species assemblages on the seabed as a result of nutrient enrichment; the physical degradation and clearing of coastal habitats such as mangroves for shrimp aquaculture; the introduction of non-native species to natural ecosystems; and the salinisation of drinking water resources, for example. Already large-scale improvements to the aquaculture sector are taking place: increasing resource-use efficiency, mangrove conversion is largely being prevented and the share of fishmeal and fish oil in feeds is declining, putting less pressure on wild fish resources.

Without appropriate management of these systems, however, the intensification of aquaculture, as wild fish stocks decline and demand for fish increases, could also intensify these environmental impacts. Sustainable intensification is called for, in the case of aquaculture defined as: advancing socio-economic development; providing safe, nutritious food; increasing the production of fish relative to the amount of land, water, feed, and energy used; and minimising water pollution, fish diseases, and escapes. The WRI paper explores various scenarios of aquaculture growth to 2050 to investigate whether the sector’s development can be sustainable. They find that under most scenarios environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions, are increased. The report recommends five approaches to transforming the aquaculture sector, increasing production while reducing its impacts:

Sustainable Food Systems

Food demand is expected to rise by 70% to 2050. Urbanisation and increasing incomes per capita are shifting diets to those more demanding of meat and other animal products, which has serious implications for the use of natural resources to produce food. Today around 1 in 8 people are malnourished and 870 million people chronically hungry, indicating our current food systems cannot meet present demand let alone future. Modifying the world’s food production systems to produce more food and perhaps distribute it more evenly, is made harder by a growing recognition of the negative impacts agriculture can have on the environment. Conversion of land to agriculture is the biggest threat to biodiversity. Agriculture places large demands on scarce natural resources, the overuse of which not only threatens the wider global environment and human wellbeing, but the very processes agriculture relies on e.g. pest control, pollination and rainfall.

A new report by the European Commission’s Science for Environment Policy, entitled Sustainable Food: A Recipe for Food Security and Environmental Protection, lays out the changes we need to make to our entire food system and the urgency with which we need to make them.

The report begins with a summary of the pressures on food production and the drivers of food demand namely: population growth; natural resource scarcity including land, biodiversity, water, climate change, and biofuels; changing dietary patterns and; rising food prices.

The report then turns to some of the solutions and pathways to making food systems more sustainable, advocating action around the following areas:

• Minimising food waste
• Rethinking land management and agricultural practices:
  • Using agroecological principles such as building soil organic matter, which the EU claim can reduce negative impacts and at the same time increase yields, although evidence of this potential win-win is scarce
  • Conservation agriculture and land sparing versus land sharing
  • Replenishing water supplies through, for example, no-till agriculture
  • Ensuring the long-term sustainability of fish stocks through expanding aquaculture
  • Reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change
  • Increasing the efficiency of agriculture through the application of science and technology
  • Understanding consumption patterns in a bid to contain the demand for the most resource-intensive types of food
  • Investing in smallholder farmers to help them increase their productivity and integration with global markets

Of course knowing that we need to undertake many of these actions is relatively easy. Understanding how to take action is hard and the report acknowledges that considerable policy and knowledge gaps exist, for example, what future per capita consumption levels will be, the benefits or impacts of different agricultural practices and ways of integrating multiple objectives in policy making.

Marine Fisheries

As stated in Chapter 14, most of the world’s wild fish stock harvest is stagnant or declining. The global harvest captured in the oceans and inland waters has peaked in 2000 at 96 million tons and subsequently fallen to 90 million tons in 2003, remaining at that level until 2009.

Fisheries, like rangelands discussed in Chapter 10, can be conceptualised in terms of a range of possible carrying capacities and sustainable yields, depending on the objectives. If preservation is desired, for example of the world’s whale stocks, an ecological carrying capacity can be sought; it is also possible to maximise the production of high quality sport fish, or of small ‘industrial’ fish. The recent history of the world’s marine fisheries has been an accelerating trend towards industrial fishing, harvesting smaller and smaller fish, not for direct human consumption but for feed. 20 per cent of world production now consists of small pelagic species used for making fishmeal which, in turn, is used in pig and poultry production and in salmon and shrimp aquaculture.

Despite the apparent stability of the oceans, their fish and other populations are as much subject to fluctuation as are rangeland cattle. One of the most productive fisheries in the world, providing 20 per cent of the world’s fish landings in the 1960s and 1970s, is generated by upwellings of cold, nutrient rich waters off the coast of Chile and Peru.