With a rapidly expanding global population, agriculture needs to meet the dual challenge of increasing food production while sustaining environmental goods and services. Approximately 70% of the world’s terrestrial surface is currently at least partly devoted to agricultural uses (LEAD 2006). According to the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (Wood et. al 2000), crop-dominated landscapes or mosaics comprise about 30 percent of the earth’s total land area, and only limited areas remain that are entirely unaffected by agriculture.
This has an enormous impact on ecosystems and the services they provide. Deforestation associated with agricultural land use (Watson 2000) and the chain of activity involved in the production and consumption of livestock (Steinfeld 2006) are each individually responsible for higher greenhouse gas emissions than the global transport sector. Two-thirds of global freshwater is used for irrigation, with 15-30% of withdrawals depleting water tables faster than they are naturally replenished. Moreover, many water sources are being polluted by excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides.
The ecosystem services provided by robust biodiversity, water filtration, and land stabilization are not only important for long-term ecosystem health; they are also the foundation for food security and a necessary base for adaptation to climate change. With increasing demand for high value agricultural products and a rapidly expanding population, some experts predict that world food demand will grow by as much as 50 to 60 percent in the period from 2000 to 2030 (McMichael 1999). Within this context, it is imperative to reward farmers and countries who are finding more sustainable ways to produce food while maintaining environmental integrity.
Agriculture is defined here to include annual and perennial crop production and livestock production in both intensive and extensively managed systems. Key elements of a complete
- Protecting natural habitats in agricultural landscapes
- Environmental management for agricultural production needs
- Sustainable human livelihoods from agroecosystems
- Environmental management of the full food-fiber value chain.
The EPI strives to represent a sampling of significant and timely issues. In creating a map of practice and effect, it helps equip governments, private sector institutions and individuals with the knowledge necessary to make better agricultural and environmental policy decisions.
In deciding what indicators to use in developing environmental parameters for agriculture, we considered a range of issues. The key policy concerns we wanted to capture were the degradation of land; the pollution of water and air; greenhouse gas emissions; soil degradation; biodiversity, and land use change. Many potential indicators await the development of better datasets. The five indicators in the Agriculture subcategory of EPI 2008 are: Cropland Intensity, Irrigation Stress, Agricultural Subsidies, Pesticide Regulation, and Burned Land Area.
Proportion of Irrigated Areas Under Water Stress
115 countries have a proximity-to-target score between 90 and 100, indicating minimal or no water stress in their irrigated areas, while another 34 countries score a 70-90 on the proximity-to-target scale, indicating problems in some areas. A dozen countries score 50 or less, indicating very serious threats to the sustainability of irrigation: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kuwait, Egypt, Mauritania, Niger, Morocco, Jordan, Somalia, Djibouti and Namibia. Even moderate levels of irrigation water stress in large producers with high dependence on irrigation, such as China, the United States, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Australia, could potentially have noticeable effects on global food supply. Of countries with a high proportion of land under irrigation, over 90% of lands in Taiwan and Thailand are unstressed, and in Mali the figure is also quite high, at 85%.
Proportion of Cropland in Agricultural Landscapes
Crop cover data is available for 146 countries. Of these, 90 reached proximity-to-target scores of 90-100, meaning that 40% of land area in nearly all agricultural landscapes was left uncultivated, providing potential niches for wildlife habitat and other ecosystem services. Another 55 countries score at 50 or higher. However, 11 countries score between 30 and 50, meaning that a large share of their agricultural landscapes is at risk of ecosystem degradation. These include: Egypt, India, Algeria, Syria, Morocco, Ukraine, Denmark, Bangladesh, Tunisia and Moldova.
Proportion of Total Land Burned
Ten countries have proximity-to-target scores below 40, indicating comparatively high proportions of burned land area: Central African Republic, Zambia, Moldova, Angola, Ukraine, Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania, North Korea, Hungary, and Mozambique. 80 countries score highly in the 90-100 range, while 57 score from 60-90. It is notable that although intentional and unintentional burning for weed and pest control is more prevalent in developing countries (often at the forest or grassland ‘frontier’ where land use conversion is occuring), many of the countries with the most extensive burning were developed countries like the United States, where wild forest and grassland fires are on the rise.
Legislation to Control Toxic Pesticides
Of the 149 countries in the EPI ranking, 22 have fully implemented legislation in line with the Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions on control of pesticides and Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). 13 of the 22 countries with a perfect score are European, but the list also includes some developing countries: Costa Rica, Uruguay, Jamaica, Mauritius, Gabon, El Salvador and Guatemala. Another 53 countries score at least 80 percent of the way to target on the relevant legislation. Another 21 score between 51 and 80 and 21 fall significantly short with scores from 10 to 22. The 30 lowest ranked, who scored less than 10, included important agricultural countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Russia and Taiwan, as well as a number of very poor countries. Some of the lowest scoring countries were signatories to both the Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions, but had not yet banned any of the nine POPs.
Agricultural Subsidies as a Proportion of Value
Fully 180 of the 194 countries in the full country data set met the target of no agricultural subsidies, while 17 countries had proximity-to-target scores over 85, and another 17 had scores between 40 and 84. By contrast, 27 countries, incuding many of the more prominent members of the EPI had scores below 25, including most of the European Union. The lowest ranked countries were Jordan, Israel, Venezuela, Switzerland, Japan, Iceland, South Korea, and Norway.
Agriculture-environment monitoring at the global level is still weak. Nonetheless, the quality of data has improved over the past 10 years, primarily as a result of the expansion of remote sensing and global efforts at cross-country data collection, synthesis and analysis. Globally comparable data have been developed, for example, on agro-ecosystem status (Wood et al 2000), ecosystem status (MEA 2005), organic agriculture (Willer and Yussefi 2007), and spatial mapping of hunger hotspots by ecosystem (CIESIN 2000). Sectoral data have been compiled on carbon sequestration and storage (Watson et al 2000), tree cover (University of Maryland 1999) and livestock environmental impacts (Steinfeld 2006). Regional and landscape-scale comparative indicators on agriculture and environment have been developed within the European Union (EU 2007). Detailed spatial mapping and overlays of agriculture and environmental data are available for the US from the USDA (national sample farm study by ERS) and the Heinz Center (2002), and in Kenya from a recent atlas by ILRI-WRI (WRI et al 2007). A comprehensive review of indicators has been developed by the OECD (2007), and Buck et al (2006) discuss indicators that are specific for agricultural-natural system landscape mosaic (ecoagriculture) systems.
In addition to the five indicators used in the EPI agricultural index, we identify another ten prospective indicators for which relevant global data exist or could be compiled. These relate to:
Water Productivity in Agriculture Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions Agricultural Area under Eco-Certified Production Biological Health and Productivity of Agricultural Soils Agricultural Water Pollution Livestock Concentration Pesticide Monitoring Wild Species in Agricultural Lands Agricultural Crop Diversity, and Conservation Areas on Private Lands.
For a thorough discussion of each of the proposed indicators please see the White Paper on Enviromental Management in the Agriculture Sector prepared for the EPI by Sara J. Scherr and Ariela Summit of Ecoagriculture Partners.
The paper is available at http://www.ecoagriculture.org
The histograms above represent indicators used to calculate this policy subcategory score. Each dot is a single country’s proximity-to-target value for this indicator. The tinted box represents the inner quartile range of country values, or points lying between the 25th and 75th percentiles. The small triangle marker at the bottom of the chart indicates the median of country scores.
