Fostering biodiversity benefits farmers, our diets

Maria Helena Semedo is Deputy Director-General of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

In a bid to eradicate hunger amid a rising global population in the coming decades we have to catch up with climate trends which press the need for food systems, particularly in the agricultural sector, that are increasingly flexible, resilient and adaptable.

Providing nutritious food to a growing world population poses many challenges which require us to make crop and livestock systems, forests, fisheries and aquaculture more productive while ensuring landscapes and seascapes can provide other essential ecosystem services such as better regulation of air quality, soil fertility, crop pollination or even control of natural disasters like floods.

We'll need to put a lot of natural capital -- especially biodiversity -- to work to do that.

While the loss of biodiversity is occurring at an alarming rate, agricultural systems are becoming simpler, wider and more uniform with less diversity in terms of species, varieties and breeds. Some 150 livestock breeds became extinct between 2000 and 2018.

But globalised food systems have led to only a few crops providing the lion's share of what we eat. Just eight crop species -- dominated by wheat, rice and maize -- provide more than half of our average daily food. Widespread use of nitrogen fertilisers has done wonders for output. But it has also triggered water pollution that in turn provokes costly drinking-water crises for local communities. When carried by rivers to the sea, this creates dead zones hostile to marine ecosystems.

Action is needed to safeguard our planet's rich resources. What we need is a stronger and more focused commitment to halt the losses of biodiversity for food and agriculture and make sustainable and equitable use of what remains while promoting diversification.

We must consider biodiversity as a value across all sectors -- in agriculture, fisheries, forestry and beyond -- even in how and what we consume. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has rolled out a Biodiversity Mainstreaming Platform to foster the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue that can lead to a transformational change in the way we tackle this challenge.

It is an existential challenge, and an achievable one. For millennia, farmers have cultivated and bred in a way that maintained ecosystems and species and conserved genetic resources for food and agriculture where the adoption and spread of best practices was a proxy for success.

As agriculture is biodiversity's biggest user, it must become its ally.

After all, the human touch need not be a disaster! A recent study from Brazil found that earthworm density -- a proxy for soil biodiversity -- is actually higher in areas practising minimal tillage or integrated crop-and-livestock practices than in areas people aren't managing.

The guiding principle is that we must manage our natural assets in a more sustainable way. If we do, we can meet the world's food demands while mitigating and avoiding the high deferred costs of the Green Revolution.

Biodiversity is about dynamic relations rather than silver-bullet solutions. For example, pollinators such as bees can only benefit from reduced exposure to pesticides, but they also need ecological niches offering food and nesting areas.

Biodiversity can also be fostered through our diets, very often to our own benefit.

Different rice varieties can thrive in different climate conditions, and also offer a wider range of nutritional qualities -- with up to eightfold differences in iron content -- underscoring the importance of efforts to conserve and support many cultivars. On top of that, planting diversified crops often leads to higher yields as harvests prove resilient to volatile pest, weather and farming conditions.

Our consumption choices also matter, especially as we are over-exploiting what in fact is only a tiny share of nature's bounty. Nine crops account for more than two-thirds of all crop production, and around 200 make up practically all of it -- even though over history we have used more than 30,000 plants for food and cultivated more than 6,000 of them. This leads to unwelcome outcomes such as micronutrient deficiency in Micronesia, where imported leafy green vegetables that locals don't appreciate have pushed the local yellow-fleshed giant swamp taro off the menu.

Approaches such as agroecology and programmes like the FAO's Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, with its 50 designated sites around the world, are raising awareness both of agricultural biodiversity's ongoing importance and of the ingenious ways people harnessed it in the past to create mutually sustainable livelihoods and ecosystems.

We need to shift to more sustainable food systems with lower environmental costs. And we must acknowledge that the agricultural sectors have the potential to contribute to the protection of biodiversity. Today there is a consensus: Productive farming can provide environmental benefits while creating rural employment and sustaining livelihoods. Agroecology and other approaches can play a significant role.

Protecting and capitalising on biodiversity will take a lot of teamwork to achieve common understanding, direction and commitment to protect diversity in order to produce enough nutritious food in the face of climate change, emerging diseases, pressures on feed and water supplies and shifting market demands.