In this disheartening but informative report, conservation researchers express their concerns that “green” farming methods can, counterintuitively, have net undesirable effects on food production and costs.
As a society, we are “addicted” to fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture - that is to say, in order to continue producing enough food to feed everyone, we are obliged to contine using them or risk starving.
They explain how rewilding, pesticide and fertilizer reduction, and organic farming practices can mean benefits for local biodiversity, while still having a net negative impact on the world overall, due to the resulting increased demand for food production elsewhere in the world.
The article apparently calls for “land sparing” as the most promising farming technique. It involves intensively farming some land, while leaving the rest completely alone as a nature preserve.
Their argument is pretty much that you just move the problem to other places, which is true for pretty much any environmental policy. Emissions restrictions? Move the factory to Vietnam. It’s too expensive to dispose of toxic waste properly? China doesn’t care that much. Not allowed to use modern farming techniques? Grow it in Brazil. They don’t care.
It’s all very shortsighted.
