Food Security - National Agricultural Biotechnology Council ...

Less LandAgriculture already uses an estimated 40% of the globe’s arable land, with some 3.75billion acres in production. So, among the questions confronting us are how we doubleagricultural production without further deforestation and its attendant problems of soilerosion and of pollution of streams and waterways.Again, this is not a problem unique to the developing world. In May, 2011, in aletter to the House and Senate agriculture committees, groups representing grain andfeed traders, livestock producers, fertilizer manufacturers, meatpackers and others urgedCongress to put back into production millions of acres of farmland that are now enrolledin the Conservation Reserve Program (Brasher, 2011). The land in the program servesto prevent soil erosion and the degradation of streams and rivers, sequesters carbon andalso serves as valuable habitat for wildlife. It is expected that any effort to put these acresback into production will face ferocious opposition from environmental and wildlifeadvocacygroups.Less WaterWater availability is equally constraining to output growth. Of the fresh water utilized byman, which is a fraction of what is available on earth, 70% is used by agriculture. However,this varies widely by region of the world and by crop. For example, in the United Statesonly 15% of corn is irrigated; the rest is largely rain-fed.But crop losses due to water scarcity are becoming endemic throughout the world,as exemplified by the crop-destroying drought and fires in Russia in 2010, and severedroughts in Texas and the Southwest United States in 2011.In India and China, groundwater withdrawals are increasing at an unsustainable pace.Here in the United States, we are also on an unsustainable water-use curve. The OgallalaAquifer, which supplies 70% to 90% of the irrigation water for three of the top grain-producingstates, is fast becoming depleted. Groundwater levels have declined by more than100 feet in some areas according to US Geological Survey data (USGS, 2011). Withoutwater for irrigation from this aquifer, this region—the breadbasket of the world—wouldbe dramatically less productive.Role of SustainabilityIn this rather bleak picture, what is the role of sustainability? In a word: essential. It isinextricably linked to solving the global food-security challenge.“Sustainability” is used in many contexts today. Sometimes the term is applied toorganically produced crops or commodities, to locally grown produce and to small-scalefarming operations. There are merits and elements of sustainability in all of them.It is incorrect, though, to juxtapose intensive farming against organic, small scale orlocally grown options in ways that suggest intensive operations are not also sustainable.Therefore, “agricultural sustainability” is used here in the context of efficient employmentof finite, scarce resources in a manner that results in beneficial outcomes for theenvironment. That means thinking about sustainability in the context of growing morefrom less through the smart use of proven practices and a suite of agricultural technolo-Stone59