Torbjörn Fagerström and Jens Sundström (F&S) wrote ”No sustainable future without a highly productive agriculture” (DN 28/12), based on the report ”Creating a Sustainable Food Future”. There are given proposals on how the world can produce food for ten billion people by the year 2050. The report is, unfortunately, partly political, that is to say that some of the proposals are selected away as ”unrealistic”. It is a spell that has been used for a long time to silence system critical voices. Therefore, both the report that the article is questionable.
It is good that both the biological diversity and climate change, is mentioned as the boundary conditions and to report, as well as F&S in the press on the importance of preventing deforestation and to restore wetlands. A weakness is that the report does not take the effects of climate change on people. For example, there is research that indicates that climate change has contributed to severe drought in Syria from 2007 to 2010, which in turn contributed to the conflict and the refugee crisis.
elected away from the beginning of the report. It says that it is unrealistic that we will succeed in reducing the consumption of animal products to almost zero and to an honest distribution of food in the world. It is a political position, and that the researchers omit the option (which they themselves call for desirable) means that politicians will not consider them either. Further, it is written that ”when quality and price of alternatives to meat and animal products is as good as the original can köttskatt be politically viable”. But the price of meat is low only because of subsidies and the quality of the options is good enough already now. To remove the subsidies by the principle that the polluter (for example, greenhouse gases) should pay is a necessary first step.
F&S adopts the report concluded that agricultural production needs to grow by more than 50 percent to feed 40 per cent more people without questioning the report’s assumptions. But intense and large-scale agriculture is perhaps the most important reason for the drastic reduction of many of the species that the world has witnessed since the second world war and who has been called the sixth great extinction. The UN global sustainability goals have as the cornerstone to a solution for achieving one of the objectives may not impair the conditions for reaching the other goals. To restore biodiversity in managed landscapes, it is necessary a reduction of the giftanvändning and monocultures must be replaced with the mixed type of farms. Some biologists advocate that half of the earth should be exempt from human impact. A large part of the agricultural land currently used for breeding of beef cattle and by asking about the use of the land can more food be produced at the same time as the release of greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity strengthened.
to test how we can restore biological diversity in a farming where pesticides are avoided as far as possible, and which at the same time, can maintain the food production that can feed the world’s population. This will require entrepreneurship based on a different kind of farming than the F&S advocates. Finally, it is necessary long-term management of resources to achieve the UN’s global sustainability goals. Proposals that seem ”unrealistic” from a market perspective that is used in the report must be embraced in order to reach a sustainable future.
