Industrial Agriculture and Climate Issues

Prof. M Zahidul Haque

Prof. M Zahidul Haque and Tanzila Rahman

AGRICULTURE is, and will continue as the basic industry providing human-beings with food plus raw materials for clothing, shelter and other industries.

Globally agriculture plays an important role on socio-economic development and income generation. Agriculture is effectively reducing poverty, locally and globally.

Tanzila Rahman 

In most countries of the world especially in developing countries subsistence agriculture is being practiced. Subsistence agriculture requires land mainly for growing food for one’s own consumption and for the survival of his family.

Surplus food and other agricultural products are sold to the market to generate income. Subsistence agriculture is labor intensive; hence a lot of people are being employed in this system of agriculture.

Meanwhile the demand for food is growing with the increase of population. By 2050, the world population will reach to 9.7 billion people; to feed this huge population, we are to make significant shift in our agricultural system, i.e. the way we grow and eat food.

As history reveals, in the beginning humans were hunters and gatherers. But about 12 thousand years ago, people started modern agriculture by growing wild wheat and barley in Mediterranean basin with cultivating rice paddies in the swamps of China. Then humans learned to use machineries, applying chemical fertilizer, pesticides and other modern agricultural inputs to boosting agricultural production. Crop yield increased in many folds but the use of agro-chemicals and pesticides also contributed massive amount of agriculture pollution harmful to the humans as well as environment.

Even after significantly increasing agricultural productivity through application of modern technologies, the world still needs more food to feed the ever increasing population. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations—around 815 million people in the world are not getting enough food that is required to sustain a healthy life. Asia has the highest number of hungry people with South Asia having 36% under-nourished under-five children. Appreciating the urgency of reducing global hunger and poverty,

two UN Sustainable Goals have been marked for attaining—“no poverty and zero hunger.”

In order to shift agriculture from subsistence to more profitable agri-business, developing countries have intensified efforts to switch on to commercial and industrial farming. Commercial agriculture involves producing crops and rearing livestock—the end products are sold to derive income. On the other hand, Industrial agriculture is a highly intensive form of commercial agriculture to produce crops with maximum yield with minimum costs. Bangladesh is gradually shifting to commercial agriculture from subsistence agriculture for producing enough food for the growing population. The use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides and other modern agricultural technologies have been increased significantly. In order to ensuring food safety, Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) is being followed now. Well, the environmental pollution due to agriculture is yet to become prominent. Actually, the main threat to Bangladesh Agriculture is the rising of sea levels and temperature plus other climatic disasters due to climate change.

Industrial agriculture is fossil-fuel based and therefore contributes to greenhouse-gas emissions through fuel burnt by agricultural machinery, food processing plus transporting the food over a thousand miles from farm to the consumers’ table. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—”agriculture is responsible for 10-20% of total global anthropogenic emissions and almost a quarter of the continuing increases of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The GHG is much less in subsistence agriculture because small-scale farming uses less fossil-fuel based energy and releases fewer GHGs than the industrial agriculture. In Industrial agriculture, synthetic fertilizers are profusely applied on crop fields over vast farming land. When the synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizer is sprayed on soil, nitrous oxide is emitted into the atmosphere which is a greenhouse gas and a potential contributor to climate change. A molecule of nitrous oxide is nearly 300 times more potent at trapping heat than a molecule of carbon dioxide. It may be indicated here that once nitrous oxide is released into the air, it sticks around for more than one hundred years, heats the atmosphere depleting the ozone layer.

Industrial agriculture is highly water-intensive. It requires about 1000 liters of water to produce 1Kg of wheat or rice. This system of farming pollutes water as the fertilizer and pesticides applied to agro-fields run off to the natural water reservoirs like lake, river etc. and causes water pollution.

The United States is the largest country to practice industrial agriculture for producing farm commodities like corn, cattle/calves, soybeans, chicken eggs, wheat, hay, hogs and miscellaneous crops. The USA is the top food exporter in the world. China, India, Brazil and Russia are the top countries having agro-industry being the world’s largest grain producers; they produce maximum carbon footprint than GHGs generated by the agriculture in developing countries.

Brazil and Australia are the largest beef producing and exporting countries in the world. It may be mentioned here that ruminants like cows emit methane. 

Beef production is the biggest source of greenhouse gasses—54.7 Kg of carbon dioxide per 100g of protein with 99.48 Kg carbon dioxide per kilogram.

However, meat from non-ruminant animals, such as, chicken, turkey, duck has a much lower carbon footprint. Carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane that are generated by our actions.

The carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tones, one of the world’s highest.

Industrial farming generally focuses on cultivating a single crop, such as, maize, wheat, soy using intensive methods to produce more crops at a minimum cost.

But large scale monoculture can reduce biodiversity and cause degradation of soil through depletion of soil nutrients. Concentrated or Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in industrial agriculture contribute to environmental pollution. Industrial agriculture uses genetically modification technique but the long-term effects might cause havoc; however, the exact effects of GMOs on ecology and human health are still unknown. Meanwhile direct laboratory alterations of genomes has a risk of unexpected consequences.

Farm and food system accounts for a third of planet ‘warming emissions’. The agricultural declaration signed by the world leaders at COP28 agreed to make their agricultural system to fight climate change through bringing about improvements in this sector.

Although some pragmatic decisions have been taken in COP28 to bringing down fossil-fuel emissions to zero but in reality, it would be much difficult for all the Parties to realize the goal-- until and unless generation of more efficient alternative to fossil-fuel. In the same way, it won’t be easy to drastically reducing GHGs emission from agriculture because agriculture is essential for maintaining steady food production to feed the huge volume of global population. Again innovating new technologies to lower GHG emissions from the existing agricultural system plus to design new environment friendly devices is needed. Hence, it is invariably essential to allocate more funds both locally and internationally to generate innovations for keeping GHGs under control making agriculture environmentally sound and safe. At the same time, people must change their food habit by increasing consumption of plant-based foods and avoiding red meat and other carbon-intensive foods. Control of food wastes at every levels of supply chain including the farm itself is essential.

(Prof. M Zahidul Haque retired as Professor and was also the Dean of Faculty of Agriculture at Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka and Tanzila Rahman (BCS-Agri) is Upazila Agriculture Officer, Ramu, Cox’s Bazar)