Mono-a-Mono: The Threat of Today’s “Green Deserts” to Tomorrow’s Food Production

There is, however, an even bigger challenge, largely ignored, that has to do with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned efforts to produce more food from each acre of land. Not just the synthetic fertilizers and other chemical inputs but also, most critically, the large-scale farming techniques they have helped spawn. Specifically, the trend toward industrial farming practices like mono-cropping has resulted in vast areas – even entire biomes – being essentially cleared of all but one or two plant varieties such as soy, sugarcane, corn or wheat.

Producers didn’t create this situation on their own. Rather, they have been responding to a market that demands near-term production efficiencies and in which 60 percent of global caloric intake comes from just five crops. The end result, however, is the creation of “green deserts,” an end-run around Mother Nature that makes farming not only bad for the environment but a long-term threat to agriculture itself. This is because raising only one or two types of plants over vast expanses of land creates a vicious downward spiral that depletes nutrients from the soil, leaving it weak and unable to support healthy plant growth without adding ever-increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizers. It also creates new opportunities for pests, weeds and diseases that a more biodiverse landscape would normally suppress on its own, thereby giving rise to the need for the application of more and stronger chemicals to combat them.

In Brazilian soybean areas, the plant disease Asian rust has become so resistant to chemical treatments that many farmers now have to spray for it several times over the course of their growing season, further diminishing soil health, ground water and biodiversity. Similarly, soy farmers in in the U.S. and Latin America are finding that the relatively less toxic herbicides such as glyphosate, also known by its brand name Roundup, are not working as effectively as they once did, prompting many to switch to stronger chemicals that are more destructive to local biodiversity. And researchers have found that reducing plant diversity in an agricultural area can itself attract greater numbers of crop-destroying insects, largely because it is so easy for them to thrive when their favorite food is all around them.

Put all this together and farming in the green deserts, with increasing applications of inputs, can be sustained only to a point – after which soil health collapses, pests and diseases become intolerable, and the land loses its productivity. And with that goes the ability of global agricultural systems to keep pace with growing food demand. By relying on agricultural practices that reduce plant diversity over large areas, we are creating pest and disease resistance and that is going to set us back 50 years in terms of our ability to produce food.

So what’s the answer to this?

As Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” We need to think anew and make fundamental changes across global agricultural systems, and we can start by moving biodiversity and soil health to the very front of the global agenda. Yes, we need to save critical natural areas such as rainforests and savannahs.  But equally critical is saving our future capacity to produce food. The fact that there isn’t anything like a New York Declaration to curtail monocultural practices indicates that we have never seriously considered any alternatives.

Which is crazy. Ninety percent of the world’s food originates in the land. And diversified farming techniques that actually enhance soil health and biodiversity are proven to be more profitable and productive in the long run than those that are now leading us toward ecosystem collapse.