The Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda: a Golden Opportunity to Mainstream Agroecology

The eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty, to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and the world’s leading development institutions.  The Post-2015 Agenda will be determined through critical evaluation of how the MDGs have worked as a framework for development, identifying what has worked well and areas for improvement, especially in response to current development challenges. 

Recently I listened to an interesting talk by Jeffrey Sachs, who heads the UN Sustainable Solutions Network and has been tasked with shaping the Post-2015 Agenda.  He called for the new UN Development Goals, to be applicable to all nations and incorporate both the post MDG agenda and the Sustainable Development agenda that was agreed in Rio last year.  This convergence would drive the policy changes that are needed to reduce global warming, which threatens people in both the developing and the developed world.

Sachs envisages a single set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 4 pillars:

• Ending extreme poverty
• Reducing inequality
• Promoting good governance
• Protecting the environment and cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

The inclusion of environmental protection and GHG emission reduction in the post 2015 SDG’s, would place enormous pressure on industrial agriculture, particularly where production depends on the use of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and manure slurry and where cattle are reared intensively. This is because high input agriculture emits two of the most potent GHGs - nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4). In terms of global warming, N2O is 310 times as powerful as CO2, while CH4 is 21 times as powerful as CO2.

N20 is emitted directly from cultivated soils when crop residues are ploughed in, synthetic fertiliser or farmyard manure is applied and when leeching and run-off occur; also during nitrogen fixation by leguminous plants. Excess nitrogen that runs off into streams and lakes causes toxic algal blooms and reduces bio-diversity.

CH4 is emitted from enteric fermentation, during ruminant digestion, especially in beef and dairy cattle and during anaerobic decomposition of manure, e.g. in slurry tanks and lagoons.

In addition, CO2 is emitted from fossil fuels used to power agricultural machinery and transport and during the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides.
 
This means that the Post-2015 agenda presents us with a golden opportunity to promote smallholder agriculture and mainstream agroecology as an environmentally sustainable, low GHG emitting form of agriculture: Agroecology has been already been recommended by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food – as there is evidence that in Africa, organic farms, using agroecological methods, can produce 2, 641 – 4, 381 calories per person per day, without the use of synthetic fertilisers or pesticides.  Agroecological farming can also increase diversity through reduced tillage, mixing and rotating crops and planting live fences and trees within and around fields.

More, highly successful, agroecology projects are documented by Miguel Altieri, et al, here…. 

However, for agroecology to score highly as an environmentally sustainable, low GHG emitting form of agriculture post-2015, the UN Key Indicators of Sustainable Development will need to be extended to include the following:

• GHG emissions 
• Carbon sequestration methods
• Nitrate levels in rivers and lakes
• Number of species in surrounding aquatic and terrestrial environments
• Crop diversity
• Nutritive value of food crops
• Frequency of antibiotic use in animal production
• Number of farming households above the poverty line