The Ground beneath Our Feet: Food, Agriculture and Climate Change

As the urgency of global climate change becomes more acute, the way we eat and produce our food has begun to garner news headlines. Witness the proliferation of public discourse around the distance food travels from farm to table, the rise of online calculators to determine carbon footprints of different foods, and mounting calls for the need to shift toward plant-based diets. Leveraging and redirecting consumer habits may indeed prove crucial in combatting climate change. But to fully grasp the challenges of climate change confronting agriculture, we also need to look beyond our plates and attend to the range of social and environmental relations that agriculture enfolds.

Agriculture: Part of the Problem, and the Solution?

Agriculture is triply implicated in global climate change. While agricultural activities directly contribute to climate change, agricultural production is strongly impacted by climate change. Agriculture, however, may also offer solutions of a kind through pathways to mitigate or reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the report Climate Change and Land released in August 2019 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agriculture accounts for 23% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Depending on what is, and is not, counted, some estimates place the figure considerably higher at 40% or more. Emissions are created directly as greenhouse gases (in agriculture these are principally methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide) are released through biological processes such as enteric fermentation in cattle and soil respiration, fertilizer and manure management, as well as when land is cleared, burned, or ploughed for agriculture. The use of fossil fuels to produce inputs such as fertilizer, to process post-harvest agricultural products, and for transportation, represents indirect sources of emissions connected with agricultural activities.

Concurrently, agriculture is directly impacted by climate change. These impacts will be felt unevenly across the world, as changing temperatures and rainfall levels, among other things, will affect the length of growing seasons, the kinds of crops that can be grown in particular environments, crop yields, water availability, and pest and disease ecologies among other things.

But even as agriculture contributes to, and is impacted by, climate change, it is on (and in) land and land use that one may find myriad possibilities for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the amount of carbon dioxide held in soils is three times higher than that found in the atmosphere, and soils sequester more than four times as much carbon dioxide as living biomass, including forests. This dual position of agriculture, as both a contributor to the global climate crisis and an area that may offer paths toward reducing global emissions, has made it a sensitive and delicate issue for climate negotiations and policy.

Elephant in the Room

Although agriculture accounts for a significant proportion of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, it poses a considerable challenge for the development of policy and regulation. the amount of carbon dioxide held in soils is three times higher than that found in the atmosphere Part of the challenge is assessing the emissions themselves: the global scale, diversity and dynamism of agricultural practices make measuring emissions extraordinarily difficult. But the challenge is much more than a technical or purely scientific one. When it comes to agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, as with climate change more generally, responsibility is not borne evenly geographically or historically. Nor are the current and future impacts. And as much as climate change is an environmental crisis, so too is it one that has arisen through historic and ongoing forms of social inequality and exploitation – and it is likely to further exacerbate them.

Questions about how land is used, by whom, for what, and for whom, have always been deeply political. In the global arena, they raise questions about national sovereignty, food security, and the right to development. Bringing these questions to bear on legislative and policy responses to climate change globally therefore also demands a mindfulness of the ways they may create or exacerbate tensions within and across local, regional, national and global priorities for land use. The fires in the Brazilian Amazon have brought such dynamics into relief, illustrating at one and the same time the often-conflicting claims on the rainforest and the land made by indigenous communities and farmers, by nationally and internationally powerful agricultural lobbies and corporations, by the regional and national state, and by the international community.

Taking steps to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land, while imperative, also demands sensitivity to the social, political and economic complexities of human relations with these environments. This will require institutions, therefore, to grapple not only with the technical complexities of this endeavour, but with social, cultural and political complexities that are equally – if not more – challenging to address. Here, caution is needed to ensure that approaches to mitigating climate change do not conflict with food security, for example by redirecting food production toward the production of bioenergy. Similarly, incentives to encourage afforestation and other mitigation measures must be carefully balanced to ensure that they do not undermine land and tenure rights (or struggles) of local peoples.

Neolithic Reckonings

The advent of settled agriculture, beginning some 12,000 years ago, set in motion changes in land use that profoundly transformed our planet. Simultaneously, as the political scientist James Scott has observed, this Neolithic Revolution transformed us humans too – from the trajectory of our evolution as a species to the development of agrarian societies, polities and states, cultures, economies and empires. And so it is in agriculture, and through the ways we produce and consume food, that we find the complexities and intimacies of human relationships to land and environment laid bare.

Agriculture is a cause and a casualty of climate change; it is, equally, key to finding ways to mitigate our present impact. The Neolithic Revolution shows us, as our present era also does with an historically unique urgency, that human and natural histories (and futures) are not distinct but connected and interdependent. Agrarian relations – which span the globe, stretch across value chains, and are encompassed by commodity, financial and insurance markets among others – are undoubtedly crucial to finding ways to adapt to, and allay, the significant local and planetary repercussions of climate change.