SDG #2 is to “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”
Within SDG #2 are eight targets, of which we here focus on Target 2.4, which is:
By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality.”
Within target 2.4 is a sole indicator:
Proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture.
We touched on the importance of the future of sustainable agriculture in an earlier SDG #2 target. It’s a complex issue, and very much sensitive to the varied unique agro-ecologies the world over.
Sustainable agriculture seeks to meet the challenges of scarce freshwater resources, erosion, surface runoff, salinisation, imbalances in the environmental cycles of nitrogen, phosphate and carbon, slash-and-burn practices clearing forests, using advanced techniques of irrigation and water efficiency, crop rotation.
Whilst not at scale, the practices of urban agriculture emphasise local food like roof gardens, community gardens, sharing gardens. Other concepts of importance include organic farming using natural manures and other techniques in contrast to synthetic fertilisers. Regenerative agriculture is another field receiving more attention recently for its emphasis on protecting biodiversity and ecosystems, a philosophy shared with the discipline of permaculture.
Standards and certification have also made recognising food grown sustainably easier for consumers, such as organic certification, the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification.
At a political level, the European Commission’s European Green Deal sets forth to make European food systems sustainable, whilst the US Department of Agriculture has historically been a driver of intensified agriculture, with attendant ills for human diet and ecological damage.
Sustainable food systems don’t just encompass how food is produced, but its distribution, with local food being environmentally better, as well as benefitting the sustainability of our diets and food loss and waste
In acknowledging the importance of agriculture’s relationship with ecosystems, climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters, we see SDG #2’s interplay with Goal’s 13 through 15 - all topics we’ll examine further in the targets within those respective goals.
Without agriculture our civilisation never could have reached the levels of population size nor prosperity many of us experience. Advances in agronomy have proffered more food, fuel and fibre for humankind. Examples are agrochemicals, pesticides to keep pests away from crops, fertilisers to provide plants the chemical nutrients they need to grow.
Yet agricultural practices do not come without an environmental impact. The welfare of animals beside humans is largely neglected or ignored. Agriculture has been, and continues to be a major drive of climate change, the practice itself in its current form a large greenhouse gas emitter.
The importance of forests to heading off climate change is widely understood, yet deforestation still occurs on a massive scale for the purposes of creating pasture for grazing.
Can our aquifers, which sustain our vital freshwater supplies contend with what agriculture draws from it, and pollutes it with? Will the degradation imposed on the land put us at greater risk of desertification, turning once healthy soil mixtures, supporting life itself, into drylands.
Can the environment handle what we take from it and feed into it, or are we risking the depletion of resources necessary for human survival? Are we risking the compromise of the quality of our air, water and soil - even entire ecosystems? Do our patterns put at peril the destruction of habitats, the extinction of species of wildlife, biodiversity loss and pollution at large? Is the production of animal feed for livestock an inefficient use of precious resources?
Have we placed ourselves higher on the food chain than is necessary to live healthy lives? Do we need to slaughter cattle, pigs and sheep? Do we need products from the milk of cows, buffaloes, goats and sheep? Do we need textiles derived from sheep, cashmere and mohair from goats and animal skins for clothing?
Both humans and animals are affected by the use of antibiotics, growth hormones and genetically engineered lifeforms in the meat and dairy industry.
We humans need fuel to work; raw materials to turn goods into products; grains, vegetables and oils for cooking.
Yet our policies around agriculture need to change, and we need to harness the science and economics of agriculture to be sustainable.