UN Chronicle | Good and Bad: Farming Plays Key Role in Climate Change

Good and Bad
Farming Plays Key Role in Climate Change

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Farming is pivotal in climate change, both as one of the sources of the problem and as a recipient of its impacts, according to a study published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in its annual report, "The State of Food and Agriculture", which includes a review of the current global and regional agricultural situation, world trade, commodity prices and the implications for agriculture of the fourth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference.

In the special chapter on harvesting carbon sequestration through land-use change, FAO states that an estimated 80 per cent of global carbon stocks are stored in soils or forests, and that a considerable amount of the mineral originally contained in those areas has been released as a result of agricultural and forestry activities and deforestation. Agriculture and forestry practices confine and fix carbon into the soil, plants and trees through photosynthesis, reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases. According to the report, farming and forestry activities have the potential to counteract the effect of emissions made elsewhere by reducing deforestation, generating increased forest stocks, adopting agroforestry schemes, reducing soil degradation and rehabilitating degraded forests.

Source: The State of Food and Agriculture 2002, published by FAO

A separate section examining the role of agriculture and land in the provision of global public goods reports that farming, fisheries and forestry have importance beyond that of providing the world with food and raw materials necessary for survival and well-being, and ensuring the livelihoods of farmers, fishermen and foresters worldwide. People employed in these sectors of the economy play a role in managing resources that benefit the world at large. "Through proper management of these resources, farmers, fishermen and foresters provide a range of benefits to others, such as landscape conservation, watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem stability and maintenance of fish stocks", the report states.

While these public goods are widely recognized as benefiting large numbers of people, they cannot be expected for free. Some public goods are global in nature and benefit all of humanity. But because so many people benefit from these public goods without paying, the report concludes that "mechanisms for compensating the providers are necessary to ensure that socially desirable levels of the good will be provided".

Fundamental to this discussion is a conceptual framework for land-management decisions of land users and their implications for the generation of private and public benefits. In this framework (schematically presented in figure above), the land-using household is taken as the key decision- making unit. Households operate under given socio-economic and environmental conditions, which shape their ultimate decisions on land use. These include macro-level factors, such as the degree of market integration, the presence of infrastructure, and agroclimatic conditions, which will affect the incentives and constraints land users face in making their decisions. In addition, households have a given endowment of resources, e.g., land, labour and capital, which they allocate to various activities in their efforts to maintain a livelihood. These livelihood-generating activities can be divided into land-use based and non-land-use based. Land-use-based activities may be for the purposes of generating private production benefits, or for the generation of environmental services for payment. The way in which households allocate their resources to land-use activities results in both private and public outcomes: private benefits in the form of products for their own consumption or income from marketed products, and public benefits (or costs) in the form of environmental services or, more specifically, carbon sequestration (or emissions).

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